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Feminism and Women’s Rights Worldwide
Recent Titles in Women’s Psychology ‘‘Intimate’’ Violence against Women: When Spouses, Partners, or Lovers Attack Paula K. Lundberg-Love and Shelly L. Marmion, editors Daughters of Madness: Growing Up and Older with a Mentally Ill Mother Susan Nathiel Psychology of Women: Handbook of Issues and Theories, Second Edition Florence L. Denmark and Michele Paludi, editors WomanSoul: The Inner Life of Women’s Spirituality Carole A. Rayburn and Lillian Comas-Diaz, editors The Psychology of Women at Work: Challenges and Solutions for Our Female Workforce Michele A. Paludi, editor
Feminism and Women’s Rights Worldwide Volume 1 Heritage, Roles, and Issues
MICHELE A. PALUDI, EDITOR Praeger Perspectives Women’s Psychology Michele A. Paludi, Series Editor
PRAEGER An Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC
Copyright 2010 by Michele A. Paludi All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Feminism and women’s rights worldwide / Michele A. Paludi, editor. v. ; cm. — (Women’s psychology) Includes bibliographical references and index. Contents: The myth of the man-hating feminist / Melinda Kanner and Kristin J. Anderson — Gender differences : the arguments regarding abilities / Jennifer L. Martin — Women in education : students and professors worldwide / Susan Basow — In women’s voices / Samantha Smith — Working life as a house : a tale of floors, walls, and ceilings / Leanne Faraday-Brash — Women as religious leaders : advances and stalemates / J. Harold Ellens — The feminine political persona : Queen Victoria, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and Michelle Bachelet / Emily A. Haddad and William Schweinle — Women in the military : is it time to un-gender combat roles? / Breena E. Coates — Sexual minority women : sources and outcomes of stigmatization / Rhonda M. Schultz, and Kristin P. Beals — Special issues for women with disabilities / Martha E. Banks — Body dissatisfaction and disordered eating : the globalization of western appearance ideals / Jaehee Jung and Gordon B. Forbes — Sexual violence to girls and women in schools around the world / Susan Strauss. ISBN 978-0-313-37596-5 (set : hard copy : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-31337597-2 (set : ebook) — ISBN 978-0-313-37598-9 (v.1 : hard copy : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-313-37599-6 (v.1 : ebook) — ISBN 978-0-313-37600-9 (v.2 : hard copy : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-313-37601-6 (v.2 : ebook) — ISBN 978-0-31337602-3 (v.3 : hard copy : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-313-37603-0 (v.3 : ebook) 1. Feminism. 2. Women’s rights. 3. Sexual harassment of women. 4. Abused women—Psychology. 5. Women—Psychology. I. Paludi, Michele Antoinette HQ1180.F424 2010 305.42—dc22 2009035343 ISBN: 978-0-313-37596-5 EISBN: 978-0-313-37597-2 14 13 12
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This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an eBook. Visit www.abc-clio.com for details. Praeger An Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC ABC-CLIO, LLC 130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911 Santa Barbara, California 93116-1911 This book is printed on acid-free paper Manufactured in the United States of America
For Rosa and Lucia, my maternal and paternal grandmothers and for Antoinette, my mother: ‘‘Remember, our heritage is our power; we can know ourselves and our capacities by seeing that other women have been strong.’’ —Judy Chicago
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Contents
Series Introduction
ix
Acknowledgments
xi
Introduction Michele A. Paludi Chapter 1: The Myth of the Man-Hating Feminist Melinda Kanner and Kristin J. Anderson
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Chapter 2: Gender Differences: The Arguments Regarding Abilities Jennifer L. Martin
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Chapter 3: Women in Education: Students and Professors Worldwide Susan Basow
43
Chapter 4: In Women’s Voices Samantha Smith
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Chapter 5: Working Life as a House: A Tale of Floors, Walls, and Ceilings Leanne Faraday-Brash
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Chapter 6: Women as Religious Leaders: Advances and Stalemates J. Harold Ellens
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Chapter 7: The Feminine Political Persona: Queen Victoria, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and Michelle Bachelet Emily A. Haddad and William Schweinle
97
Chapter 8: Women in the Military: Is It Time to Un-Gender Combat Roles? Breena E. Coates 111
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Chapter 9: Sexual Minority Women: Sources and Outcomes of Stigmatization Rhonda M. Schultz and Kristin P. Beals
125
Chapter 10: Special Issues for Women with Disabilities Martha E. Banks
149
Chapter 11: Body Dissatisfaction and Disordered Eating: The Globalization of Western Appearance Ideals Jaehee Jung and Gordon B. Forbes
161
Chapter 12: Sexual Violence to Girls and Women in Schools around the World Susan Strauss
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Women’s Studies Programs in the United States Michele A. Paludi
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Appendix:
About the Editor and Contributors
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Index
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Series Introduction
Because women’s work is never done and is underpaid or unpaid or boring or repetitious and we’re the first to get fired and what we look like is more important than what we do and if we get raped it’s our fault and if we get beaten we must have provoked it and if we raise our voices we’re nagging bitches and if we enjoy sex we’re nymphos and if we don’t we’re frigid and if we love women it’s because we can’t get a ‘‘real’’ man and if we ask our doctor too many questions we’re neurotic and/or pushy and if we expect childcare we’re selfish and if we stand up for our rights we’re aggressive and ‘‘unfeminine’’ and if we don’t we’re typical weak females and if we want to get married we’re out to trap a man and if we don’t we’re unnatural and because we still can’t get an adequate safe contraceptive but men can walk on the moon and if we can’t cope or don’t want a pregnancy we’re made to feel guilty about abortion and . . . for lots of other reasons we are part of the women’s liberation movement. —Author unknown, quoted in The Torch, September 14, 1987
These sentiments underlie the major goals of the Praeger Perspectives book series, Women’s Psychology. The goals are as follows: Value women: The books in this series value women by valuing children and working for affordable child care; value women by respecting all physiques, not just by placing value on slender women; value women by acknowledging older women’s wisdom, beauty, aging; value women who have been sexually victimized and view them as survivors; value women who work inside and outside of the home; and value women by respecting their choices of careers, of whom they mentor, of their reproductive rights, their spirituality, and their sexuality. Treat women as the norm. Thus the books in this series make up for women’s issues typically being omitted, trivialized, or dismissed from other books on psychology.
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Take a non-Eurocentric view of women’s experiences. The books in this series integrate the scholarship on race and ethnicity into women’s psychology, thus providing a psychology of all women. Women typically have been described collectively; but we are diverse. Facilitate connections between readers’ experiences and psychological theories and empirical research. The books in this series offer readers opportunities to challenge their views about women, feminism, sexual victimization, gender role socialization, education, and equal rights. These texts thus encourage women readers to value themselves and others. The accounts of women’s experiences as reflected through research and personal stories in the texts in this series have been included for readers to derive strength from the efforts of others who have worked for social change on the interpersonal, organizational, and societal levels. A student in one of my courses on the psychology of women once stated: I learned so much about women. Women face many issues: discrimination, sexism, prejudices . . . by society. Women need to work together to change how society views us. I learned so much and talked about much of the issues brought up in class to my friends and family. My attitudes have changed toward a lot of things. I got to look at myself, my life, and what I see for the future. (Paludi, 2002)
It is my hope that readers of the books in this series will also reflect on the topics and look at themselves, their own lives, and what they see for the future. This three-volume book set on Feminism and Women’s Rights Worldwide provides readers with the opportunity to accomplish this goal and offers suggestions for all of us working for gender justice within our friendships and romantic relationships, in guiding institutional and social policy change in workplace and educational institutions, and in lobbying state and federal legislators on issues related to reproductive rights, pay equity, education, sexual violence, and childcare. Michele A. Paludi Series Editor REFERENCE Paludi, M. (2002). The psychology of women. 2nd ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Acknowledgments
Teaching and writing are separate, but serve/feed one another in so many ways. Writing travels the road inward, teaching, the road out—helping OTHERS move inward—it is an honor to be with others in the spirit of writing and encouragement. —Naomi Shihab Nye
Nye’s sentiment is echoed throughout this three-volume set on feminism and women’s rights. Most of the contributors have taught courses in women’s studies and feminism as well as conducted research and written about feminist issues. Many contributors have been advocates on behalf of feminist principles through working with local, state and federal agencies, legislators, and the United Nations. And many of us have collaborated with students in our classes in writing chapters for this book set. These students have made us believe that all of them, in their individual ways, will continue to do what this book set intends: value feminism and work toward equality. It has been exhilarating for me to see a new generation of feminists collaborating with mentors and colleagues on the chapters for this book set. I have been honored to have collaborated with the contributors to these volumes. Several friendships with contributors have been rekindled and strengthened, and I have met many new colleagues from around the world who taught me about their disciplines through their writing. You have all shown me the great accomplishments of feminists as well as the work we have yet to do. Thank you. I wish to thank my sisters, Rosalie Paludi and Lucille Paludi, for their support during the preparation of this book set. I also thank Carmen Paludi, Jr. for his guidance and encouragement. Our discussions about feminism brought back wonderful memories of my mother,
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Antoinette, and my father, Michael, about whom I continue to learn and continue to cherish the time I had with them. I acknowledge several friends who encouraged me during the preparation of this set of books. Thank you to Paula Lundberg Love, Jennifer Martin, Billie Wright Dziech, Darlene C. DeFour, and Florence Denmark. I have been fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with students throughout my career, now at Union Graduate College. I have thoroughly enjoyed learning from them. Thank you to students in the Human Resource Management Certificate Program and Management and Leadership Certificate Program. I especially acknowledge Michelle Strand, Carrie Turco, Haimanot Kelbessa, Sarah Bennett, Sarah Boggess, Kristina Hicks, James Luciano, Sarah Henderson Maneely, Abbey Massoud-Tastor, Marie Fuda, Jessica Wilmot, Katie Kelly, and Nick Salvatoriello. I am honored you have called me your professor. I also thank Debbie Carvalko for supporting my visions for books and helping them become realities. I have enjoyed working with Debbie and her colleagues at Praeger. They are a wonderful team of caring people. They appreciate my love of writing and editing books. Debbie somehow knew that, after the publication of the three-volume set on the Psychology of Women and Work (2008, Praeger), which I edited, and the political climate of the 2008 presidential campaign, especially regarding women, I had to follow up those texts with books on feminism. She knows I share Sheila Bender’s sentiment: We write because something inside says we must and we can no longer ignore that voice.
Introduction Michele A. Paludi And how do you look backward? By looking forward. And what do you see? As they look forward, they see what they had to do before they could look backward. And there we have it all. —Gertrude Stein
Alyssa Zucker and Abigail Stewart (2007) reported in their study of 333 university alumnae that feminism is internalized quite differently depending on the developmental stage in our lives. This research led me to consider my own feminist socialization and feminist identity development as I began writing and editing these three volumes on feminism and women’s rights. I was introduced to feminism by my parents, Antoinette and Michael, at a very young age, even though the label feminism was not used by them. Yet, as I came to realize much later, their behavior was very much in keeping with feminist principles. They valued my sisters and me unconditionally; wanted to give us educational opportunities that were denied to them because of the generation into which they were born and because they were first generation Americans whose parents had other values to instill in them; they worked for equality in relationships, politics, and health care. I was 18 the year individuals became eligible to vote at age 18, and both my parents took me to cast my votes that year. They believed that, like them, I had a responsibility to make things better for the next generation. They valued voting; I was told what the Suffragists had endured in order to win this right for us and to remember this each year I vote. I took my first course in feminism as an undergraduate in the early 1970s: ‘‘Sex Roles in American Society’’ with Nancy Walbek. I would share the class discussions with my mother, telling her about the experiences of students in class that were different from my own—for example, being denied the use of certain
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toys considered ‘‘sex inappropriate’’ for them; being tracked into different high school and college programs because of being women or men; women being told by family and friends to hide their achievements from potential dates and mates. I was unable to relate to these experiences and realized for the first time that my parents were feminists, a term to which I was introduced formally in this class and then subsequently as a graduate student when I took courses with Dee Graham and Edna Rawlings. I also learned that I had been exposed to nonstereotyped role models, and because there were all girls in our family, we were not raised to conform to stereotyped behavior. It was in graduate school that I decided to pursue research in feminist psychology, especially in women’s career development. I was fortunate to have a mentor, William Dember, who encouraged me to pursue this research, even though it was not in his area of specialization (i.e., visual perception). Bill encouraged me to take courses with faculty in departments in addition to psychology: educational leadership and family development. He told me this would help put pieces together in understanding the research I was conducting. I thank Kathy Borman and Judy Frankel for their roles in my feminist identity development. A few years later when my father died, Charlie, who attended my father’s wake, came to my mother, my sisters, and me and told us how my father had impacted his life. Charlie, an African American man, told us my father was the only coworker (both were skilled workers at General Electric) who treated him fairly, didn’t talk with him in a derogatory manner, and stopped others from making racial slurs and epithets. I learned for another time what it meant to be a feminist. I dedicated the three-volume set on the Psychology of Women at Work to my parents: ‘‘For Antoinette and Michael Paludi, who encouraged me to define what women’s work is for myself.’’ They wanted all their daughters to be independent thinkers and doers and to help others. They gave us no templates to follow but encouraged us to navigate our own paths. And, especially in my case, encouraged me to leave home to attend graduate school in a city that seemed, to my parents, to be very far away—but they never said ‘‘no.’’ My parents thus taught me that not only did they believe in the economic, educational, social, and political equality of women and men, but they favored the social and legal changes necessary to achieve equality between the sexes and among races, and they were committed to implementing these principles. Perhaps they could not effect change at the national level, but they did do so in personal relationships with their family and friends and on the local level. This is the legacy they left my sisters and me. This book set is a tribute to Antoinette and Michael. I have been reminded of Antoinette and Michael throughout the writing and editing of these volumes on feminism and women’s rights.
Introduction
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I am especially reminded of what my mother used to tell me: ‘‘You are there before you get there.’’ She knew I wanted equality to happen fast and that I grew concerned when feminists didn’t win political elections, when younger women didn’t know the heritage of how they came to be accepted in graduate programs and in certain jobs, how the glass ceiling for women and people of color is still strong, and that worldwide, women constitute 64 percent of all adults who are illiterate (see Susan Basow’s chapter in Volume 1). I have learned that she was right; that change takes time, and to measure change differently, i.e., in increments. As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stated as she suspended her campaign for president of the United States in 2008: ‘‘Although we weren’t able to shatter this highest, hardest glass ceiling this time, thanks to you, it’s got about 18 million cracks in it, and the light is shining through like never before.’’ The chapters in these volumes show us where the light is shining through on feminism. All three volumes represent what Judith Lorber (1998) and Snelling (1999) identified: several types of feminism and feminists. Lorber (1998) categorized feminism into three major areas: gender reform, gender resistance, and gender rebellion. Genderreform feminism emphasizes similarities between women and men rather than focusing on differences between them. Gender-resistance feminism holds that formal legal rights alone will not end gender inequality; male dominance is too ingrained into social relations. Gender-resistance feminism focuses on how men and women are different—cognitively, emotionally, and socially—and urges women to form women-centered organizations and communities. Genderrebellion feminism looks at the interrelationships among inequalities of sex, race, ethnicity, social class, and sexual orientation. A number of years ago my text on the psychology of women displayed a quilt on its cover (Paludi, 2002). I asked for this design to highlight Gentry’s (1989) image of quilt making for understanding feminism. These three volumes on feminism and women’s rights also represent quilt making in understanding feminism. Each contributor has made one piece of the quilt that has been joined with pieces by other contributors. Each of the contributors has used different stitching on their piece of the quilt. No one chapter is more important than the other. We need all pieces if we are to complete the quilt that is feminism. According to Gentry (1989): Feminist psychology and feminism in general seem to be at the point of trying to piece together the individual parts of a quilt. The overall pattern of the quilt that we want is still emerging. No one knows what equality in a post-patriarchal world will look like. We are beginning to piece the separate parts together—to explore the kinds of stitching to use in connecting the pieces and how to place the separate pieces into the
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In Volume 1, Heritage, Roles, and Issues, contributors have discussed efforts to integrate feminist scholarship into several disciplines, including education, work, science, military, religion, and politics. As Catherine Stimpson (1971) noted, there have been three kinds of problems in the disciplines and curriculum with respect to women: omission, distortions, and trivializations. Each of the contributors to Volume 1 notes where the sexism in the disciplines has existed and where feminist correctives have restructured the disciplines. Jennifer Martin, in her chapter concerning gender differences in abilities, noted: Women have made significant social, academic, and occupational gains in the past 50 years; for example, women are entering nontraditional fields with more frequency, participating in high school and college sports more than ever before, and carving out more egalitarian roles for themselves within the family. However, women have still not ultimately achieved true equity with their male counterparts. . . . The idea that women somehow possess different or inferior aptitudes when compared to their male counterparts can lead to diminished expectations for women—in terms of how they view themselves and how others view them.
In Volume 2, Mental and Physical Health, contributors deal with violence and discrimination against girls and women and the resulting impact on women’s emotional and physical well being, interpersonal relationships, career development, and self-concept. Types of discrimination and victimization addressed are sexual harassment, sexual violence, harassment of sexual minorities, and rape and violence in the context of women’s HIV risk. Contributors have addressed these issues globally. Bethany Waits and Paula Lundberg-Love offer new cutting edge evidence on neurological responses in women victims of sexual violence. Therapeutic support for women victims of violence is also addressed in this volume, including feminist therapy and ethnocultural psychotherapy. All contributors note that sexual victimization is prevalent in the United States and globally, as is sexual harassment and sexual orientation discrimination. As Waits and Lundberg-Love note: Female survivors of sexual violence are everywhere. They are in universities, religious institutions, court rooms, hospitals, and the military. They are daughters, mothers, spouses, sisters, friends, next-door neighbors, and co-workers. Many differ in age, education, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. . . . However, their lives are connected by the violence that they have experienced.
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The international focus on feminism and women’s rights is continued in Volume 3, Feminism as Human Rights. In this volume, contributors address laws on sexual harassment, pay equity, and rape. Furthermore, contributors speak to the injustices to women with disabilities. Human rights issues such as arranged and forced marriage for women, pornography, and the globalization of western appearance ideals are also presented in this volume. All contributors to this volume call for further advocacy on behalf of women. As Noorfarah Merali stated: It is only if arranged marriages are understood in light of their intentions, diverse forms, actual outcomes, and local or international contexts that laws, policies, and human rights advocacy can be appropriately channeled to protect and preserve women’s well-being.
In addition to the scholarly reviews of research on feminism and women’s rights, I have included women’s personal accounts of their own feminist identity development. They are at different stages in life, in their career, and in relationships and yet they are bound by shared stories. It is my hope that these volumes encourage individuals to self identify as feminists. Research has suggested for some time that most people reject the term ‘‘feminist’’ when describing themselves but support feminist principles—equal pay for equal work, for example (see Paludi et al., Volume 3). Goldner’s (1994) study noted that when women who hold feminist beliefs anticipate a negative reaction from their peers to the label ‘‘feminist,’’ they will avoid using the term to describe themselves. Goldner indicated that media is a primary source of negative images of feminists. It is common to see photos of women identified as feminists having clenched fists. These images are not representative of feminists. More recent research by Rudman and Fairchild (2007) found that the stereotype that feminists are unattractive still persists. However, these images are rejected by individuals, especially during adolescence and young adulthood, when maintaining gender role stereotypic behavior is reinforced and is central to their self-esteem and self-concept. Paludi, Paludi, and DeFour (2004) noted that individuals reject the label feminist because they view themselves as in control, as powerful rather than as victims of gender inequality. Thus, they perceive the term ‘‘feminist’’ to imply a powerless position, which they reject (Rhode, 1977). The contributors to each of the three volumes of Feminism and Women’s Rights Worldwide encourage us to think critically about feminism, to value cultural experiences and to integrate our knowledge of theories and research about feminism with our own life experiences. The chapters encouraged me to do this in remembering my own feminist
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socialization. I encourage you to do the same. It is my hope these three volumes serve as a ‘‘life raft’’ (Klonis, Endo, Crosby, and Worell, 1997) for feminists, especially those in the millennial generation. REFERENCES Gentry, M. (1989). Introduction: Feminist perspectives on gender and thought: Paradox and potential. In M. Crawford & M. Gentry (Eds.), Gender and thought. New York: Springer-Verlag. Goldner, M. (1994). Accounting for race and class variation in the disjuncture between feminist identity and feminist beliefs: The place of negative labels and social movements. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, Los Angeles. Klonis, S., Endo, J., Crosby, F., & Worell, J. (1997). Feminism as life raft. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 21, 333–345. Lorber, J. (1998). Gender inequality: Feminist theories and politics. Los Angeles: Roxbury. Paludi, M. (2002). The psychology of women. 2nd ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Paludi, M., ed. (2008). The psychology of women at work: Challenges and solutions for our female workforce. Westport, CT: Praeger. Paludi, M., Paludi, C., & DeFour, D. (2004). Introduction: The more things change, the more they stay the same. In M. Paludi (Ed.), Praeger guide to the psychology of gender. xi–xxxi. Westport, CT: Praeger. Rhode, D. (1997). Speaking of sex. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rudman, L., & Fairchild, K. (2007). The F word: Is feminism incompatible with beauty and romance? Psychology of Women Quarterly, 31, 125–136. Snelling, S. (1999). Women’s perspectives on feminism. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 23, 247–266. Stimpson, C. (1971). Thy neighbor’s wife, thy neighbor’s servants: Women’s liberation and black civil rights. In V. Gornick & B. Moran (Eds.), Woman in sexist society: Studies in power and powerlessness. New York: Basic Books. Zucker, A., & Stewart, A. (2007). Growing up and growing older: Feminism as a context for women’s lives. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 31, 137–145.
Chapter 1
The Myth of the Man-Hating Feminist Melinda Kanner Kristin J. Anderson
The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians. —Reverend Pat Robertson (Robertson letter attacks feminists, 1992)
Spanky: Let’s start a club right now. The He-man Woman-haters. I’ll be president. Alfalfa: And I’ll be second president, and you can be third president. Buckwheat: Thanks. Spanky: Alright, get up and do exactly what I do. Put your hand on your heart, and raise your other hand. We, the He-man Woman-haters club . . . Alfalfa and Buckwheat: We, the he-man woman-haters club . . . Spanky: . . . promise not to fall for this Valentine’s business . . . Alfalfa and Buckwheat: . . . promise not to fall for this Valentine’s business . . . Spanky: . . . because girls are the bunk. Alfalfa and Buckwheat: . . . because girls are the bunk. —Hearts and Thumps (1937) from the Our Gang comedy film series, directed by Hal Roach
THE HE-MAN WOMAN-HATER AND THE MAN-HATING FEMINIST In 1934, the comedy trio The Three Stooges made their first short ‘‘musical novelty film,’’ The Woman Haters. In this misogynist cinema
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Heritage, Roles, and Issues
fantasy, the fraternal organization protects men from the trials of romance and marriage and from the presumed inevitable disappointments and betrayals that accompany relationships with women. A second fantasy comes from the Little Rascals child comedy troop who produced the Our Gang comedies for nearly two decades, a regular feature of which was the He-Man Woman-Haters Club, which provided solace for the little boys in the gang and excluded girls from play. Both examples from the annals of American mass media illustrate some of the important and lasting dimensions of the myth of the feminist man-hater. First, we find an intrinsic conflict that emerges in relationships between females and males, even in these young, preadolescent fictional proxies for real-life women and men. This conflict is presented as inevitable, natural, and as fundamentally contrary to the personal and social interests of males. Second, in these apparently innocent and trivial fictional illustrations, we find the production of justification for division and suspicion—not caution and sensitivity, but overt and institutionalized hostility toward females from males. Finally, contained in the invention of the woman-hater, and the need for boys to embrace such an identity, is an expression of a diametric opposition in which the needs of men and the needs of women are set up as antagonistic. Whether or not such antagonism is real, it is effectively made real and asserted redundantly and repeatedly. There is a presence in male-produced and (largely) male-consumed popular culture of the figure of the woman-hating man. There exists as well a seemingly parallel figure—the man-hating feminist. However, this figure is not, in a parallel way, the creation of some delirious feminist fantasy, but the product of the same mass media organ of patriarchy. The man-hating feminist is an invention, and a powerful and effective one at that. But what are the sources of these images? What allows the image of the man-hater to persist, to stick in the popular mind? And what interests are served by perpetuating this stereotype? No matter how we frame it, feminism has gotten a bad rap in the cultural mind. From the myth of the bra-burner, to the negligent mother, to the career-minded spinster, to the man-hater, the mere mention of the word ‘‘feminist’’ produces strong and often negative reactions. The feminist has endured some of the most grotesque kinds of distortion and defamation among all the emblems of social progressivism and liberation. Much as black activists have typically been portrayed as wild-eyed, reckless, and dangerous to society, the feminist has been tagged with many labels. She has been assigned the role of repository of many cultural fears, and has, perhaps most potently, been identified as a man-hater. The man-hater itself is a socially and frightening figure in the cultural imagination. The man-hater will not cooperate with the goals and practice of patriarchy and poses a threat to the very cornerstone, the living embodiment of patriarchy: the
The Myth of the Man-Hating Feminist
3
individual man himself. As with any political caricature, the images do more than misrepresent: they obstruct and mislead. These problems have been compounded somewhat by genuine critiques of patriarchy as a system. Much like the identification and expose of the institutionalized racism of dominant society, feminist critique of patriarchy necessarily identifies the oppressive nature of the social supremacy of ‘‘man.’’ The invented feminist ‘‘man-hater’’ is in no way a natural, inevitable, or organic product of feminist politics and philosophy. This straw woman is not linked to feminist values in any sense. It first serves nefarious and destructive ends aimed at undermining the philosophy and struggle for social equality. If this is not a real thing, how did it become coined? What specific social and political circumstances are linked to this myth? Is there any basis in reality to support the claims entailed in this figure? At stake here is not just the good name of feminists, nor even the struggle for equality. The data we present here demonstrate that it is not the case that feminists hate men, but perhaps that anti-feminists hate men. The ‘‘man-hating feminist’’ has no basis in reality but is part of a largescale, long-term tacit process by which power is maintained and the myths that support gender inequality continue to circulate on its behalf. It is part of a smoke-and-mirrors subterfuge to convert womanhaters into an epidemic of male bashing, feminist man-haters and lesbian conversion campaigns. In this process of misdirection, accusation, and cultural myth-making, not only feminists are harmed. Any woman, any man who resists the narrow and constricting confines of absolute gender conformity, are victims as well. This chapter explores the myth of the feminist-as-man-hater and examines some of the origins and content of the myth. We do not undertake here to review the history of the term ‘‘feminist’’ or to sort through the hundreds of historical and recent aspersions cast on feminism through the direct effort of conservative news, and talk programming, or the more subtle but equally effective contamination of mainstream news and entertainment media. The major contribution offered here is an argument built on empirical evidence that actually examines the truth-value of the claim that feminists dislike men. In our empirical research, we investigated the real-life ideas and experiences of respondents and discovered that the image of the feminist as manhater is far from the reality of women and men who embrace feminist values and identify themselves as feminists. FEMINISM: THE ANTI-FEMINIST CREATES THE MAN-HATER FEMINISM The very word evokes strong feelings in most people; Strong feelings and, too often, a world of misconceptions. The real meaning of
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feminism, and what it actually means to call oneself a feminist, has become obscured by an array of prejudices, preconceptions, and mechanisms that serve to maintain inequality. Structured inequality based on gender—much like inequalities based on race or ethnicity or sexual identity—has been an established way of doing things for centuries. For some, the question begins and ends with women’s right to vote. For others, a belief exists that gender inequality is a thing of the past, and that women now enjoy social and economic equality in terms of access to resources and prestige. Still others believe that feminism is an antique effort, a fad whose time has passed. In any event, many women and many more men continue to resist identifying themselves as feminists. What are some of the sources of the claims asserted by the manhating feminist myth? Some of the myths are simply defamatory and dismissive of feminists and feminism. Through the simple accusations of ‘‘lesbian,’’ and the homophobia easily mobilized, many are frightened away from the label that accurately describes their philosophy. By invoking terrifying images of social outcasts, of ‘‘spinsters,’’ and ‘‘bra-burners,’’ still others are driven into a disjuncture between values and the adoption of an identity that accurately describes their social principles. The deployment of the twinned terms ‘‘man-hating’’ and ‘‘feminist’’ creates a myth with doubly harmful results. First, feminism is denied the understanding it merits. The obfuscation and distortions of the realities of feminism—the struggle for suffrage, the collective striving for economic and social parity, the centuries-long drive to achieve meaningful political participation—are overwhelmed by the fun-house mirror of misogyny held up by the accusations of manhating. Second, in the service of dismissing the central values of feminism, such accusations additionally activate hostility toward lesbians and intensify the sexism and misogyny that underlies both issues. At its core, feminism is the belief in certain fundamental principles of social, economic, political, and judicial equality. In a society in which women and men have traditionally received unequal treatment, feminism seems a reasonable and long-overdue corrective to the historical lack of access women continue to experience. Merriam-Webster defines feminism as: (1) The theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes; and (2) Organized activity on behalf of women’s rights and interests. The Encyclopedia Britannica defines it as: The belief in the social, economic, and political equality of the sexes. And bell hooks (2000) defines feminism as a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression. On the face of it, it would seem that all women, and most men, would identify with the goals of feminism. In spite of the widely agreed-upon philosophical desire for guarantees of equality, today, few women call themselves feminists. Survey research shows that the percentage of respondents who actually call themselves
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feminists is strikingly small. In surveys of university women, the percentage who identify as feminists range from 8 (Myaskovsky & Wittig, 1997) to 44 percent (Bullock & Fernald, 2003) depending on the demographic makeup of the students. What accounts for these low numbers? When you consider the misconceptions we carry around with us because of the way in which feminism is portrayed in popular culture and politics, it is not surprising that relatively few women call themselves feminists. Anti-feminists blame feminists for a variety of social problems: for young men entering college at a lower rate than that of young women (Sommers, 2000); for the decline in ‘‘manliness’’ in American culture (Mansfield, 2006); and even for the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 (Falwell, 2001). MOST WOMEN ENDORSE FEMINIST PRINCIPLES Surveys find that women hold feminist beliefs but are hesitant to describe themselves as feminists because they know that feminism is viewed by some as anti-male (Alexander & Ryan, 1997; Aronson, 2003). If it is the case that most people—men and women—endorse the fundamental principles of feminism, it should stand to reason that most people would actually support feminism. Even among individuals who endorse or embrace feminist principles, the adoption of the identity ‘‘feminist’’ is resisted. One study of mostly white American women who were college students found that of the women who did not consider themselves feminists, 81 percent agreed with some or all of the goals of the feminist movement (Liss, Hoffner, & Crawford, 2000). DO FEMINISTS HATE MEN? WHAT IS THE EVIDENCE? Now let us address the common belief that feminists are man-haters. While there are abundant of examples popular culture purporting to reveal feminists’ attitudes toward men, there are very few empirical studies on the subject. In addition to our own empirical study that we describe shortly, Iazzo’s 1983 study is the only one we found that examines feminists’ attitudes toward men. Iazzo (1983) developed the Attitudes toward Men scale. He measured the degree to which women agreed with statements about Marriage/Parenthood (e.g., ‘‘Men consider marriage a trap.’’), Sexuality (e.g., ‘‘A man cannot get enough sex.’’), Work (e.g., ‘‘A man’s job is the most important thing in his life.’’), and Physical/Personality Attributes (e.g., ‘‘An athletic man is to be admired.’’) of men and gender roles. Women expressed their agreement on a 1 to 4 scale, and a score of 80 would indicate a neutral attitude toward men. The ‘‘control group’’ sample was 104 mostly white women recruited from a university, department stores, and other places of business. They were compared with battered wives, rape victims,
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lesbians, and feminists from a local chapter of the National Organization for Women. The control group mean score was 89.93, above the neutral midpoint of 80.00, suggesting slightly positive attitudes toward men. The average score of feminists was 79.54, not statistically distinguishable from the 80.00 midpoint, suggesting neutral attitudes toward men. So feminists did not have negative attitudes toward men. What about lesbians, a category that is often conflated with feminists? Lesbians scored, on average, 70.97, so somewhat lower than neutral but hardly indicative of man-hating. Further inspection of the statements that make up the Attitudes toward Men scale may shed light on why lesbians scored lower than both feminists and the ‘‘control group’’ of women. Some of the statements may not be relevant to lesbians. For instance, some of the items are as follows: ‘‘Male sex organs are attractive,’’ ‘‘The male body is visually unappealing,’’ and ‘‘The sight of a penis is repulsive.’’ These are questions from the Sexuality subscale. It would have been interesting to have analyzed how feminists and lesbians scored on each separate subscale. For instance, perhaps lesbians had relatively ‘‘anti-male’’ attitudes on the 7 items that made up the Sexuality scale because they do not find men’s body parts attractive. Conversely, their scores on the other subscales could have been neutral or positive. The limitation of Iazzo’s study is that many of the statements might be irrelevant to lesbians because the statements assume that women have intimate relationships with men. Maltby and Day (2001) studied British college students and examined various psychological characteristics as they correlate with attitudes toward women and men. For women, a feminine-stereotyped gender role self-concept—the degree to which people see themselves in terms of feminine stereotypes—was found to be correlated with negative attitudes toward men. In other words, the more women saw themselves as feminine, the less they liked men. While Maltby and Day’s study did not measure feminists’ attitudes toward men, their results imply that perhaps it is non-feminists who do not like men because feminists tend to have relatively more masculine and androgynous gender role self-concepts than do non-feminists. Another way to put it is that, in this study, women with traditional gender role orientation— who are likely to be non-feminists—had more negative attitudes toward men than did women with nontraditional gender self-concepts— who are more likely to be feminists. Another study with an ethnically diverse sample of university students found that those women who perceived large value and belief differences between women and men tended to like men less than did those women who did not perceive large value and belief differences (Stephan, Stephan, Demitrakis, Yamada, & Clason, 2000). Again, this study did not examine feminists’ attitudes per se; however, we can extrapolate from the data. Other studies have found that feminists tend to think women and men are
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not very different (Liss et al., 2000; Liss, O’Connor, Morosky, & Crawford, 2001), whereas non-feminists are more likely to think that women and men are fundamentally different (Yoder, Fischer, Kahn, & Groden, 2007). Therefore, it appears non-feminists see women and men as fundamentally different and have more negative attitudes toward men than do feminists. AMBIVALENCE TOWARD MEN: TWO ASPECTS OF ATTITUDES TOWARD MEN The most recent method of measuring attitudes toward men has been the Ambivalence toward Men Inventory (AMI), developed by Glick and Fiske (1999). They found two aspects of women’s (and to a somewhat lesser extent men’s) attitudes toward men. Hostility toward men represents overtly negative attitudes toward men. It characterizes men as inferior in ways that are safe to criticize, such as that men are babies when they are sick. Hostility toward men also taps into resentment about men’s power relative to women, men’s aggressiveness, cultural attitudes that portray men as superior, and the way men exert control within heterosexual intimate relationships. Individuals with high hostility toward men scores tend to agree with statements such as, ‘‘When men act to ‘help’ women, they are often trying to prove they are better than women,’’ and ‘‘Most men pay lip service to equality for women, but can’t handle having a woman as an equal.’’ The second aspect of attitudes toward men is benevolence toward men. Benevolence toward men does not represent overtly negative attitudes toward men, but rather overtly positive or affectionate attitudes toward men. It is a set of beliefs that includes the idea that just as women are dependent on men, so too are men dependent on women. Benevolence toward men suggests that a woman’s role is to take care of a man, but only in the domestic context. Experiencing subjectively positive feelings of affectionate protectiveness, admiration, and connection with men in intimate relationships represents benevolence toward men. Those who score high on benevolence toward men agree with statements such as, ‘‘Women are incomplete without men,’’ and ‘‘Even if both members of a couple work, the woman ought to be more attentive to taking care of her man at home.’’ Hostility and benevolence toward men are distinct concepts, although they tend to occur together. That is, women who have high hostility toward men scores tend to also have high benevolence toward men scores. Thus, women may resent men’s power even as they subscribe to beliefs that support it. Women tend to score higher than men on hostility toward men and lower than men on benevolence toward men. Attitudes of hostility and benevolence toward men are correlated with other kinds of beliefs. For instance, benevolence toward men is
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correlated with sexist attitudes toward women: those who believe that men should protect women, and that women should take care of men at home, also tend to believe that women need protection because they are inferior to men. Interestingly, women’s hostility toward men and benevolence toward men scores correlate, indicating that some women simultaneously hold beliefs that actively support and justify male dominance (benevolence toward men) at the same time they resent the consequences of this dominance (hostility toward men). Glick and Fiske (1999) speculate that the greater the dependence a woman has on men, the more she is likely to experience both benevolence and hostility toward men; the former because of her recognition of her investment in men and the latter because of resentment over her dependence. Although Glick and Fiske do not directly answer the question of the relative position of feminists in terms of their benevolent or hostile attitudes toward men, they do explore the relationship between gender inequality and hostility toward men and benevolence toward men, which has implications for feminism and attitudes toward men. In a massive study across sixteen nations, Glick et al. (2004), along with several colleagues around the world, used many translated versions of the AMI to investigate attitudes toward men. Glick et al. (2004) found that in most nations, hostility toward men was higher among women than among men. Hostility toward men scores correlated with the national measures of gender inequality. Specifically, hostility toward men was higher in traditional than in egalitarian nations. At the same time, benevolence toward men was higher in traditional than in egalitarian nations. The authors’ speculated that women in traditional nations may be more resentful toward men for what they view as abuses of power, but that this resentment is not necessarily a challenge to gender hierarchy because it coexists with benevolent beliefs about men’s roles as protectors and providers. The more hostile men are toward women, the more women resent and show hostility toward men. Heightened resentment of men’s hostility may explain why women’s hostility toward men scores increasingly outstrip men’s in more traditional cultures. It is worth noting that there were many more gender similarities than differences across nations—women and men in the sixteen nations tended to have similar attitudes toward women and men. In terms of addressing the myth of feminists and man-haters, the Glick et al. (2004) study on attitudes toward men suggests that man-hating is linked more to anti-feminism and gender in equality, than it is to feminism and gender equality. Although the AMI is widely used, it had not been used with feminists until Anderson, Kanner, and Elsayegh (2009) conducted a study that examined feminists’ and non-feminists’ attitudes toward men that surveyed an ethnically diverse sample of 488 American college
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students and asked them to respond to statements about gender roles including the items from the AMI. Students were also asked whether or not they are feminists. Only 14 percent of the sample of women and men identified as feminists, which is consistent with an ethnically diverse sample. Contrary to popular stereotypes, self-identified feminists had lower levels of hostility toward men than non-feminists. Interestingly, women overall did tend to have higher levels of hostility toward men than did men, but again, the hostility was not among the feminists. Feminists also tended to have lower levels of benevolence toward men. Low levels of benevolence toward men does not mean one feels malevolence toward men, it just means that the respondent does not agree with traditional gender roles— for instance, that women should take care of men in the home, while men should be the main wage earners. Thus, based on our study results, it appears that feminists, compared to non-feminists, do not have negative attitudes toward men. Feminists do tend to reject traditional gender roles that put women in less powerful positions than men. Taken together, systematic empirical studies do not find evidence that feminists dislike men. In contrast, there is some suggestion than non-feminists, those women who adhere to traditional gender stereotypes, dislike, or at least, resent, men. We must ask then, why does the myth of feminist man-haters persist? WHY DOES THE MYTH OF THE FEMINIST MAN-HATER PERSIST? The myth of the feminist man-hater exists in part because feminists do not behave themselves in conventional ways. Feminists tend to violate gender role expectations, and that makes people uncomfortable. Women who desire and have professions, women who resist the limitations of housewifery, women who do not feel themselves to be in the irresistible grip of maternal inevitability—these and other women, and men, who depart from gender conformity find themselves in the sweep of the accusation of man-hater. There are stiff sanctions for women, and men, who violate gender roles. Now that we have established the lack of empirical support for the notion that feminists are man-haters, we are left with explaining why the myth persists and what we can do about it. The next section begins by examining women’s reactions to conventional and nonconventional women by first examining ambivalent sexism. Next, we will look at people’s perceptions of another type of gender violator, women leaders. Then the supposed link between feminism and lesbianism is examined, and the function of lesbian-baiting as a strategy to keep women in their place is discussed. Finally, the empirical research presented in this chapter is put in its larger cultural context by tying it to the ‘‘battle of the sexes’’ and the ‘‘boy crisis’’ rhetoric that are currently popular.
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WOMEN ARE WONDERFUL BUT FEMINISTS ARE NOT: REWARDING TRADITIONAL AND PENALIZING NONTRADITIONAL WOMEN Understanding people’s negative attitudes toward feminists requires understanding the context more generally of attitudes toward women. Just as people’s attitudes toward men are ambivalent—with a mix of respect and admiration along with resentment of men’s power and privilege—attitudes toward women are ambivalent as well. At first glance, however, attitudes toward women seem positive relative to attitudes toward men. Attitudes toward women are more positive in terms of affect. Eagly and Mladinic (1994) have coined the phrase womenare-wonderful to illustrate this. The global category ‘‘woman’’ is viewed more positively than the global category ‘‘man.’’ The women-are-wonderful effect occurs on explicit attitude surveys as well as with implicit attitude measures such as when positive words such as ‘‘good’’ and ‘‘happy’’ are associated more with women than with men (Rudman & Goodwin, 2004). There are two important points about the positive feelings people have about women compared to men connected to the negative reaction some have for feminists. Just because a group is liked does not mean that it is treated fairly and taken seriously. Also, just because the global category ‘‘women’’ is liked more than ‘‘men,’’ this does not mean that particular subcategories of women are liked. These important caveats to the women-are-wonderful effect are elaborated below.
DISCRIMINATION AND DISRESPECT Gender-based discrimination is widespread and well documented (see Valian, 1998, for a review). Take, for example, the disparities in pay between women and men (see Volume 3) Women college graduates in the United States who work full time make only 75 percent of what comparable men make (U.S. Department of Labor, 2005). In the United States, girls and women are more likely to live in poverty than are boys and men (Bishaw & Stern, 2006). And while women in the United States held half of all management and professional positions in 2004, only 14 percent of architects and engineers and 29 percent of physicians and surgeons are women, whereas 86 percent of paralegals and legal assistants are women (U.S. Department of Labor, 2005). In terms of representations of women in popular culture in the United States, men are overrepresented on prime time television shows (Screen Actors Guild, 2005), in television commercials (Ganahl, Prinsen, & Netzley, 2003), feature films (Lauzen & Dozier, 2005), music television (Seidman, 1999), and in newspaper comics (Glascock & PrestonSchreck, 2004). In terms of political representation, women make up
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only 16.1 percent of the members of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate (Center for American Women and Politics, 2008). Eagly and Mladinic’s (1994) work on the women-are-wonderful effect revealed, women may be liked, but they are not necessarily respected. Fiske, Cuddy, Glick, and Xu (2002) have found that groups that are traditionally targets of discrimination are judged along two dimensions: warmth and competence. For instance, people tend to think Jews are highly competent, but do not feel warmly toward them—they are respected but not liked. People tend to feel warmly toward old people, but do not respect them— they are high on warmth, low on respect. As you might guess, women are viewed as warm and therefore likeable, but they are less likely to be seen as competent and are therefore less respected. Men, relative to women, are less liked but are viewed as more competent. If women are liked more than respected, where do feminists fit in? Haddock and Zanna (1994) found that people have different views of two categories of women that are seen as opposites: housewives and feminists. Like Eagly and Mladinic’s (1994) work on the women-are-wonderful effect and Fiske et al.’s (2002) work on warmth and competence, Haddock and Zanna found that when Canadian college students were asked to form a mental image of the typical woman and typical man, women were evaluated more favorably than were men. However, when subcategories of women were considered, different attitudes emerged. Feminists tend to be evaluated more negatively than housewives, even though feminists and housewives are both part of the larger category of women. Haddock and Zanna further found that those who dislike feminists believe that feminists violate traditional values and customs. In other words, feminists are seen as a threat to the status quo in a way that housewives are not. AMBIVALENT SEXISM: THE CARROT AND THE STICK OF PATRIARCHY Because there are differing views of different types of women, sexism, the institutionalized prejudice and discrimination against women is not a single, unitary concept. Glick and Fiske (1997) developed ambivalent sexism as a measure that captures subjectively positive and negative feelings toward women. Racial/ethnic groups may, and often do, avoid kinship ties (or almost any kind of contact) with other racial/ethnic groups, however, heterosexual women and men have to be intimate. For instance, one might be against marrying someone of another race, but it is unlikely that a heterosexual man will decide not to be involved with a woman. And although men may wish to exclude women from certain activities and roles, few (even among the most rabidly sexist) wish to banish women completely from their lives. You can avoid another ethnic group, but it is hard to avoid another gender.
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Similar to their measure of ambivalence toward men discussed earlier, Glick and Fiske find that men’s (and people’s, generally) ambivalence toward women can be broken down into two kinds of sexism, hostile sexism and benevolent sexism. Hostile sexism is what most people think when they think of sexism. It consists of overtly hostile feelings toward women, with negative feelings toward, and stereotyping of, nontraditional women in particular. Hostile sexism seeks to justify male power, traditional gender roles, and men’s exploitation of women as sexual objects through derogatory characterizations of women. Hostile sexists agree with statements such as, ‘‘When women lose to men in a fair competition, they typically complain about being discriminated against,’’ and ‘‘Most women fail to appreciate fully all that men do for them.’’ Benevolent sexism is something of a slippery concept because it involves subjectively positive attitudes toward women. Women are characterized as pure creatures who need protection from men. It is the view that women are adored by men and are necessary to make a man complete. Benevolent sexism relies on kinder and gentler justifications of male dominance and prescribed gender roles; it recognizes men’s dependence on women and a romanticized view of heterosexual relationships. Ideologies of what Glick and Fiske (1997) refer to as benevolent paternalism allow members of dominant groups to characterize their privileges as well deserved, even as a responsibility they must bear (similar to the ‘‘white man’s burden’’). Men are willing to sacrifice their own needs to care for the women in their lives. Benevolent sexists agree with statements such as, ‘‘No matter how accomplished he is, a man is not truly complete as a person unless he has the love of a woman,’’ and ‘‘Women should be cherished and protected by men.’’ For women, benevolent sexism undermines women’s resistance to male dominance: benevolent sexism is disarming because it is subjectively favorable and also promises that men’s power will be used to women’s advantage, as long as they can secure a high-status male protector. People do not immediately recognize benevolent sexism as sexist, and some women are even flattered by the attitudes of benevolent sexism (Barreto & Ellemers, 2005). Although hostile sexism and benevolent sexism are separate and contradictory concepts, people can, and often do, experience hostile and benevolent sexism simultaneously. People can have loving and hating attitudes toward women. People tend to feel hostile sexism toward women who violate traditional gender roles (e.g., feminists, sexually active women) and benevolent sexism toward conventional women (e.g., homemakers). Benevolent sexism can result in the women-are-wonderful effect because traditional women are considered to be wonderful because of their purity and nurturance. The way Glick and Fiske describe the workings of ambivalent sexism, benevolent sexism is the ‘‘carrot’’—the reward of positive feelings toward and protectiveness given to women who embrace traditional roles; and hostile
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sexism is the ‘‘stick’’—the hostility that women who reject traditional roles in favor of taking on traditionally masculine roles face from men who wish to keep them in their places. Punishment (through hostile sexism) alone is not the most effective means of shaping behavior because that might result in only resentment and resistance. However, punishment for some and reinforcement for others maintains patriarchy and the gender status quo (Glick & Fiske, 2001). Benevolent sexism, then, is insidious for three reasons. First, it doesn’t seem like prejudice to male perpetrators because men do not view it as something negative. Second, women may find its ‘‘sweet allure difficult to resist’’ (Glick & Fiske, 2001, pp. 114–115). Praising women’s nurturing traits is part of expressing the belief that women are especially suited to domestic roles. Furthermore, stereotypes of women as nurturing and communal justify their subordinated status (Jost & Kay, 2005). Third, benevolent sexism can drive a wedge between women. Women (e.g., feminists) who reject the overtly negative aspects of hostile sexism as well as the more hidden negative aspects of benevolent sexism are at odds with traditional women who are rewarded by benevolent sexism and reject feminism because they want to hold on to the little power they get as a result of benevolent sexism. So, while feminists and traditional women should be working in solidarity to fight gender discrimination, they are split by being on two opposite sides of benevolent sexism. Like their work on ambivalence toward men, Glick and Fiske have analyzed patterns of hostile and benevolent sexism in a variety of cultures (Glick et al., 2004). In general, men’s hostile sexism is higher than women’s, and women are more receptive to benevolent sexist beliefs than hostile sexist beliefs. In nations where hostile sexism was endorsed, women were especially likely to embrace benevolent sexism, in some cases, even more so than the men. This points to the irony of women who are forced to seek protection from members of the very group that threatens them: The greater the threat, the stronger the incentive to accept benevolent sexism’s protective ideology. This explains the tendency for women in the most sexist societies to endorse benevolent sexism more strongly than do men. Furthermore, the countries in which women rejected both benevolent and hostile sexism were the ones in which men had low hostile sexism scores. As sexist hostility declines, women may feel able to reject benevolent sexism without fear of a hostile backlash. Ambivalent sexism addresses the question of whether or not chivalry is good for women. In excluding women from the outside world of work and from positions traditionally held by men, benevolent sexists exclude women from roles that offer more status in society. Thus, some women (specifically traditional women) are protected to some extent by chivalry, but at great cost. Ambivalent sexism is a concept
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that can also be related to other objectionable attitudes. Feminists, who may reject chivalry for good reason, get an angry, defensive response from men who feel that feminists are ingrates. In a study of Spanish women’s reactions (Moya, Glick, Exp osito, de Lemus, & Hart, 2007) to discriminatory scenarios (e.g., losing a promotion), the same acts of discrimination were perceived as less serious when the perpetrators expressed a benevolent, protective justification than when they expressed a hostile one. Furthermore, women who scored higher in benevolent sexism were more likely to excuse both hostile treatment from a husband and benevolently-justified discrimination by non-intimate men (e.g., a boss). But this pattern of response only occurred among women participants who were without paid employment. This finding suggests that women who are highly dependent on men are prone to forgive even hostile acts, perhaps reinterpreting them as signs of the husband’s passionate attachment. One study with Turkish and Brazilian respondents, found that individuals (both women and men) with high levels of hostile sexism found wife abuse more acceptable than those with low levels of hostile sexism (Glick, Sakalli-Ugurlu, Ferreira, & de Souza, 2002). Benevolent sexism has been linked to attributions of blame against women for acquaintance rape. Individuals high in benevolent sexism attributed less blame to perpetrators and recommended shorter sentences for an acquaintance rape perpetrator than did low benevolent sexist individuals (Viki, Abrams, & Masser, 2004). A study of Zimbabwean male college students found that those men with higher levels of hostile sexism reported that they were more likely to commit acquaintance rape than men with lower levels of hostile sexism (Viki, Chiroro, & Abrams, 2006). Thus, hostile sexism rationalizes mistreatment of women who violate traditional roles, while benevolent sexism provides a framework for what is acceptable (i.e., traditional) behavior for women. The work on ambivalent sexism demonstrates that while traditional women tend to elicit positive feelings from people, nontraditional women such as feminists have hostile reactions directed toward them. Even though the supposed protective qualities of benevolent sexism are alluring to some women, that protection comes with the price of restricted options and strong sanctions to women who appear to violate traditional roles. PENALTIES FOR NONTRADITIONAL WOMEN A central feature of negative attitudes toward women is the dislike of women who do not fit into the traditional feminine role (e.g., feminists, lesbians, women athletes). From the discussion of Glick and Fiske’s (1997) work on ambivalent sexism and Fiske et al.’s (2002) work on warmth and competence as a relevant dimension of judging social
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categories, it should be clear that what makes feminists threatening is that they violate (or appear to violate) and reject traditional gender norms for women. Women leaders also violate people’s expectations about women and therefore threaten the gender hierarchy. While women who are leaders are not necessarily feminists, and feminists are not necessarily women in leadership positions, both engender similar reactions. Think of the strong reactions toward Hillary Clinton, Martha Stewart, and Condoleezza Rice. While women in leadership positions in the work domain have gradually increased, expectations about what women are like have not kept pace with women’s changing roles. Research findings have indicated that women who behave in ways typically reserved for men are found to be less socially appealing than men who behave similarly or women who behave in ways that are more in line with normative prescriptions. When a woman is acknowledged to have been successful at performing male gender-typed work, she is, by definition, thought to have the attributes necessary to effectively execute the tasks and responsibilities required. But it is these same attributes that are in violation of gender-prescriptive norms (Valian, 1998). So, although there is a good fit between what the woman is perceived to be like and what the job entails, there is a bad fit between what the woman is perceived to be like and the conception of what she should be like. One study illustrates the subtlety with which judgments about women who violate gender expectations get played out (Heilman, Wallen, Fuchs, & Tamkins, 2004). American college students were given packets that contained a profile of a clearly successful or ambiguously successful woman or man in a male-dominated job (assistant vice president in mechanics and aeronautics). Students were asked to rate the candidate on competence, likeability, and interpersonal hostility. When students rated the obviously successful candidate, women and men were rated equally—they were both given credit for their successes. However, gender did play a role when the candidates’ qualifications were ambiguous. When information about the candidate’s performance was ambiguous, the woman was rated as less competent than the man. There were results associated with liking ratings as well. When there was ambiguity about the target person’s performance, there was no significant difference between the liking ratings of women and men targets. But when there was clear evidence of success, the woman was liked less than the man. In other words, the clearly successful woman was liked significantly less than the clearly successful man, the unsuccessful woman, and unsuccessful man. A similar finding emerged in terms of judgments of hostility. The woman candidate was rated as less hostile than the man in the ambiguous performance outcome condition but was rated as more hostile than the man in the clearly successful condition. These results suggest the double standard used when
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judging women in male-dominated occupations: Women were viewed as less competent than men only when there was ambiguity about how successful they had been; when the women’s success was made explicit, there were no differences in these characterizations. However, when success was explicit, women were viewed as less likeable than men. Women, although rated less competent than men when information about them was ambiguous, were at least rated as less hostile interpersonally. But the switch when success was clear is dramatic: women who are acknowledged as successful were viewed not merely as indifferent to others but as downright uncivil. And these patterns held for both women and men participants, so these gender stereotypic norms and the tendency to penalize those who violate them are meaningful for both women and men. Heilman et al. (2004) also found that dislike was associated with not being recommended for promotions and salary increases. The authors conclude that while there are many things that lead an individual to be disliked in the job setting, it is only women who are disliked when they are successful. LESBIAN-BAITING Understanding the link between feminism and lesbianism reveals some of the fundamental sources of the discomfort and antagonism toward feminism we have explored so far. Indeed, in casual contexts and in mass media, lesbian is, erroneously, often portrayed as interchangeable with feminist where the presumption is made that lesbians are, by definition feminists, and feminists are presumed to be lesbians. Both lesbians and feminists are understood as women who disrupt and threaten gender, and both terms describe nontraditional women. Both feminists and lesbians seem inherently unladylike, assertive, and outspoken, and women like this threaten the gender status quo (Alexander & Ryan, 1997). Homophobia, in addition to sexism, creates an additional set of tactical opportunities to discredit and marginalize feminism’s efforts to achieve comprehensive equality for women. Like the accusation of male-bashing, the framing of lesbianism as the inevitable result of feminism or as a necessary dimension of feminism, are scare tactics designed to frighten people away from associating with feminism and feminist activism. The very positioning of lesbianism as a source of discrediting reveals the underlying layer of homophobia that often joins with sexism to maintain systems of oppression and retain privilege. Women who have worked actively against sexual assault and rape are often the target of lesbian-baiting. Framed as insults and debasement, accusations of lesbianism, along with descriptions of feminists as angry, unladylike, and unfeminine, are employed to make feminists, and by extension, the goals of feminism, unattractive and repellent. Grant
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(2000), who has studied community responses to anti-violence activists, argues that these slurs are the result of people feeling as though women are acting out of their place by complaining too much about men’s violence against women. It is as though it is okay to believe that rape is wrong, but that women should not complain about it, or at least if they complain, they should not complain loudly. Battered women’s shelters and rape crisis centers have been vandalized with graffiti such as ‘‘No means dyke,’’ or ‘‘No means tie her up.’’ Rape crisis centers have been charged with ‘‘turning women into lesbians’’ or ‘‘being man-hating.’’ Women’s activism is seen as a threat. ‘‘Lesbian,’’ as much as it is an expression of sexual identity, also functions as a regulatory term (Grant, 2000). It refers to women who are independent from men. That is why it can be used when a woman refuses sexual advances from a man. Since lesbian is often conflated with feminist, and because of homophobia, feminists are often required to prove they are not lesbians. Lesbian-baiting can also be a form of sexual extortion, especially in the military. Corbett (1997) has written about lesbian-baiting since the emergence of the U.S. military policy of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Pursue. According to Corbett, accusations of lesbianism are a threat to all military women, regardless of their sexual orientation. The antigay policy gives harassers and rapists tools of sexual extortion. Allegations of lesbianism can ruin a woman’s career. It doesn’t matter whether or not the allegations are true. Women soldiers who refuse sexual advances from men may be accused of being lesbians and subjected to investigation for homosexual conduct. Thus, the Don’t Ask policy is being used as a weapon of retaliation against women who report sexual harassment or rape, against those who rebuff sexual advances, or against those who succeed in their careers. Obviously, if lesbians and gay men could serve openly in the military, this would be a less effective weapon against service members. Although lesbians, like feminists, are seen as man-haters, there is no empirical evidence suggesting they are. Markey begins her Redbook article, ‘‘Male Bashing,’’ with, ‘‘I used to be a rather accomplished malebasher. After all, I was married to a man. . .’’ (Markey, 1993, p. 104). Magazines from the popular press actually imply that male-bashers are heterosexual women with traditional gender roles: women complain about men’s infidelity (Lego, 1999), inept husbands (Heckard, 1998), and men who are not ‘‘domesticable’’ (Heard, 1989). Lesbians likely have different relationships with men and therefore do not have the complaints, disappointments, and frustrations that some heterosexual women have. Grant (2000) interviewed lesbian feminist activists who reported that, rather than disliking men, they felt that men were either neutral players (e.g., male relatives) or just not relevant to their lives. One lesbian interviewee reported that men are not a major part of her
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life and that heterosexual women complain about men ‘‘all the time.’’ More systematic research needs to be done in the area of lesbians-asman-haters. We suspect another stereotype will be debunked, just as the feminists-as-man-haters stereotype has been. CONFUSING THE UNIT OF ANALYSIS: ‘‘WAR AGAINST THE SEXES’’ VERSUS PATRIARCHY AND PRIVILEGE Feminists are accused of man-hating when they object to gender discrimination because some interpret the objection as being anti-man (as complaints about particular, individual men, or even all men) rather than as a protest against the patriarchal system that gives power and privilege to men relative to women. Feminists see sexism as part of a system of inequality (Kane, 2000). Those who do not understand the systemic nature of gender inequality translate feminists’ activism as complaints directed at particular men or at men as a category, as if feminists blame each man or all men. For instance, in his book, Manliness, Harvey Mansfield describes feminism as women being ‘‘none too pleased with men and not shy about letting them know it’’ (Mansfield, 2006, p. 4). The incorrect notion that stems from and engenders hatred of men, rather than the accurate framing of feminism being a critique of a patriarchal system, does more than make women afraid to call themselves feminists, thereby contributing to gender inequality. In the studies we have reviewed in this chapter that revealed gender discrimination, nearly all found that men and women participants discriminate against women. Sexism and gender discrimination is not just something men do to women. Everyone participates in a sexist system, although it is certainly true that men benefit through the male privilege inherent in a sexist system. Ignoring the systemic nature of gender inequality also leads men to feel stuck in a defensive response rather than being able to see that men too are confined by gender expectations. Trivializing feminists’ resistance to inequality as anger at men insults the women’s liberation movement that fights for the right to vote, for equal pay, for educational equity, and for reproductive freedom—efforts focused on changing the system, not on ‘‘bashing’’ men. One manifestation of the focus on individual men versus the focus on systemic gender discrimination and male privilege is the ‘‘battle-ofthe-sexes’’ (e.g., Heard, 1989) rhetoric that is prevalent in popular culture. Battle-of-the-sexes rhetoric produces false neutrality and false parallelism of the advantages/disadvantages of women and men and suggests that both women and men are equally advantaged and disadvantaged—just in different ways (e.g., O’Beirne, 2006). For instance, in Time magazine article, ‘‘Men, Are They Really That Bad?’’ Morrow (1994) takes on what he describes as the ‘‘overt man bashing of recent years’’ (p. 54). He says, ‘‘both men and women have been oppressed
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by the other sex, in different ways’’ (p. 56), and ‘‘American men and women should face the fact that they are hopelessly at odds’’ (p. 59). Judy Markey (1993) says, ‘‘How can we gripe that they put us down as a group, if we do the same thing to them?’’ (p. 105) and, ‘‘We’ll wind up sounding like squabbling children crying, ‘He started it!’ ‘No, she did!’ ’’ (p. 105). This popular discourse that women-and-men-areat-odds suggests that women’s and men’s complaints are parallel and equal. The ‘‘sex wars’’ rhetoric trivializes genuine critiques about patriarchy and male supremacy and reduces discrimination to a he-saidshe-said dynamic in which there are no real winners and no real losers, but only miscommunication between the sexes. This view of individual-based gender debates can reduce things such as rape and sexual harassment to miscommunication that can leave men victims. For instance, in his book, The Myth of Male Power, Warren Farrell (1993) writes ‘‘Feminism has taught women to sue men for creating a ‘hostile environment’ or for date rape when men initiate with the wrong person or with the wrong timing’’ (p. 18). Similarly, Morrow (1994) claims that a successful approach to a woman is called romance and courtship. Sexual harassment, according to Morrow, is simply an unsuccessful approach, and, in his view, is unfairly treated as a crime. This rhetoric suggests that the real victims of sexual harassment and rape are not women, but men who are victimized by women’s flirtations and mixed messages. STEALING THE CENTER STAGE OF OPPRESSION: THE BOY CRISIS In recent years, another manifestation of the accusation of manhating comes in the form of the popular discourse on the ‘‘boy crisis.’’ Beginning in the 1980s, there was an increase in awareness regarding the male bias in clinical and popular psychological theories that treated girls like deviants and boys as the norm, with books such as Carol Gilligan’s (1982), In a Different Voice and Mary Pipher’s (1994) Reviving Ophelia. Part of this focus was a critique of the educational system that seemed more geared toward the benefit of boys. Myra and David Sadker’s (1994) book, Failing at Fairness: How America’s Schools Cheat Girls, as well as a report from the American Association of University Women (1992), generated headlines in the popular press. As these works grew in popularity, a backlash in the form of a recovery effort for boys supposedly wounded by the alleged disproportionate attention given to girls and women during the 1980s and early 1990s began to grow as well. Several anti-feminist pop psychology books on boys’ development became best sellers. Christina Hoff Sommers’ (2000) book, The War Against Boys, and now more recently, Kate O’Beirne’s (2006) book, Women Who Make the World Worse and How Their Radical Feminist
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Assault is Ruining Our Schools, Families, Military, and Sports, accompanied hundreds of books and newspaper and magazine articles published in the United States, Europe, and Australia about the ‘‘boy crisis.’’ Writers cite the disproportionate numbers of women entering and graduating from college compared to men who do so as their evidence of women getting one up on men. Typical newspaper and magazine articles of this type are entitled ‘‘At Colleges, Women Are Leaving Men in the Dust’’ (Lewin, 2006), ‘‘Silence of the Lads’’ (Stark & Ebenkamp, 1999), and ‘‘How Boys Lost Out to Girl Power’’ (Lewin, 1998). According to Mead’s (2006) analysis of National Assessment of Educational Progress data, in primary school, boys’ overall academic achievement is increasing, but girls’ academic achievement is increasing at a faster rate. Girls still outperform boys in reading and writing and boys outperform girls in math and science. Thus, men’s higher education attainment is not declining; it’s increasing, albeit at a slower rate than that of women. Women still earn fewer than half of U.S. doctorates and professional degrees, such as those in law and medicine. Women earn more master’s degrees than men, but these are heavily concentrated in female-stereotyped fields, such as education and psychology. Women’s college degrees are more likely to be for low-paying, low-status occupations such as teaching, and recent women college graduates earn less than men even after controlling for choice of field. Anderson and Accomando (2002) analyzed the literature on the ‘‘boy crisis’’ that claims that girls have myriad advantages over boys. They find that this literature reveals a panic reaction that amounts to center-stealing (Grillo & Wildman, 1997). Center-stealing occurs when members of a privileged group imagine a threat when attention, even temporarily and briefly, is directed away from them and toward members of a marginalized group. Center-stealing occurs when the dominant and privileged group steals back attention from the subordinate group, putting the focus back on the dominant group. While books and articles that focus on how the educational system has been biased against girls assume that it is necessary to redress past wrongs including sexism, discrimination, and exclusion, ‘‘boy crisis’’ authors see the focus on girls as a takeover by girls and women. The ‘‘boy crisis’’ authors assume that the playing field for girls and boys (and men and women) was level before this relatively brief focus on girls, rather than seeing the decades of disadvantage of girls. The brief moment of academic, educational, and popular focus on the inhospitable nature of classrooms for girls and of the workplace for women has been perceived as a conquest by girls and women. This backlash against feminism may account for some of the apparent internal contradiction among those who, while claiming to support egalitarianism, think that feminists have gone too far. Much in the ways that cries of ‘‘reverse racism’’ attract attention, engender fear,
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and draw upon the accumulated confusion and misinformation that surrounds gender and race politics (Anderson, in press), those who are genuinely disenfranchised become the accused, and the oppressors— either actual or symbolic—are both exculpated and their imaginary injuries are nursed and tended publicly. CONCLUSION How do we understand the myth of the man-hating feminist? How do we explain the combined ‘‘pedestalizing’’ and devaluing of women in mass media imagery? Finally, what do we make of the invention of terms such as ‘‘man-hating’’ or ‘‘male bashing?’’ Cataldi (1995) discusses the irony in the use of the term ‘‘male bashing.’’ To bash means to violently strike with a heavy crushing blow. ‘‘Bash’’ connotes an indiscriminate, random, confused and unmotivated lashing out. Bash suggests that the striking of the blow is unfair, undeserved, or prejudiced—similar to how the word ‘‘gay-bashing’’ is used—violently beating someone because of their presumed homosexuality and never used in cases of male violence against women. There is no standardized ‘‘woman bashing.’’ Verbal bashing appears to involve unjustly denouncing the members of a group, people who are innocent victims. As Cataldi reminds us, women (in general) are not bashers, they are bashees. In the United States, one study of more than 5,000 American women college students, found that 28.5 percent had experienced an attempted or completed sexual assault either before or since entering college. One fifth of the college women reported experiencing an attempted or completed sexual assault since entering college (Krebs, Lindquist, Warner, Fisher, & Martin, 2007). One out of every 12 American women will be stalked at some point in their lives, and 87% of the stalkers were men. Four out of five stalking victims were women (U.S. Department of Justice, 2006). Why aren’t physical assaults on women characterized as ‘‘female bashing?’’ Cataldi (1995) argues that conjuring up images of abused men bashed by women and casting women in the role of bashers reverses what actually happens. This table turning can then operate, perniciously, as a form of victim-blaming and as a means of exaggerating the severity of any harm done to men who are, supposedly verbally bashed by women. Another function of co-opting the expression ‘‘male-bashing’’ and its brutality, is to lead us into thinking that the ‘‘male bashing’’ women supposedly engage in is equivalent to what men do to women. Those who use the expression may also be attempting to siphon attention and support away from women and from those who are physically harmed by men. In designating feminists as ‘‘male-bashers’’ focus is shifted entirely from the system, from the institutions, from the mechanisms that create, reify, and perpetuate oppressive structures, including sexism, heterosexism, misogyny, and homophobia.
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On the very social bruises where attention should focus on the epidemic problem of men’s violence against women, we find instead media attention proclaiming that there is a war on boys and that there is an epidemic of male-bashing. Instead of social and educational programs, we have unsupportable claims that feminism brings with it man-hating. The feminist critique of gender-based social inequality may be disconcerting to men and some women; it might hurt feelings, it might seem unfair, and it might seem to disregard men’s good intentions. It certainly does problematize and complicate the privileges that accrue to men in patriarchy. Although these challenges and their results make men—and doubtless many women—feel resistant and uneasy, these challenges do not constitute male bashing. Feminists are not critical of men simply for being men. A feminist social critique targets systems of gender-based inequality and their connections to other forms of oppression based on sexuality, class, and race. The stronger women become, the more gains they make, the more pernicious are the representations of ‘‘the feminist.’’ A living and vivid image in many domains in mass media, there appears to be no real-life support for such fears. Indeed, given the goals and values central to feminism, it is anti-feminists rather than feminists who harbor and express hostility toward men in a patriarchal society. REFERENCES Alexander, S., & Ryan, M. (1997). Social constructs of feminism: A study of undergraduates at a women’s college. College Student Journal, 31, 555–567. American Association of University Women. (1992). The AAUW report: How schools shortchange girls. Washington, DC: The American Association of University Women Educational Foundation. Anderson, K. J. (in press). Benign bigotry: The psychology of subtle prejudice. New York: Cambridge University Press. Anderson, K. J., & Accomando, C. (2002). ‘‘Real’’ boys? Manufacturing masculinity and erasing privilege in popular books on raising boys. Feminism & Psychology, 12, 491–516. Anderson, K. J., Kanner, M., & Elsayegh, N. (2009). Are feminists man-haters? Feminists’ and nonfeminists’ attitudes toward men. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 33, 216–224. Aronson, P. (2003). Feminists or ‘‘postfeminists’’? Young women’s attitudes toward feminism and gender relations. Gender & Society, 17, 903–922. Barreto, M., & Ellemers, N. (2005). The burden of benevolent sexism: How it contributes to the maintenance of gender inequalities. European Journal of Social Psychology, 35, 633–642. Bishaw, A., & Stern, S. (2006, June 15). Evaluation of poverty estimates: A comparison of the American Community Survey and the Current Population Survey. Washinton, DC: Poverty and Health Statistics Branch, Housing and Household Economic Statistics Division, U.S. Census Bureau.
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Bullock, H. E., & Fernald, J. L. (2003). ‘‘Feminism lite?’’ Feminist identification, speaker appearance, and perceptions of feminist and antifeminist messengers. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 27, 291–299. Cataldi, S. L. (1995). Reflections on ‘‘male bashing.’’ NWSA Journal, 7, 76–85. Center for American Women and Politics. (2008). Women in the U.S. Congress 2008. New Brunswick, NJ: Eagleton Institute of Politics. Corbett, K. M. (1997, November). Lesbian-baiting: A threat to all military women. Lesbian News, 23, 16–17. Eagly, A. H., & Mladinic, A. (1994). Are people prejudiced against women? Some answers from research on attitudes, gender stereotypes and judgments of competence. In W. Stroebe & M. Hewstone (Eds.), European review of social psychology (Vol. 5, pp. 1–35). New York: Wiley. Farrell, W. (1993). The myth of male power: Why men are the disposable sex. New York: Berkley Books. Fiske, S. T., Cuddy, A. J. C., Glick, P., & Xu, J. (2002). A model of (often mixed) stereotype content: Competence and warmth respectively follow from perceived status and competition. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82, 878–902. Ganahl, D. J., Prinsen, T. J., & Netzley, S. B. (2003). A content analysis of prime time commercials: A contextual framework of gender representation. Sex Roles, 49, 545–551. Gilligan, C. (1982). In a different voice: Psychological theory and women’s development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Glascock, J., & Preston-Schreck, C. (2004, October). Gender and racial stereotypes in daily newspaper comics: A time-honored tradition? Sex Roles, 51, 423–431. Glick, P., & Fiske, S. T. (1997). Hostile and benevolent sexism: Measuring ambivalent sexist attitudes toward women. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 21, 119–135. Glick, P., & Fiske, S. T. (1999). The Ambivalence toward Men Inventory: Differentiating hostile and benevolent beliefs about men. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 23, 519–536. Glick, P., & Fiske, S. T. (2001). An ambivalent alliance: Hostile and benevolent sexism as complementary justifications for gender inequality. American Psychologist, 56, 109–118. Glick, P., Lameiras, M., Fiske, S. T., Eckes, T., Masser, B., Volpato, C., et al. (2004). Bad but bold: Ambivalent attitudes toward men predict gender inequality in 16 nations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 86, 713–728. Glick, P., Sakalli-Ugurlu, N., Ferreira, M. C., & de Souza, M. A. (2002). Ambivalent sexism and attitudes toward wife abuse in Turkey and Brazil. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 26, 292–297. Grant, A. (2000). And still, the lesbian threat: Or, how to keep a good woman a woman. Journal of Lesbian Studies, 4, 61–80. Grillo, T., & Wildman, S. M. (1997). Obscuring the importance of race: The implication of making comparisons between racism and sexism (or other isms). In A. K. Wing (Ed.), Critical race feminism: A reader (pp. 44–51). New York: NYU Press.
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Haddock, G., & Zanna, M. P. (1994). Preferring ‘‘housewives’’ to ‘‘feminists’’: Categorization and the favorability of attitudes toward women. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 18, 25–52. Heard, A. (1989, August). Stop blaming men for everything! Mademoiselle, 183, 232, 234. Heckard, I. R. (1998, January/February). Male bashing: Is it trash talk or harmless humor? Today’s Christian Woman, 20, 46–48. Heilman, M. E., Wallen, A. S., Fuchs, D., & Tamkins, M. M. (2004). Penalties for success: Reactions to women who succeed at male gender-typed tasks. Journal of Applied Psychology, 89, 416–427. hooks, b. (2000). Feminism is for everybody. Cambridge, MA: South End Press. Iazzo, A. N. (1983). The construction and validation of Attitudes toward Men Scale. The Psychological Record, 33, 371–378. Jost, J. T., & Kay, A. C. (2005). Exposure to benevolent sexism and complementary gender stereotypes: Consequences for specific and diffuse forms of system justification. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 88, 498–509. Kane, E. W. (2000). Racial and ethnic variations in gender-related attitudes. Annual Review of Sociology, 26, 419–439. Krebs, C. P., Lindquist, C. H., Warner, T. D., Fisher, B. S., & Martin, S. L. (2007, December). The campus sexual assault (CSA) study: Final report. Prepared for National Institute of Justice. (NIJ Grant No. 2004-wg-bx-0010). Lauzen, M. M., & Dozier, D. M. (2005). Maintaining the double standard: Portrayals of age and gender in popular films. Sex Roles, 52, 437–446. Lego, S. (1999). Monicagate and male bashing. Perspectives in Psychiatric Care, 35, 3–4. Lewin, T. (1998, December 13). How boys lost out to girl power. New York Times, 148, Section 4, p. 3. Lewin, T. (2006, July 9). At colleges, women are leaving men in the dust. The New York Times. Retrieved July 11, 2006, from http://www.nytimes.com/ 2006/07/09/education/09college.html. Liss, M., Hoffner, C., & Crawford, M. (2000). What do feminists believe? Psychology of Women Quarterly, 24, 279–284. Liss, M., O’Connor, C., Morosky, E., & Crawford, M. (2001). What makes a feminist? Predictors and correlates of feminist social identity in college women. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 25, 124–133. Maltby, J., & Day, L. (2001). Psychological correlates of attitudes toward men. The Journal of Psychology, 135, 335–351. Mansfield, H. C. (2006). Manliness. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Markey, J. (1993, May). Male-bashing. Redbook, 181, 104–108. Mead, S. (2006, June). The truth about boys and girls. Retrieved February 12, 2008, from http://www.educationsector.org/analysis/analysis_show.htm? doc_id=378705. Morrow, L. (1994, February 14). Men: Are they really that bad? Time, 143, 53–59. Moya, M., Glick, P., Exp osito, F., de Lemus, S., & Hart, J. (2007). It’s for your own good: Benevolent sexism and women’s reactions to protectively justified restrictions. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 33, 1421–1434. Myaskovsky, L., & Wittig, M. A. (1997). Predictors of feminist social identity among college women. Sex Roles, 37, 861–883.
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O’Beirne, K. (2006). Women who make the world worse. New York: Sentinel. Pipher, M. B. (1994). Reviving Ophelia: Saving the selves of adolescent girls. New York: Ballantine Books. Robertson letter attacks feminists. (1992, August 26). The New York Times. Retrieved February 19, 2008, from http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage. html?res=9E0CE7DC1430F935A1575BC0A964958260&scp=1&sq=robertsonþ letterþattacks&st=nyt. Rudman, L. A., & Goodwin, S. A. (2004). Gender differences in automatic ingroup bias: Why do women like women more than men like men? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87, 494–509. Sadker, M., & Sadker, D. (1994). Failing at fairness: How America’s schools cheat girls. New York: C. Scribner’s Sons. Screen Actors Guild. (2005, October 5). TV performers again take hit from reality programming. Retrieved May 13, 2009, from http://www.sag.org/ content/tv-performers-again-take-hit-from-reality-programming. Seidman, S. A. (1999). Revisiting sex-role stereotyping in MTV videos. International Journal of Instructional Media, 26, 11. Sommers, C. H. (2000). The war against boys. New York: Simon & Schuster. Stark, M., & Ebenkamp, B. (1999). The silence of the lads. Brandweek, 40, 22–23. Stephan, C. W., Stephan, W. G., Demitrakis, K. M., Yamada, A. M., & Clason, D. L. (2000). Women’s attitudes toward men: An integrated threat theory approach. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 24, 63–73. U.S. Department of Justice. (2006). Report to congress on stalking and domestic violence, 2005 through 2006. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice Office on Violence Against Women. U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2005, May 13). Women in the labor force: A databook. Retrieved May 15, 2007, from www.bls.gov/cps/ wlf-table17-2005.pdf. Valian, V. (1998). Why so slow? The advancement of women. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Viki, G. T., Abrams, D., & Masser, B. (2004). Evaluating stranger and acquaintance rape: The role of benevolent sexism in perpetrator blame and recommended sentence length. Law and Human Behavior, 28, 295–303. Viki, G. T., Chiroro, P., & Abrams, D. (2006). Hostile sexism, type of rape, and self-reported rape proclivity within a sample of Zimbabwean males. Violence Against Women, 12, 789–800. Yoder, J. D., Fischer, A. R., Kahn, A. S., & Groden, J. (2007). Changes in students’ explanations for gender differences after taking a psychology of women class: More constructionist and less essentialist. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 31, 415–425.
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Chapter 2
Gender Differences: The Arguments Regarding Abilities Jennifer L. Martin
Women have made significant social, academic, and occupational gains in the past 50 years; for example, women are entering nontraditional fields with more frequency, participating in high school and college sports more than ever before, and carving out more egalitarian roles for themselves within the family. However, women have still not ultimately achieved true equity with their male counterparts for a variety of reasons, one of which stems from the self-fulfilling prophecy (or the power of expectation). The idea that women somehow possess different or inferior aptitudes when compared to their male counterparts can lead to diminished expectations for women—in terms of how they view themselves and how others view them (Martin, 2008). The conception that women’s lacuna in achievement is somehow natural and related to ability is perpetuated in the popular media and in academic scholarship. For example, in January 2005, Harvard president, Lawrence Summers, suggested that ‘‘innate ability’’ might explain why there are so few women in the highest levels of science, technology, and engineering positions in academia (Bombardieri, 2005). Researchers examined standardized test scores and compared the numbers of women in mathematics and science courses and occupations to those of men to justify gender-based differences in intellectual ability. However, there are many scholars and activists who insist that gender differences in achievement are based on cultural factors such as gender socialization—and that numbers alone do not tell the whole story about women’s abilities. It appears that the nature versus nurture debate is still alive and well—both in the popular press as well as in academe.
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Gender stereotyping has much to do with this debate, for it can lead to gender discrimination; it can also create low expectations for the stereotyped. When people have low expectations for women attempting to enter a nontraditional field, for example, they may be less likely to hire them based upon said stereotypes. Negative stereotypes based upon gender can also lead to diminished expectations, which can affect people on an individual level: where people expect little for themselves and live up to that expectation. When expectations are low, so too is achievement; thus negative self-fulfilling prophecies are perpetuated. No matter what the cause, gender discrimination is still a major problem for girls in schools and for women in the workplace and in academe (Carr, Szalacha, Barnett, Caswell, & Inui, 2003). In order to be successful, girls and women have to overcome more obstacles in a variety of different areas simply by virtue of their gender. This fact is often compounded by racial, socioeconomic, and heterosexist biases as well. Despite the fact that, according to Lorber, ‘‘. . . gender, like culture, is a human production that depends on everyone constantly ‘doing gender’ ’’ (1994, p. 13, as cited in Lueptow, Garovich-Szabo, & Lueptow, 2001, p. 3), people do not generally view gender as a construction. Many view gender as a ‘‘naturally’’ occurring phenomenon where behavioral roles are determined on the basis of biology and are thus unchangeable. Gender socialization theory posits that gender differences in academic and career choices stem from stereotypes—which are handed down via socialization (Konrad, Yang, Goldberg, & Sullivan, 2005). Women and men unknowingly accept traditional norms, values, expectations, roles, as ‘‘normal,’’ natural, and ‘‘their own’’ (Konrad et al., 2005; Martin, 2008). Adherence to such norms is reinforced by the culture; those who deviate from proscribed behaviors are punished by isolation, social and workplace exclusion, ridicule, etc. Because masculine and feminine stereotypes are still enforced for males and females, often boys and men gravitate toward academic areas and careers that relate to or represent the masculine role. The same is true for girls and women (Konrad et al., 2005). Such stereotypes are bound to have an effect on girls’ and women’s perceptions of themselves and on what they are capable of achieving. In sum, sociocultural influences play a large part in supposed gender ‘‘differences’’ (Whiston & Bouwkamp, 2003). The extent to which people challenge such norms has much to do with individual expectation and future individual success. Although feminist educators are working to alleviate the effect of gender stereotypes through education and to lobby for more egalitarian treatment of girls and boys within the family, the schools, and in the workplace, these cultural traditions and their effects still persist. Perhaps the most telling facet of women’s success in the workplace, or lack thereof, is this psychological precept: observers perceive that the abilities, attributes, and personality factors that enable a person to
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succeed in a particular activity are somehow ‘‘natural’’ to that person (or group of people) (Eagly & Steffen, 1984). Thus, when women are absent from certain fields or from positions of power, society deems it to be a natural problem with women, that something within them is missing that would enable them to hold said positions. The issue here is not necessarily inherent ability, but the perception of ability (or lack thereof). The socialization of girls influences gender differentiation in personality characteristics and values. For example, girls are often socialized to believe that when they become women, they should place other things ahead of their own career advancement, such as home and family. Even if women do not hold these values as primary, they are often perceived as holding these values by the corporation; corporate managers do not promote people to positions of power who do not hold career as their main priority. To complicate this situation, women who do not hold these ‘‘traditionally feminine realms’’ sacred, as society deems they should, may be harshly judged by this ‘‘failure of femininity.’’ Women are still, to a certain extent, expected to value children and taking care of the home and family as a priority; women who deviate from this convention are often viewed with judgment and derision. Kirchmeyer (2002) argues that gender roles are malleable. Although gender socialization contributes to one’s personality and dictates how many people ‘‘perform gender’’ for life, people’s perceptions of their gender or the expectations for their gender can be changed or altered throughout the life cycle. Kirchmeyer (2002) argues that gender has more to do with career choices than biological sex. Thus, gender role socialization is a greater predictor of career choice than is biological sex. According to Goodman, Fields, and Blum (2003), women and men possess similar career aspirations and values, which suggests that women experience barriers to workplace advancement to explain their lack of prominence in positions of power. The research suggests that women have not achieved workplace equity, in terms of pay and in terms of position, in part because of the expectations for their gender. In short, narrow and limiting gender role expectations still exist and still negatively affect women. In fact, the essentializing of the sexes, or holding differential expectations for women and men that are based solely on biological sex, can be dangerous and limiting for both women and men. Kerka (1993) also cautions against the ‘‘essentialization’’ of women and men. Some researchers (Gilligan, 1982) have called for a separate approach to viewing women, that women have ‘‘different ways of knowing.’’ Kerka warns that focusing on the differences, as opposed to the similarities, between women and men can have serious negative effects. Instead, validating a variety of types of thinking may assist in different perspectives being valued as opposed to one. Women are socialized to focus on relationships and intimacy; because of this, women’s careers often do not follow a traditional or linear pattern (as is common in men) (Kerka, 1993).
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Workplace stereotypes often hinder women’s advancement (Crampton & Mishra, 1999): Women are thought to be weaker than men; women are thought to lack commitment to their employment, for they may leave to have or rear children. It is assumed that women cannot work long hours because of household responsibilities; women are thought to lack judgment in making difficult decisions or in high-stress situations. The prevailing feminine stereotypes promote the prototype of woman as nurturing, soft, caring, emotional, and communal. Midgley and Abrams (1974) indicate that societal expectations and stereotypes have had negative effects on women’s motivation. Women must fight these stereotypes in order to compete and succeed. Gender schema theory argues that perceptions develop regarding gender based upon the information we receive from a variety of areas. As Bem (1983) states, ‘‘Adults in the child’s world rarely notice or remark upon how strong a little girl is or how nurturant a little boy is becoming, despite their readiness to note precisely these attributes in the ‘appropriate sex’ ’’ (p. 604). For today’s girls and boys, such schema can have negative effects on social and academic development and on eventual career choices and advancement. In the early 1980s, a series of articles was published by Benbow and Stanley (1980, 1982) that attributed the gender differences between boys and girls on the mathematical portion of standardized tests to biological causes (Jacklin, 1989). The popular media then publicized these ‘‘findings.’’ The effect of these studies and the subsequent communication of them resulted in the support of the already popular myth that males possess superior abilities in mathematics. As Jacklin indicates, although these authors reported a biological explanation for gender differences, they possessed no biological data. During this time, another larger-scale study conducted by Eccles and Jacobs (1986) found that math anxiety, stereotypical beliefs of parents with regard to gender, and the perception of the value of math account for gender differences in mathematical achievement. According to Jacklin, ‘‘. . . Eccles and her colleagues have found that most strongly related to their mothers’ beliefs concerning the difficulty of mathematics for their children. Mothers’ beliefs were also important in that they directly and strongly influenced their children’s math anxiety’’ (p. 127). Despite the results of this study, the overwhelming impact of the initial communication of innate differences between the sexes in the press had long lasting and far-reaching effects. This media campaign had a direct impact on parental perceptions, which further caused more gender-based stereotypes regarding math abilities of children. As Jacklin (1989) states, ‘‘As mothers came to believe that mathematics was much more difficult for girls than boys, their daughters become less likely to take additional math courses’’ (p. 128). Linn and Petersen (1985, 1986) found that there is no ‘‘consistent pattern’’ of gender difference regarding mathematics, science, and
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spatial reasoning. In essence, cognitive differences based upon gender have been reduced in the past few decades (Jacklin, 1989). In 1988, Feingold analyzed findings of the Differential Aptitude Tests (DAT) in terms of gender and found that the performance advantage of males on the spatial measures and the performance advantage of females on the language measures decreased between the years of 1947 to 1980. Rosenthal and Ruben (1982) also studied this phenomenon, but could not find a reason for it: ‘‘. . . we can say that, whatever the reason, in these studies females appear to be gaining in cognitive skill relative to males rather faster than the gene can travel!’’ (p. 711). Thus, it would seem, nature, or biology alone, cannot answer the question of whether or not gender differences exist with regard to academic ability. One possible reason for the narrowing of the gender gap in math and science is the attempt to make standardized tests less gender biased. It is imperative that test developers create culturally responsible assessments so that they are fair and equitable to all who take them. According to Kaminski, Shafer, Neumann, and Ramos (2005), ‘‘Examination of a measure’s underlying factor structure and its stability across different ethnic groups is one important step in legitimizing the widespread use of any given measure. Failure to attend to such ethnic/cultural considerations could not only have a negative impact on assessment and therapy but also violate ethical standards’’ (p. 322). In short, certain groups have historically had an advantage to perform well on standardized tests, which has served to perpetuate society’s status quo. When examining standardized test results, oftentimes gender differences appear when data are disaggregated. For example, in general, girls tend to outperform boys in terms of grades in the early elementary years, but boys outperform girls on novel tasks (Robinson, Abbott, Berninger, & Bussee, 1996). However, by high school, boys outperform girls. Most studies on gender indicate that males outperform females on mathematical, logical, and spatial abilities (Rammstedt & Rammsayer, 2002). Males are more likely than females to score higher on measures of science and mathematics; females tend to score higher on measures of reading comprehension (O’Reilly & McNamara, 2007). The largest gender differences exist in the area of visual-spatial abilities. According to Linn and Petersen (1986), such differences can be measured around the ages of eight or nine; these increase at the age of 18 and continue throughout the life cycle. Halpern (1989) argues that gender differences in cognitive abilities still exist and that studies suggesting the gap is decreasing are faulty. However, numbers alone cannot adequately describe the range of human experiences that contribute to such seemingly gender-based content area differences on standardized tests. To give a strictly biological explanation for these differences is simplistic at best. There are a variety of factors at play here. For example, boys are overrepresented in high school advanced math courses
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(Robinson et al., 1996), which may affect their performance on standardized tests; girls’ underrepresentation in the same courses also contributes to the explanation of the achievement gap of girls. Despite the fact that girls’ achievement in mathematics has improved in recent years, girls’ perceptions of their math achievement remain dysfunctional (Preckel, Goetz, Pekrun, & Kleine, 2008). This is also true of girls who are gifted in science. As Preckel et al. (2008) indicate, ‘‘In the general population, fewer women than men chose academic courses or careers in mathematics, the inorganic sciences, and engineering. This also holds true for women of high scientific ability. Research has further documented that the underrepresentation of women in these fields grows with increasing scientific ability’’ (p. 147). Gender differences in math and science have much to do with the expectations of future success and perceptions of competence (again the self-fulfilling prophecy). Parents’ expectations do much to influence their children’s perceptions along these lines (Preckel et al., 2008). Girls feel they have to work harder to achieve success in math, and they show less confidence in their abilities (Preckel et al., 2008). In sum, stereotypical gender role expectations on the part of the individual, in conjunction with the expectations of parents and teachers, work to shape achievement-oriented motivations, which influence development (Preckel et al., 2008). This can have negative consequences for girls in mathematics and science courses. In addition, female students tend to rate their competence levels in mathematics lower than their male counterparts (Preckel et al., 2008). The corresponding stereotype that still persists is that girls are better at reading and writing; this expectation can obviously do much to hinder boys in these areas. Beginning at an early age, boys possess a higher level of general self-esteem than do girls (Hergovich, Sirch, & Felinger, 2004). Moreover, boys have been found to possess higher self-concepts in the area of mathematics, whereas girls possess higher self-concepts in language (Hergovich et al., 2004). Furthermore, males tend to be more likely than females to suffer from reading disabilities (O’Reilly & McNamara, 2007). Females tend to use overt study strategies more often than males and have higher grade point averages (GPAs) (O’Reilly & McNamara, 2007). Reasons for gender difference include gender-stereotyped socialization (Hergovich et al., 2004). According to O’Reilly & McNamara (2007), ‘‘. . . we also recommend addressing gender differences by working together with teachers and parents to reduce stereotypical attitudes and behaviors that support gender differences. This is important because research has shown that gender differences are supported by socialization. For example, recent work has shown that mothers engage in more science talk with boys than they do with girls . . . and teachers are often more responsive with boys than girls’’ (pp. 187–188). In short, self-perceptions are often not only echoed by others, but also
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influenced by them, e.g., by parents and teachers. For example, according to Hergovich et al. (2004), ‘‘Parents especially tend to judge their children in a gender-stereotypical way, so that boys are rated better in the areas of mathematics and sports and girls are rated better in verbal areas’’ (p. 208). Even if performance rates do not accord with these perceptions, sons are still rated higher than daughters. Research indicates that expectation has much to do with academic achievement. To illustrate this point, males estimate their general intelligence higher than do females (Rammstedt & Rammsayer, 2002). Beloff (1992) found self-estimates to be related to gender stereotypes. According to Rammstedt and Rammsayer (2002), ‘‘Such gender stereotypes may be based on minor though true gender differences that become overpronounced by ignoring intragender differences and, concomitantly, by focusing on the intergender bias’’ (p. 276). Thus, the story becomes: there are biological differences based upon gender which explain academic differences. Historically, this has been demonstrated on standardized assessments and it was seen as natural. Now we see that there can be cultural and sociological factors that contribute to such explanations. Geary (1989) argues that the explanation for gender differences in academics is not biological, but cultural: specifically, that culture can influence the development of cognitive skills. However, this cultural explanation (that the experiences of males and females are becoming increasingly similar over time) does not account for the complexity of this phenomenon. In other words, Geary argues that there is more to this than simply the effect of culture on humans. Hormones and anatomy still play a part in cognitive development, which may influence choice, which then may further influence male advantage in certain areas. According to Geary: Culture, however, may attenuate or exaggerate these early biologyrelated behavioral gender differences by directing the focus of the experiences of male and female individuals to be more or less similar, which would thereby influence the pattern of gender-related abilities. Within this model, the male performance advantage on measures of spatial ability would be related to prenatal hormonal factors, but the magnitude of this advantage would not be immutable and in fact could vary across generations and across cultures. (p. 1155)
If this is in fact the case, then, as Geary argues, as females and males continue to engage in increasingly similar activities, gender differences in terms of cognitive abilities may cease to exist. Also, as Geary argues, these experiential differences may interact with hormonal differences, which may further lessen gender differences. In short, biology and human development are not immutable. For example, as Geary states, ‘‘. . . the distribution of these early sex-dimorphic behaviors might be
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continuous with later patterns of adolescent special-related activities which, in turn, could contribute to gender, and individual, performance differences on measures of spatial ability’’ (p. 1156). Jacklin (1989) argues that the negative effects of the media coverage on the continued superiority of males in math should be proactively combated in schools. Interventions should be created that address negative stereotypes on behalf of students, parents, and teachers. Much work has been done in this regard (see Sadker & Sadker, 1994) such that there is currently a backlash against interventions for girls. The media now suggests that the extra time and resources used to increase achievement for girls in math and science has had a negative effect on boys. In 2005, Laura Bush announced that her new focus would be ‘‘the problem of boys’’ (2006, Newsweek). The popular media (via the New Republic, Esquire, Newsweek, the Today show, etc.) presented the case that at every level of education, America’s boys are falling behind in academic achievement, graduating from high school at lower rates than girls, attending college less frequently than girls, and exhibiting poorer verbal skills (Mead, 2006). Single-sex classrooms and schools are opening nationwide to address this crisis by redirecting educational efforts (and funding) to the nation’s boys. Feminists and Title IX are often blamed for this new ‘‘boy crisis’’ (see, for example, Christina Hoff Summer’s The War against Boys: How Misguided Feminism is Harming our Young Men); when, in fact, opponents of Title IX have created and perpetuated the myth that expanded educational opportunities for girls have somehow come at the expense of boys. However, this is a gross oversimplification. This is the very nature of backlash: to minimize or erase the real gains that girls have made by perpetuating a myth that America’s boys are in crisis, in large part, because of the attention paid to America’s girls. However, when one truly examines the data, the test scores, in elementary school girls do as well or better in math than boys. There is a gap in middle school that widens greatly between girls and boys in high school (Mead, 2006). In fact, in terms of overall academic achievement, attainment for boys is higher than ever (Mead, 2006). According to the American Association of University Women (AAUW) (2008) ‘‘Educational achievement is not a zero-sum game, in which a gain for one group results in a corresponding loss for the other. If girls’ success comes at the expense of boys, one would expect to see boys’ scores decline as girls’ scores rise, but this has not been the case’’ (p. 2). This gap also translates to higher education. For example, in Ivy League schools, men still outnumber women (Rivers & Barnett, 2006). The truth is that the real crisis is a crisis of poverty: 76 percent of students in middle- to higher-income areas graduate from high school, compared to 56 percent of students from lower-income areas (Swanson, 2004). The truth is that there are more differences within the sexes than
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between: boys are more different from each another than they are from their female counterparts (Mead, 2006). The true test of equity in America is the wage gap, which still disproportionately affects women negatively (women earn .77 to a dollar earned by a man) and is a telling example of just what kind of crisis we are still experiencing (Institute for Women’s Policy Research, 2008). The data suggest that boys have made progress in most academic areas, but girls have made improvements faster in certain areas, such as math, science, and geography. Consequently, girls have narrowed some academic achievement gaps, creating the fear that boys are in crisis (Mead, 2006). The idea that girls are surpassing their male counterparts in certain academic areas (although they are still behind in others) seems hard for many to accept. Instead, many blame feminism for ‘‘shortchanging boys.’’ According to some critics, feminists have advocated for allotting monetary resources on girls (at the expense of boys) and demonized typical male behavior. Perhaps the conversation about gender and achievement should shift to one that is not based upon one group at the expense of another, but on interventions that are necessary at all levels; scholars and advocates should be able to discuss boys and achievement without unfairly undermining the gains girls have made. When disaggregating data for race and class, white suburban boys are not significantly affected by this ‘‘crisis.’’ Again, the privileged perform well on standardized assessment, and thus the status quo is maintained. The boys who truly need academic interventions are many rural and inner-city boys. Despite all of the attention in the popular press about boys in crisis, the fact remains that academic faculties in U.S. institutions, especially in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) areas, are still predominantly male (Spelke, 2005). Popular belief suggests that this is the case because first, women are less talented in these fields; and, second, this gender difference has a genetic explanation (dealing with intrinsic aptitude). According to Spelke (2005), males possess greater variability in their inherent talent in mathematics, and thus, they predominate in professions such as mathematician and scientist: that a genetic predisposition to learn about particular, gender-specific, things exists. Females have made gains in these areas, largely because of Title IX. For example, the gender gap has closed with regard to enrollment in calculus courses (Spelke, 2005), and in 2000, women received 47 percent of the bachelor’s degrees awarded in mathematics (Spelke, 2005). According to Spelke (2005), men do not possess greater intrinsic aptitude in mathematics and science, ‘‘Although older boys and girls show somewhat different cognitive profiles, the differences are complex and subtle (it is not the case, e.g., that women are verbal and men are spatial)’’ (p. 956). Spelke argues that such differences are caused by
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strategy choices. In terms of both average and gifted students, high school boys and girls do equally well in math classes. Title IX has done much to increase girls’ visibility in traditionally male dominated areas: such as math, science, and sports. Such male dominated domains have also, it has been argued by many, been due largely to differential, innate, differences between women and men. Prior to the 1970s, the career and technical education system in the United States intentionally segregated students by sex. Soon after Title IX passed, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) and high school administrators argued that boys’ sports would suffer if girls’ sports had to be funded equally. Since the enforcement of Title IX, girls’ participation and achievement in math and science have increased substantially, discrimination against pregnant girls and teachers has decreased, vocational schools and classes have been opened to both sexes, sexual harassment in schools is now illegal, and girls’ participation in sports has exponentially increased (National Coalition for Women and Girls in Education, 2008). Since the passage of Title IX, women’s high school participation in sports has increased by 904 percent (from 294,015 in 1971–1972 to 2,953,355 in 2005–2006). Men’s high school sports participation has increased by 15 percent (from 3,666,917 in 1971–1972 to 4,206,549 in 2005–2006) (National Coalition for Women and Girls in Education, 2008). At the college level, women’s sports participation has increased by 456 percent since the passage of Title IX (from 29,977 in 1971–1972 to 166,728 in 2004–2005). Men’s sports participation since the passage of Title IX has increased by 31 percent (from 170,384 in 1971–1972 to 222,838 in 2004–2005) (National Coalition for Women and Girls in Education, 2008). Thus, Title IX has not caused a decrease by male sports participation at either the high school or the college level. According to the National Women’s Law Center (July 2008) there are many positive effects of sports participation for girls: it increases confidence, self-esteem, and promotes pride in girls’ physical and social selves. Sports participation can also reduce the likelihood of drug use and teenage pregnancy, increase graduation rates, and decrease depression. Female student athletes are more likely to have higher grades and are less likely to drop out of school; they also have higher graduation rates than their nonathletic peers. Because of Title IX, the gender gap at all grade levels has decreased significantly since 1970 on standardized assessments in science and math. The percentage of women obtaining bachelor’s degrees in natural sciences and engineering has more than doubled. The percentage of women obtaining doctoral degrees in these same fields has more than quadrupled. However, women still only earn 20 to 25 percent of the degrees awarded in physics, computer sciences, and engineering. In addition, the culture of STEM fields remains male dominated and still isolates and excludes girls and women.
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Again, despite the attention in the popular press that girls and women are outperforming boys and men in a variety of areas, there is still much work to be done. For example, women comprise 79 percent of public school teachers, but only 44 percent of the principals. Women represent less than one in five faculty members in STEM fields. In engineering in particular, women account for just over one in ten faculty members. Women are 49 percent of all part-time academic employees at the college level, but hold only 39 percent of full-time academic jobs. The salaries of women K–12 teachers in 1973 were 84 percent of male teachers’ salaries. The discrepancy in female and male teacher earnings is smaller than the national average for all working women in 57 percent in 1973 and 77 percent in 2006. In institutions of higher education, overall wages for women faculty have remained at approximately 81 percent of men’s earnings since the late 1970s (National Coalition for Women and Girls in Education, 2008). Many inequities still exist because of a lack of understanding and implementation of the law. Title IX is often poorly understood and poorly implemented by educators, parents, and students. For example, relatively few education agencies comply with the Title IX regulation to appoint, train, and make available their Title IX coordinators. Parents and community members can help this problem locally, by calling their local school districts and asking about Title IX coordinators, state-wide by contacting their congress members in order to put pressure on school districts to comply with these regulations. Specifically, every recipient of federal funding (under Title IX) must designate and adequately train at least one Title IX coordinator. Prior to Title IX, many educators and counselors accepted the stereotype that girls could not achieve in STEM subjects. Unfortunately, these stereotypes still exist, as illustrated by the comments of Lawrence Summers, which were discussed at the beginning of this chapter, for example. Despite the perpetuation of these stereotypes by some, significant progress has been made by women in many nontraditional areas, dispelling the myth that academic ability has inherently something to do with one’s gender. However, there is still much more work to be done. Unfortunately, girls still comprise approximately 90 percent of students enrolled in classes, which will lead to traditionally female occupations and only 15 percent of classes in traditionally male fields (National Coalition for Women and Girls in Education, 2008). There are many factors that contribute to this occurrence: the perpetuation of gender stereotypes being one. Other factors, which may stem from the adoption of or adherence to said stereotypes is a distinct possibility; for example, biased career counseling, discriminatory treatment by teachers, sexual harassment, and other sexist practices, can result in limited educational opportunities for girls and women. This translates to significant negative consequences for women’s current and eventual
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economic security. Despite gains in educational equity, there is still a backlash against Title IX. Some opponents to Title IX insist that the law has led to diminished opportunities for men, contrary to the evidence. Opportunities for men in sports have expanded since the passage of Title IX, and continue to do so—with regard to both numbers of participating athletes and numbers of teams (National Coalition for Women and Girls in Education, 2008). Finally, Title IX has also been blamed for inspiring ‘‘feminized’’ curricula and learning environments that disadvantage boys. Proposals for improving classroom settings for boys’ learning have included recommendations for sex-stereotyped curricula, and for single-sex schools. Title IX compliance has, by and large, been driven by lawsuits and threats of lawsuits. Although the law states that schools in violation of Title IX will lose their federal funding, since the passage of Title IX in 1972 no school has ever lost federal funding for failing to comply with the law. POTENTIAL SOLUTIONS The debate between socialization and essentialism is still alive in the minds of Americans and in the pages of academic journals and popular magazines. Yet it seems that, all in all, more differences in abilities exist within the sexes than between them. The gap that women face in earnings and the lower numbers of women in positions of power within organizations and in certain male dominated fields cannot be explained away by ‘‘innate’’ differences based upon sex. These differentials have more to do with expectation, discrimination, family structure (child care issues and the division of labor at home), and lack of mentoring. Women in general face more obstacles to career success and advancement in terms of pay and position than do men. However, this does not mean that women are helpless victims. Women have more agency than this; they can demonstrate this by creating positive selffulfilling prophecies for themselves, and participating in the creation of better realities. Women must often fight against how they were raised, and how society views them. Confidence, or the belief in one’s ability to succeed, is often associated with privilege. Men working in traditionally male fields possess privilege and have access to the organizational norms and practices that are often not made explicit to ‘‘outsiders.’’ Women face unique experiences such as this that can interfere with career motivation, performance, and success. In short, a high confidence level is a necessary attribute when individuals are the minority in certain fields (such as women in the STEM areas). Women working in nontraditional fields are, oftentimes, already at a disadvantage because they may not be
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privy to implicit norms and informal networks within the organization. Confidence is a good way to inspire competence and can lead to the breaking down of stereotypes that still may be held within the organization. There are many things that women can do to heighten their career success and thus contribute to the breaking down of stereotypes that perpetuate the myth that women are somehow naturally less capable in certain areas; men can also assist in the successful implementation of these suggestions. It should not be assumed that, in a heterosexual nuclear family, the man’s career should dictate the behavior of others in the household. The division of labor and care of children should be based on the needs of all parties involved within the family. If women have supportive partners who are true partners in the home, then they will have a greater chance of achieving workplace success (Martin, 2008). Women must work to value themselves, have high expectations for themselves (Noonan, Gallor, & Hensler-McGinnis, 2004), and be proactive in managing their own careers. Women must develop an internal locus of control (Midgley & Abrams, 1974) by attributing one’s successes to one’s own abilities, and not to mere luck. This is a key to achieving and maintaining career confidence. Other integral areas that must be rectified in order for gender equity to occur are the establishment of progressive gender role identities. Progressive gender roles will assist in the reduction of stereotypes and negative expectations with regard to gender. There are many ways to work toward this end: intervene when gender harassment and sexual harassment are witnessed, report these instances on the organizational level, and support victims. Concerned individuals must intervene for the health and well-being of all and for the overall health of the organization (organizational culture) (Miner-Rubino & Cortina, 2004; Welsh, 1999). Finally, we must vote for legislators who value women and who will fight for laws that promote equity for all people. Much work still must be done with parents, teachers, and counselors in their understanding of the danger in adhering to gender based stereotypes and negative self-fulfilling prophecies. Much work also must be done with students so that they may realize their individual potential. Interventions are important for girls, parents, and teachers that will dispel the myths that math and science are more difficult for girls. Current research findings in psychology should be communicated to teachers and parents. Girls and women should be provided with nonsexist academic career counseling. A practical solution, devised by the Feminist Majority Foundation, is the creation of a public electronic web listing of all Title IX coordinators. This will provide students, teachers, and parents with contact information of their local Title IX coordinators, or where they may seek advice and lodge complaints of Title IX
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violations. Such a listing will also assist Title IX coordinators nationwide in the sharing and dissemination of information. In sum, there are many arguments for and against gender-based differences in ability leading to gaps in achievement. Similar arguments have been made with regard to race. They are both devised to the same end: to perpetuate privilege and maintain the status quo. Since we know that culture influences biology, it seems prudent to focus energy on creating systemic change with regard to how we view gender and ability, and in creating interventions to foster gender equity for both girls and boys. REFERENCES AAUW. (2008). Where the girls are: The facts about gender equity in education. Washington DC: AAUW Educational Foundation. Bem, S. L. (1983). Gender schema theory and its implications for child development: Raising gender-aschematic children in a gender-schematic society. Signs, 8, 598–616. Benbow, C. P., & Stanley, J. C. (1980). Sex differences in mathematics ability: Fact or artifact? Science, 210, 1262–1264. Benbow, C. P., & Stanley, J. C. (1982). Consequences in high school and college of sex differences in mathematical reasoning ability: A longitudinal perspective. American Educational Research Journal, 19, 598–622. Bombardieri, M. (2005, January 19). Harvard women’s group rips Summers. The Boston Globe [Online Version]. Retrieved January 15, 2009, from http:// www.Boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2005/01/19/Harvard_ womens_group. Carr, P. L., Szalacha, L., Barnett, R., Caswell, C., & Inui, T. (2003). A ‘‘ton of feathers’’: Gender discrimination in academic medical careers and how to manage it. Journal of Women’s Health, 12, 1009–1018. Crampton, S. M., & Mishra, J. M. (1999). Women in management. Public Personnel Management, 28, 87–106. Eagly, A. H., & Steffen, V. J. (1984). Gender stereotypes stem from the distribution of women and men into social roles. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 46, 735–754. Eccles, J. S., & Jacobs, J. E. (1986). Social forces shape math attitudes and performance. Signs, 11, 367–389. Gilligan, C. (1982). In a different voice: Psychological theory and women’s development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Goodman, J. S., Fields, D. L., & Blum, T. C. (2003). Cracks in the glass ceiling: In what kinds of organizations do women make it to the top? Group and Organization Management, 28, 475–501. Halpern, D. F. (1989, August). The disappearance of cognitive gender differences: What you see depends on where you look. American Psychologist, 44: 1156–1158. Hergovich, A., Sirsch, U., & Felinger, M. (2004). Gender differences in the self-concept of preadolescent children. School Psychology International, 25, 207–222.
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Institute for Women’s Policy Research. (2008, August). The gender wage gap: 2007. Retrieved January 22, 2009, from http://www.iwpr.org/pdf/ C350.pdf. Jacklin, C. N. (1989, February). Female and male: Issues of gender. American Psychologist, 44, 127–133. Kaminski, P. L., Shafer, M. E., Neumann, C. S., & Ramos, V. (2005). Self-concept in Mexican American girls and boys: Validating the self-description questionnaire—I. Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, 11, 321– 338. Kerka, S. (1993). Women, human development, and learning. Columbus, OH: ERIC Clearinghouse on Adult, Career, and Vocational Education. (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED358379). Kirchmeyer, C. (2002). Change and stability in managers’ gender roles. Journal of Applied Psychology, 87, 929–939. Konrad, A. M., Yang, Y., Goldberg, C., & Sullivan, S. E. (2005). Preferences for job attributes associated with work and family: A longitudinal study of career outcomes. Sex Roles, 53, 303–315. Linn, M. C., & Petersen, A. (1986). A meta-analysis of gender differences in spatial ability: Implications for mathematics and science achievement. In J. S. Hyde & M.C. Linn (Eds.) The psychology of gender: Advances through metaanalysis (pp. 67–101). Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Lueptow, L. B., Garovich-Szabo, L., & Lueptow, M. B. (2001). Social change and the persistence of sex typing: 1974–1997. Social Forces, 80, 1–36. Lyness, K. S., & Thompson, D. E. (2000). Climbing the corporate ladder: Do female and male executives follow the same route? Journal of Applied Psychology, 85, 86–101. Martin, J. (2008). Shifting the load: Personality factors and women in the workplace. In M. Paludi (Ed.), The psychology of women at work: Challenges and solutions for our female workforce. Career liberation, history, and the new millennium (Vol 1., pp. 153–200). Westport, CT: Praeger. Midgley, N., & Abrams, M. S. (1974). Fear of success and locus of control in young women. Journal of Counseling and Clinical Psychology, 42, 737. Miner-Rubino, K., & Cortina, L. M. (2004). Working in a context of hostility toward women: Implications for employees’ well-being. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 9, 107–122. National Coalition for Women and Girls in Education. (2008). Title IX at 35: Beyond the headlines. Retrieved October 30, 2008, from http:// www.ncwge.org/PDF/ TitleIXat35.pdf. National Women’s Law Center. (2008, June). The battle for gender equity in athletics in elementary and secondary schools. Retrieved October 30, 2008, from http://www.nwlc.org/pdf/Battle%202007.pdf. Noonan, B. M., Gallor, S. M., & Hensler-McGinnis, N. F. (2004). Challenge and success: A qualitative study of the career development of highly achieving women with physical and sensory disabilities. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 51, 68–80. O’Reilly, T., & McNamara, D. S. (2007). The impact of science knowledge, reading skill, and reading strategy knowledge on more traditional ‘‘high stakes’’ measures of high school students’ science achievement. American Educational Research Journal, 44, 161–196.
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Preckel, F., Goetz, T., Pekrun, R., & Kleine, M. (2008). Gender differences in gifted and average-ability students. Gifted Child Quarterly, 52, 146–159. Rammstedt, B., & Rammsayer, T. H. (2002). Self-estimated intelligence: Gender differences, relationship to psychometric intelligence and moderating effects of level of education. European Psychologist, 7, 275–284. Rivers, C., & Barnett, R. B. (2006, April). The myth of ‘‘the boy crisis.’’ Retrieved January 10, 2009, from http://feminist.org/education/pdfs/BoyCrisis.pdf. Robinson, N. M., Abbott, R. D., Berninger, V. W., & Busse, J. (1996). The structure of abilities in math-precocious young children: Gender similarities and differences. Journal of Educational Psychology, 88, 341–352. Rosenthal, R., & Rubin, D. B. (1982). Further meta-analytic procedures for assessing cognitive gender differences. Journal of Educational Psychology, 74, 708–712. Sadker, M., & Sadker, D. (1994). Failing at fairness: How America’s schools cheat girls. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Shih, J. (2006). Circumventing discrimination: Gender and ethnic strategies in silicon valley. Gender and Society, 20, 177–206. Spelke, E. S. (2005). Sex differences in intrinsic aptitude for mathematics and science? American Psychologist, 60, 950–958. Swanson, C. B. (2004, February). Statistical portrait of public high school graduation, class on 2001. Washington, DC: The Urban Institute. Retrieved October 30, 2008, from http://www.urban.org/publications/410934.html. Welsh, S. (1999). Gender and sexual harassment. Annual Review of Sociology, 25, 169–190. Whiston, S. C., & Bouwkamp, J. C. (2003). Ethical implications of career assessment with women. Journal of Career Assessment, 11, 59–75.
Chapter 3
Women in Education: Students and Professors Worldwide Susan Basow
Worldwide, women constitute 64 percent of all adults who are illiterate (United Nations Population Fund [UNFPA], 2005), but there are wide variations across cultures. In most developed countries, girls and women actually outnumber their male counterparts on the university level, whereas in many developing countries, boys outnumber girls even at the primary school level (UNFPA, 2005). Despite this variation, gender issues affect the education of girls and women in all countries. In this chapter, we will examine the status of women in education in terms of students’ educational attainment, as well as in terms of the barriers to gender equity that they encounter in the educational system. We also will look at the status of women as teachers and professors, as well as the barriers to gender equity that they confront. WOMEN AS STUDENTS The importance of gender equity in education, especially literacy, cannot be overstated. As the UNFPA (2005) reported, women’s educational attainment has benefits not only for women themselves (in terms of more economic opportunities and protection against human immunodeficiency virus [HIV]), but also for their society as a whole (in terms of breaking the cycle of poverty, labor force participation, engagement in public life, and fewer but healthier children). Yet there are many barriers to gender equity in education faced by girls and women, from lack of encouragement or actual restrictions on school attendance to more subtle forms of gender discrimination within the
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school environment. In this section, we will examine gender differences in educational attainment, the effects of gender stereotypes and roles, and the school environment itself. EDUCATIONAL ATTAINMENT According to the 2005 report of the UNFPA, the goal of achieving gender equity in primary education has been achieved in most countries of the world except Southern Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and Western Asia. The countries where fewer than 76 girls are enrolled for every 100 boys are Chad, Yemen, Central African Republic, Niger, Benin, Ethiopia, Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Guinea, and Mali. Among the factors that have been found to encourage girls to attend and stay in school are safe transportation, separate toilet facilities, and avoiding gender stereotyping in the classroom. Whereas about half of all developing countries have achieved gender parity at the primary school level, only about 20 percent have done so at the secondary school level (UNFPA, 2005). Again, the countries with the poorest record are in Southern Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and Western Asia. The countries where fewer than 76 girls are enrolled for every 100 boys are Benin, Equatorial Guinea, Cambodia, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Burkina Faso, Niger, Eritrea, Mozambique, Senegal, Gambia, Congo, Burundi, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, and India (UNFPA, 2005). Interestingly, in some developed countries (especially in Latin America and the Caribbean), girls slightly outnumber boys in secondary school due to the higher dropout rate for boys (UNFPA, 2005). At the university level, an even greater disparity between developed and developing countries emerges. Whereas men greatly outnumber women in higher education by 92 percent in developing countries, women actually outnumber men in many developed countries (Charles & Bradley, 2002; UNFPA, 2005). For example, in the United States in 2006, women received 58 percent of all bachelors and masters degrees and almost reached parity with men for doctoral and professional degrees (National Center for Educational Statistics [NCES], 2005). By 2014, women are expected to receive the majority of all educational degrees beyond high school in the United States. It is important to note that reversal in the gender ratio of educational achievement in the United States and other developed countries that has occurred over the last 30 years is due to the dramatic increase in the percentage of women participating in higher education, rather than to fewer men doing so than in the past. For example, 33 percent of all U.S. men aged 18 to 24 years old attended college in 1967 compared to 34 percent in 2006. In contrast, only 19 percent of all women aged 18 to 24 years old attended college in 1967 compared to 41 percent in 2006 (NCES, 2008). A similar pattern has occurred with respect
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to the attainment of advanced educational degrees: Men have shown a modest increase, whereas women have shown a more dramatic increase (NCES, 2005). For example, the number of doctoral degrees awarded between 2002 and 2003 is projected to increase 19 percent overall between 2013 and 2014, but 12 percent for men and 28 percent for women. Thus, the new pattern is less a change in men’s educationrelated behavior than a tremendous increase in women’s educational attainment, especially among older women. This reversal of gender ratios is most likely due to the reduction of barriers to girls’ and women’s educational attainment in many developed countries. BARRIERS TO GENDER EQUITY IN EDUCATION Prime among the barriers confronting girls and women worldwide are gendered roles and expectations. Because of women’s reproductive abilities, women’s societal roles must be compatible with childbearing and nursing (Basow, 1992). In developed countries, where reproductive choice is emphasized and some societal supports exist for nonmaternal child-care (even if costly), women constitute nearly half of the paid labor force (UNFPA, 2005). In developing countries, often with a subsistence or agrarian basis, women are less likely to be in the paid labor force than are men (UNFPA, 2005). Worldwide, women constitute only 39 percent of all wage and salary workers (UNFPA, 2005). While underrepresented in the paid labor force, women are overrepresented in the informal economy, such as agricultural production and market work, which has little financial security or social benefits (UNFPA, 2005). Women also perform most of the household chores, which, in developing countries, tend to be very time-consuming, such as collecting fuel and carrying water. Because of the domestic roles women typically play, women’s education has been seen historically as less valuable and important than men’s education (Basow, 1992; Lips, 2008). Even in developed countries, where women constitute nearly half of the paid labor force, women’s domestic activities are presumed to be women’s main priorities. Consequently, women’s employment options historically have been limited to jobs compatible with childbearing and child rearing. Such jobs, such as service and office work, typically allow for intermittent employment and do not require higher education. Most also are low status and poorly paid. Other traditional female jobs that do require education beyond high school, such as teaching and nursing, also are relatively compatible with child-care, as they allow for intermittent employment and schedules that coincide with those of their school-age children. These jobs are often viewed as an extension of women’s nurturing activities and historically have not been highly compensated. Even though women’s employment options in developed countries
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today are theoretically unrestricted, occupational segregation still exists, and the challenge of balancing work and family life still disproportionately falls on women (Lips, 2008). Thus, one barrier to gender equity in education worldwide is the gendered division of labor. A second barrier to gender equity in education, closely related to women’s societal roles, is gender stereotyping. Cultures vary somewhat regarding the full range of traits and abilities associated with each gender, but in nearly all cultures, women are more associated with communal traits and men are more associated with agentic traits (Williams & Best, 1990). Indeed, gender stereotyping is often used to justify the nurturing roles assigned to women, although research suggests that differential social roles actually create gender stereotypes (Eagly & Steffen, 1984). That is, whoever typically cares for children or the elderly is viewed as nurturant, regardless of gender; and whoever typically works in high-powered jobs is viewed as active and dominant, again regardless of gender. Given their link with adult roles, gender stereotypes also affect educational opportunities. Because boys are assumed to be more active and aggressive, they typically are educated to assume the leadership roles in society, whether those roles are in business or politics. The education of boys, therefore, is given higher priority than the education of girls, as can be seen in the statistics on school attendance in developing countries. Boys often receive encouragement and training to pursue the higher-paying and higher-status jobs in a culture because boys are seen as both more ‘‘naturally’’ inclined to such work as well as the more likely breadwinner in a family. There also are specific academic skills that are gender-stereotyped, although these vary somewhat cross-culturally. In the United States and many other developed and developing countries, the fields of math, science, and technology are stereotyped as ‘‘masculine,’’ while the humanities and the creative arts (art, music, writing) are stereotyped as ‘‘feminine’’ (Charles & Bradley, 2002; Eccles, Jacobs, & Harold, 1990; Nosek, Banaji, & Greenwald, 2002; Skelton, Francis, & Smulyan, 2006). These trends both reflect and reinforce academic gender typing. Evidence suggests that gender stereotypes of academic subjects affect students’ academic performance, as well as their career choices. Indeed, in most developed countries, women are underrepresented in engineering, mathematics, computer science and, to a lesser degree, natural science; they are overrepresented in education, humanities, and health fields; and there is approximate gender parity in the social sciences (Charles & Bradley, 2002). Many people view academic gender stereotypes as based on innate gender differences in intellectual abilities: that is, boys are considered innately to have better math and visual-spatial skills, while girls are considered innately to have better verbal skills and fine-motor coordination. Some neuroscience research supports the idea that gendered
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patterns in performance on such cognitive tasks may be due to gendered patterns of brain organization (Berenbaum & Resnick, 2007; Gur & Gur, 2007; Kimura, 1999). However, most researchers (e.g., Haier, 2007; Hines, 2004) note that individual differences typically overshadow gender differences in brain structure and organization. That is, there are larger differences among boys as a group and girls as a group on all these intellectual tasks than there are between boys and girls. Furthermore, environmental influences, both prenatal (e.g., maternal nutrition) and postnatal (e.g., diet, experience), also affect brain development. In fact, in cultures where men and women are more equal (e.g., Iceland, Norway, Sweden), the male advantage in math performance disappears, although the female advantage in reading does not (Guiso, Monte, Sapienza, & Zingales, 2008). Most importantly, gender similarities greatly outweigh gender differences in cognitive abilities, and what differences exist typically are small and variable (Hyde, 2005). Nonetheless, because of gender stereotyping and gender roles, gender often serves as a cue for differential treatment and differential experience both in school and out. One type of differential experience is based on the gendered curriculum. In many developing countries, girls and boys are educated differently with different coursework and materials (Skelton et al., 2006; Sohoni, 1995). Indeed, their educational experiences may be completely gender segregated, such as occurs in many Muslim countries. In contrast, unequal gender-based educational practices have been outlawed in most developed countries since the 1970s. For example, in the United States a series of laws (e.g., Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, the Women’s Educational Equity Act of 1974, the Vocational Educational Act of 1976, and the Career Incentive Act of 1977) ended the common practices of providing technical training only to boys, and training in ‘‘home economics’’ only to girls. Nonetheless, certain less obvious discriminatory practices remain. Among the more subtle discriminatory practices is the use of curricular materials that focus on boys and men more than girls and women, conveying the message that the former are more interesting, dominant, and important than the latter. Such is the case with primary-schoollevel storybooks, where male characters outnumber female characters by a ratio of 2:1 or 3:1. Boys and men also are depicted in a wide variety of occupations and activities, while girls and women more often are portrayed as mothers, bystanders, or in need of help (Diekman & Murnen, 2004; Gooden & Gooden, 2001). In upper grades, men more often are the focus of study than are women, whether in regard to history (mainly a chronicle of men’s lives in politics and war), literature (novels, poetry, and essays written by men), or science (great discoveries by men) (Koch, 2003). Because of gender stereotypes and roles, as well as differential encouragement by parents and teachers, gender differences in
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academic interests start appearing by high school. In developed countries, more high school boys than girls take computer design and Advanced Placement (AP) science courses, and more girls than boys take AP courses in English, biology, and foreign languages (Koch, 2003). (AP courses allow high school students who achieve high grades on standardized tests to attain college credit for their work.) Vocational education is highly gender-segregated in virtually all cultures, with construction, skilled trades, information technology, and engineering viewed as the province of men; and child-care and hairdressing viewed as the province of women (Leathwood, 2006). College majors reflect this gendering of academic interests, as well: Women are overrepresented in the humanities, some social sciences (especially psychology), and biology; men are overrepresented in the physical and computer sciences, business, and engineering. Gender messages also permeate the classroom experience of girls and boys through the interactions they have with their peers and teachers. Peer influence is a particularly powerful barrier to gender equity in education. Girls and boys typically grow up in different ‘‘cultures,’’ with different language and play styles, different clothes and customs, and different expectations from adults (Basow, 2008; Leaper & Friedman, 2007; Maccoby, 1998). For example, girls’ activities, such as playing house, tend to be cooperative and verbal. Boys’ activities and games tend to be more competitive and physical. Because of these gendered play styles, girls and boys tend to segregate themselves into same-gender groups, which further reinforce gendered patterns of play and behavior. By ignoring or discouraging play with a child of the other sex, peers are major enforcers of gendered norms (Bigler & Liben, 2007; Koch, 2003). Peers often ‘‘police’’ gender-boundary violations by using derogatory language and harassing behaviors toward those who do not completely conform to gender expectations (Basow, 2008). For example, boys who might be interested in the arts, or girls who might be interested in mechanics, typically get a clear message that their interests are not gender appropriate. Because boys have a stricter and narrower gender role than girls, boys are more often punished by their male peers via verbal denigration, physical assault, and social ostracism (Renold, 2006; Wolke, Woods, Stanford, & Schulz, 2001). In a 2001 survey on sexual harassment conducted by the American Association of University Women (AAUW, 2001), 83 percent of boys reported having experienced unwanted sexual behaviors (including accusations of homosexuality) during their school years, usually from male peers. Girls too are pressured to conform to the feminine gender role by their peers, but because their role is more flexible than is boys’ in the early grades in developed countries (e.g., girls can wear dresses or pants, can be athletic or bookish, can be assertive or dependent), the
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conformity pressures on girls are somewhat less intense than for boys, at least until puberty (Basow, 2008). It is around this time that the major imperative for girls in developed countries, to be sexually attractive to boys, intensifies. Girls uninterested in boys do risk being called ‘‘queer’’ or ‘‘dyke,’’ but most of the epithets used for girls refer to heterosexual promiscuity (‘‘slut,’’ ‘‘’ho’’). In the 2001 AAUW sexual harassment survey, 88 percent of the girls reported having experienced such behaviors during their school years, mainly from male peers (AAUW, 2001). Other research supports these findings and suggests that sexual harassment is virtually a universal experience for adolescent girls in coeducational institutions, in the United States and elsewhere (Leach, Fiscian, & Kadzamira, 2003; Leaper & Brown, 2008). A majority of middle- and high school girls report having been the brunt of unwanted or inappropriate romantic attention from a boy, having been the target of unwanted physical contact from a boy, having been called demeaning names or told an embarrassing or mean joke about being a girl, as well as being teased about their appearance. Furthermore, at least one in four girls in the United States report having been teased, bullied, or threatened by a boy (Leaper & Brown, 2008). European American and African American girls report more unwanted sexual attention than do their Asian American and Latina counterparts in the United States; still, nearly all girls experience at least some of these harassing behaviors (Leaper & Brown, 2008). In addition to sexual harassment, about 30 percent of girls report having received some type of academic discouragement about their math, science, or computing abilities from male peers (Leaper & Brown, 2008). The results of peer sexual harassment are negative for both sexes, although the negative effects are more intense and pervasive for girls (AAUW, 2001; Ormerod, Collinsworth, & Perry, 2008). Girls who experience peer sexual harassment, compared to their male counterparts, report feeling more self-conscious, less confident, and more negative about their bodies and about school. Girls also are more likely to try to avoid the harasser and to keep silent in class. Thus, peer harassment is a major barrier to gender equity in education. Unfortunately, teacher behaviors often create additional inequities for girls and women in schools. In some cases, the inequities are quite overt, such as teachers who either harass female students themselves or who tolerate peer harassment. In a study at several high schools in the United States, about half of all school personnel (53 percent) were found to have sexually harassed female students themselves (Ormerod et al., 2008). Students in general tended to perceive school personnel as tolerating such behaviors. Consequently, most female students do not report incidences of sexual harassment; instead, they are likely to experience lowered self-esteem and withdraw psychologically or physically from school. In some cultures, there may not even be recognition that
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‘‘sexual harassment’’ by teachers or professors is inappropriate and/or should be punished. For example, in countries with a collectivist orientation, group harmony may be more highly valued than individual rights. In a cross-cultural study of university students, Sigal and colleagues (2005) found that a professor who had been described in a written scenario as harassing his female graduate student, was viewed as less responsible and less guilty of sexual harassment in countries with a more collectivist orientation (Ecuador, Pakistan, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Turkey) compared to those with a more individualist orientation (United States, Canada, Germany, and the Netherlands). In all countries, however, female students were more likely than their male counterparts to find the professor guilty. Teachers also treat their male and female students differently, mainly by paying more attention to boys than to girls (Duffy, Warren, & Walsh, 2001; Harris, 1997; Meece & Scantlebury, 2006; Sadker & Sadker, 1994). Teachers’ greater attention to male students occurs worldwide (Liu, 2006). Although some of this attention is negative (i.e., teachers both praise and reprimand boys more than they do girls), the result is that boys tend to dominate classroom interactions. Girls tend to receive teacher approval mainly for being quiet and compliant. In an observational study of more than 100 fourth-, sixth-, and eighth-grade classrooms in several communities in the United States, Myra and David Sadker (1994) found that teachers called on and encouraged girls less often than they did boys, although they rarely were aware of doing so. This is particularly true in math and science, subject areas gender-typed as masculine (Altermatt, Jovanovic, & Perry, 1998; Jovanovic & King, 1998). Girls not only do not receive the encouragement given their male peers, but they may actually receive discouraging comments from teachers related to their math, science, or computer abilities, perhaps because teachers tend to believe that boys are more ‘‘gifted’’ in math and science than are girls (Ceci & Williams, 2007; Leaper & Brown, 2008; Liu, 2006). Such discouragement is particularly unfortunate since the strongest predictor of attitudes toward science among high school students is social encouragements from teachers, parents, and peers (Stake, 2006). The lack of social encouragement may contribute to women’s underrepresentation in math- and science-related careers. It should be noted that student race and ethnicity also affect teachers’ gender-related behaviors. The finding that teachers give more encouragement to male than female students appears predominantly with White students. Black boys, in particular, appear to be viewed by teachers in the United States and United Kingdom as having the least academic potential when compared with White boys and to girls of both races (Ross & Jackson, 1991; Ward & Robinson-Wood, 2006; Wood, Kaplan, & McLoyd, 2007). Perhaps this explains the academic disengagement that occurs among Black boys, who drop out of high
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school at a higher rate (9.7 percent in the United States) than do White boys (6.4 percent). Hispanic boys may be even more neglected by teachers; their dropout rate is 25.7 percent (NCES, 2008). Black girls also may become disengaged due to lack of teacher attention and discouragement of their typically more verbal and active behaviors (Wilkinson & Marrett, 1985). In 2006, the high school dropout rate was 5.3 percent for White girls, 11.7 percent for Black girls, and 18.1 percent for Hispanic girls (NCES, 2008). Research confirms that teachers’ expectations strongly affect students, especially students from groups that are academically stigmatized (Blacks and Hispanics, in general, and girls in math) (McKown & Weinstein, 2002). On the college level, similar patterns are found. Women college students appear to receive less encouragement than men do for speaking in class, and they are more likely to be ignored or interrupted by both peers and professors (Sadker & Sadker, 1994; Whitt, Edison, Pascarella, Nora, & Terenzini, 1999). The qualities that seem to facilitate more gender equity in the college classroom include a smaller class size, more feminine-oriented or androgynous subject matter, more classroom interactions, a more cooperative than competitive atmosphere, and a more gender-balanced or female-dominant student gender ratio (Brady & Eisler, 1999). EFFECTS OF DIFFERENTIAL SCHOOL EXPERIENCES The barriers to gender equality in education are numerous: different social roles, gender (and racial) stereotyping of academic abilities, a male-centered curriculum, peer harassment, and differential teacher treatment. As a result, girls and boys typically develop different levels of academic self-confidence (Dweck, 1999). Boys in the United States, at least European American boys, tend to believe in their ability to solve problems, so they typically attempt and persist at challenging tasks. Girls are less likely to believe in their ability to figure things out; instead, girls tend to believe that they either have academic ability or they do not have it. Thus girls, especially high-achieving ones, tend to develop more feelings of helplessness when they encounter academic difficulties, and they give up more quickly than do their male counterparts. Girls often feel more valued for ‘‘being good’’ and for their appearance than for their intellectual skill. Academic self-confidence is important when attempting and persisting at new tasks. It is in this area that girls increasingly fall behind boys, even as girls generally continue to attain higher grades. This occurs on the college level as well. Annual surveys of entering students show that nearly two out of three men rate themselves as at least ‘‘above average’’ in academic self-confidence, whereas less than one-half of the women make similar ratings (Sax, 2007).
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The gender stereotyping of academic fields by society in general and teachers in particular may also contribute to differential student confidence and achievement. As previously noted, math and science are perceived as ‘‘masculine,’’ whereas literature, languages, and the arts are perceived as ‘‘feminine.’’ Because people expect to succeed in tasks that they view as gender appropriate, girls tend to have lower feelings of self-efficacy in math and science fields than do boys (Dweck, 2007; Eccles et al., 1990; Sax, 2007). Low expectations of success can lead girls to become uninterested in those fields and the occupations related to them. The same is true regarding boys and the humanities. Furthermore, when such gender stereotypes are made salient (e.g., by a teacher remarking that boys typically are better at math than are girls), students’ actual performance can be affected. As numerous studies have confirmed, when a student’s gender identity is primed, such as when she has to write down (or check a box) regarding her gender before taking a test, her academic performance on a masculine gendertyped task can suffer (Steele, 1997; Steele & Ambady, 2006). For example, female students who are identified as such or who are a numeric minority in a testing situation perform more poorly on a math test than male students and than a matched female control group whose gender identity has not been primed (Inzlicht & Ben-Zeev, 2000). Just taking a math test in a classroom with boys may elicit girls’ performance decrement, as found in a study of French middle-school students (Huguet & Regner, 2007). This stereotype threat phenomenon is robust and occurs for any group performing a stereotype-related task when a stigmatized identity is made salient. For example, when Asian American women’s gender identity was made salient, their math performance decreased relative to a control condition, but when their Asian identity was made salient, their math scores increased because of the stereotype that Asians are good at math (Shih, Pittinsky, & Ambady, 1999). Thus, academic performance and interest can be boosted or impaired depending upon the stereotyped nature of the task and the identity that is made salient, and this seems especially likely to occur for those individuals who identify most strongly with the group in question (Chavous, Harris, Rivas, Helaire, & Green, 2004; Oswald, 2008; Steele, 1997). In this respect, teachers’ expectancies and transmittal of academic achievement stereotypes can become prophecies that students fulfill. For example, the stereotype that African Americans are not as academically competent as European Americans can negatively affect the academic performance of the former group and can even lead to disidentification and disengagement with academic achievement in general (Steele, 1997). The phenomenon of stereotype threat may contribute to the higher high school dropout and lower college attendance rates of African Americans and Hispanics compared to European Americans.
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As noted in the beginning of this chapter, women’s education is critical for the welfare of the woman and her family, as well as her country. Because of its importance, the elimination of sex discrimination in education and training was a key component of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action adopted at the Fourth World Conference on Women that took place in 1995 (United Nations Division for the Advancement of Women, 2007). It remains a central focus of the United Nations Division for the Advancement of Women (WomenWatch, 2008). WOMEN AS TEACHERS AND PROFESSORS Women in front of the classroom also are affected by gender factors in terms of their representation, their teaching styles, and the reactions of their students, colleagues, and supervisors. Representation In most countries, female teachers are overrepresented in the lower grades and underrepresented in the higher grades (Gaskell & Mullen, 2006). As with most job categories, the percentage of women decreases as the status and pay of a field increases. The teaching jobs with the least status and lowest pay are those in early childhood education, and nine out of ten of these jobs are held by women (NCES, n.d.). The teaching jobs with the most status and pay are those in the upper ranks of university teaching; men disproportionately hold these jobs (75 percent of U.S. full professors were men in 2007) (NCES, 2008). Jobs in educational administration (principals, superintendents, provosts, university presidents) reflect the same gender hierarchy. In 2003–2004, women were 56 percent of U.S. elementary school principals (despite the fact that women constitute 91 percent of the teachers) and 26 percent of secondary school principals (despite the fact that women constitute 55 percent of teachers at this level) (NCES, 2007). At U.S. colleges and universities, women were only 23 percent of college presidents in 2006, despite the fact that they constitute 41 percent of the professorate (King & Gomez, 2007). Women were most likely to head 2-year colleges and least likely to head doctorategranting universities (King & Gomez, 2007). Gender segregation also occurs in terms of field of study, at least in most developed countries (Charles & Bradley, 2002). Not only are women more likely than men to be associated with early childhood education, but women also are more likely than men to be associated with the humanities and health fields. In contrast, men are overrepresented in engineering, mathematics, computer science and, to a lesser degree, natural science. There is approximate gender parity in the social sciences.
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There has been change over time in the United States; increased numbers of women have joined educational administration, the professorate, and science fields. For example, in the decade from 1993 to 2003, the percentage of women principals in elementary and secondary schools increased 10 percent, and the percentage of women teaching in colleges and universities increased 6 percent (NCES, 2008). These numbers still fall short of gender parity, however. Furthermore, gains by women in traditional male-dominated careers have not been matched by increased numbers of men in traditional female-dominated careers, such as early childhood education and the humanities. Thus, the overall pattern is one of many changes for women in terms of nontraditional career choices but few changes for men. Gender segregation in field of study and careers may be particularly difficult to change because it appears to be based less on beliefs about gender equality than on beliefs about innate gender differences in abilities and interests (Charles & Bradley, 2002). Another barrier to equal representation by women and men in education is the same one affecting women in nearly all occupations: balancing work/family responsibilities (Gambles, Lewis, & Rapoport, 2006; Ward & Wolf-Wendel, 2004). Because women still are primarily responsible for child-care, employed women with children often are more limited than their male counterparts in terms of time, energy, and overall freedom to pursue their careers. For example, a recent study of female Harvard University alumnae who had gone on to attain a doctorate found that 91.5 percent of those without children were employed fulltime 15 years after college graduation, compared to 65 percent of those with one child and 57.5 percent of those with two or more children (Jaschik, 2009). Having children did not affect the employment rates of their male counterparts. Indeed, one of the few careers open to educated women for many years was grade-school teaching, since such jobs were fairly compatible with caring for one’s own children in terms of hours. (That is, teachers work pretty much the same hours and number of days that their children are in school.) In higher education, however, time demands are much greater (if somewhat flexible), especially when research and publications are required. Not surprisingly, then, women are over-represented in more teaching-oriented higher education positions, while men are overrepresented at major research universities (American Association of University Professors, 2008). In fact, both women and men considering academic careers view research universities as not family friendly (June, 2009). Gendered Teaching Styles Not only are women and men frequently teaching in different grades, types of schools, and disciplines, but gender also may affect teaching
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styles, perhaps in interaction with discipline. Research has found that men are more likely than women to use a lecture-based teaching style, whereas women are more likely than men to use a more discussionbased teaching style (Basow & Montgomery, 2005; Brady & Eisler, 1999; Canada & Pringle, 1995). Some of this apparent gender difference in teaching style may be due to the subject matter being taught. A lecturebased style may suit the disciplines in which men are overrepresented, such as the sciences, better than a discussion-based style. Similarly, a discussion-based style may be more appropriate than a lecture-based style in disciplines where women have greater representation, such as the humanities. Still, even when faculty members are matched in terms of rank and discipline, female faculty still are found to be more studentoriented and to engage students more in discussions than their male counterparts (Statham, Richardson, & Cook, 1991). In contrast, male faculty appear more likely than female faculty to assert their authority in the classroom through public reprimands and corrections. Different teaching styles may appeal to different students. There is some evidence that female students may particularly appreciate female professors, as they are more likely than male students to nominate a female instructor as their ‘‘best’’ teacher (Basow, Phelan, & Capotosto, 2006), and they frequently rate female professors higher than male students do on evaluation forms (Basow, 1998). Traditional pedagogical styles appear to benefit male students more than female students (Gabriel & Smithson, 1990), whereas ‘‘female friendly’’ styles (such as those involving more cooperation than competition) benefit both sexes (Johnson, Kahle, & Fargo, 2007; Rosser, 1997). Thus, the increasing number of women on college faculties may be helping to increase gender equity in college classrooms, and may partially account for the increased retention of female students in higher education. Although female faculty seem to be particularly appreciated by female college students, such is not the case with male college students. The latter are less likely to cite a female faculty member as their best instructor than would be expected based on the number of female professors they have had, and they frequently rate female faculty lower than female students do and lower than they rate male faculty (Basow, 1998; Basow et al., 2006). Given the nature of gender roles (men have more status than women and masculinity is defined, at least in part, as ‘‘not-feminine’’ [Basow, 1992, 2008; Brannon, 1976]), perhaps it is not surprising that male college students value male faculty more than female faculty. A similar process is at work with respect to other cultural figures: Boys are less likely than girls to read books or watch television shows or movies with predominantly female main characters, and they are less likely to cite a female role model as influential. Girls, in contrast, watch, read about, and choose role models of both sexes (Basow, 1992, 2008; Basow & Howe, 1980).
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GENDER BIAS IN EVALUATING WOMEN PROFESSORS As indicated earlier, female faculty often are perceived and reacted to differently by their male and female students, whereas male faculty tend to be perceived and reacted to similarly. Women are marked for gender in ways men are not, especially when women are in nontraditional roles (such as when teaching on the college level, especially in such male-associated fields as science and technology). The normative professor is still a man. When a woman is in this role, students (and others) often note this unusual event by speaking of their ‘‘female professor;’’ when their professor is a man, they rarely note his gender. This marking of gender for women often creates a double bind for women in higher education: she must meet the expectations both of being a ‘‘good’’ professor (e.g., knowledgeable, competent) as well as a ‘‘good’’ woman (e.g., warm and nurturant). The overlap between the stereotypic gender traits for women and the stereotypic professor role is slight. Thus, female professors walk a narrow line: needing to demonstrate both ‘‘masculine’’ traits of agency and competence as well as ‘‘feminine’’ traits of warmth and compassion. Male professors do not experience the same double bind since their gender and professional roles overlap considerably. These dual (and generally incompatible) sets of expectations for female professors exemplify role incongruity and can result in biased ratings by others (Eagly & Karau, 2002). Such gender bias can be discerned in the ways students perceive and evaluate female professors. While students may appreciate warmth and nurturance in male professors (e.g., Basow, 2000; Basow et al., 2006; Freeman, 1994), men can still receive high student ratings even if they do not demonstrate such traits. But for female professors, such traits are required. For example, research in the United States has found that to receive comparable ratings, it is more important for female professors to be friendly (to smile and be available) than male professors (Bennett, 1982; Kierstead, D’Agostino, & Dill, 1988). If female professors are not perceived as warmer/friendlier than their male counterparts, women receive lower ratings, especially from their male students (Sinclair & Kunda, 2000). In general, female professors generally do receive higher ratings from both male and female students on questions relating to faculty–student interactions and quality, but their overall ratings tend to be similar to male professors (Bachen, McLoughlin, & Garcia, 1999; Basow et al., 2006; Basow & Montgomery, 2005; Bennett, 1982). With respect to grade school and high school, some concern has been expressed recently that boys’ poorer educational performance relative to their female peers may be due to the fact that most of their teachers are women (e.g., Gurian & Henley, 2001; Gurian & Stevens, 2005; Sax, 2005). However, research with nearly 1,000 Australian
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students aged 12 to 16 years old did not show that boys benefited more from male than from female teachers (Marsh, Martin, & Cheng, 2008). In fact, both boys and girls typically had higher self-efficacy in classes taught by women. Other research also has failed to show a significant effect of male teachers on boys’ behavior or achievement (e.g., Bricheno & Thornton, 2007, in the United Kingdom), although more research is needed on this topic, especially in elementary school, where female teachers typically outnumber male teachers 9:1 (NCES, n.d.). In summary, women in education are typically overrepresented in the lower grades and lower-status teaching positions and institutions, and underrepresented in the highest status positions and institutions. Within the classroom they often teach in different fields and appear to be more student-oriented than their male peers. While male professors are generally perceived and evaluated similarly by their male and female students, female professors typically receive different ratings as a function of student gender (and discipline). In general, male students tend to rate their female professors lower than their male professors, while female students sometimes do the reverse: rate their female professors higher than their male professors (and higher than their male peers).
CONCLUSION In this chapter, we have examined the status of women in education. As students, girls and women are disadvantaged in several ways. For example, in developing countries, girls often are not encouraged to attend school. In nearly all countries, girls are viewed in stereotypic ways that may restrict and/or shape their educational and occupational potential. Girls are likely to experience both a gendered curriculum as well as sexist treatment from their male peers as well as from their teachers. These educational experiences may cause girls and women to doubt their academic abilities and impair their academic performance, especially in nontraditional fields. Although women in developed countries currently are matching or surpassing their male counterparts in terms of educational achievement, their predominant fields of study still are gendered. As teachers, women are overrepresented in lower grades and lower status educational positions, and underrepresented in the higher status ones. In colleges and universities, women are more likely to use student-focused methods (e.g., discussions, group work) than their male peers, while their teaching proficiency may be more heavily scrutinized. Overall, women professors are marked for gender in ways their male counterparts are not, a fact that contributes to the heavier burden they bear to prove their worth.
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Maccoby, E. E. (1998). The two sexes: Growing up apart, coming together. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Marsh, H. W., Martin, A. J., & Cheng, J. H. S. (2008). A multilevel perspective on gender in classroom motivation and climate: Potential benefits of male teachers for boys? Journal of Educational Psychology, 100, 78–95. McKown, C., & Weinstein, R. S. (2002). Modeling the role of child ethnicity and gender in children’s differential response to teacher expectations. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 32, 159–184. Meece, J. L., & Scantlebury, K. (2006). Gender and schooling: Progress and persistent barriers. New York: Oxford University Press. National Center for Education Statistics [NCES]. (n.d.). Special analysis 2005: Mobility in the teacher workforce. Retrieved February 1, 2009, from http:// nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/2005/analysis/index.asp. National Center for Education Statistics [NCES]. (2005). Projection of education statistics to 2014. Retrieved February 1, 2009, from http://nces.ed.gov/ programs/projections/projections2014/sec_4b.asp. National Center for Education Statistics [NCES]. (2007). Contexts of elementary and secondary education: School characteristics and climate. Retrieved February 1, 2009, from http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/2007/section4/indicator34.asp. National Center for Education Statistics [NCES]. (2008). Digest of education statistics: 2007. Retrieved February 1, 2009, from http://nces.ed.gov/ programs/digest/d07/. Nosek, B., Banaji, M., & Greenwald, A. (2002). Math = male, me = female, therefore math not-equal-to me. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83, 44–59. Ormerod, A. J., Collinsworth, L. L., & Perry, L. A. (2008). Critical climate: Relations among sexual harassment, climate, and outcomes for high school girls and boys. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 32, 113–125. Oswald, D. L. (2008). Gender stereotypes and women’s reports of liking and ability in traditionally masculine and feminine occupations. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 32, 196–203. Renold, E. (2006). Gendered classroom experiences. In C. Skelton, B. Francis, & L. Smulyan (Eds.), The Sage handbook of gender and education (pp. 439–452). London: Sage. Ross, S. I., & Jackson, J. M. (1991). Teachers’ expectations for Black males’ and Black females’ academic achievement. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 17, 78–82. Rosser, S. V. (1997). Re-engineering female friendly science. New York: Teachers College Press. Sadker, M., & Sadker, D. (1994). Failing at fairness: How our schools cheat girls. New York: Scribner. Sax, L. (2005). Why gender matters: What parents and teachers need to know about the emerging science of sex differences. New York: Doubleday. Sax, L. J. (2007, September 28). College women still face many obstacles in reaching their full potential. Chronicle of Higher Education, p. B46. Shih, M., Pittinsky, T. L., & Ambady, N. (1999). Stereotype susceptibility: Identity salience and shifts in quantitative performance. Psychological Science, 10, 80–83. Sigal, J., Gibbs, M. S., Goodrich, C., Rashid, T., Anjum, A., Hsu, D., Perrino, C. S., et al. (2005). Cross-cultural reactions to academic sexual harassment:
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Chapter 4
In Women’s Voices Samantha Smith
The feminist movement has provided the opportunity for women to have more choices in their lives. Throughout history, women as well as men have fought to gain equal rights for women in regard to education, employment, enfranchisement, and relationships. I feel fortunate that much of the hard work of this movement was completed before my generation came of age. The benefits that I enjoy include applying to and attending the college of my choice, continuing my education through graduate studies, and pursuing any career that I wish. So many important strides have been made for women over the past centuries. Due to some of my own experiences as a young adult, I wonder about the future of feminism and what aspects of life feminism will impact. One of my goals always been to be a wife and mother. I never thought that this was a lowly goal, nor did I think that other women might consider it to be so. An early experience in college made me rethink feminism, as well as the role of a woman in the twenty-first century. During a lecture, one of my female professors commented that no modern woman aspires to being only a homemaker. From this I inferred that, if you did aspire to homemaking, you would not be expected to be in her class or to ever attend college. Her comment made me feel na€ve, but it also surprised me. I grew up in a household in which my mother was a homemaker with a master’s degree, and my father had a doctorate. I was raised with the belief that one should pursue education for its own sake, and that one had the choice to use education as one desired. Whether that meant as a homemaker/ mother or as a career woman was one’s own choice. After years of discussions with other young women, I realize that many feel that opting for motherhood over a career is seen as a step backward. It is as
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though all that feminism achieved is being undone by this choice, and that women who only aspire to motherhood are not modern, progressive women. There are other women, of course, on the opposite side of this argument who feel, as I do, that women should have the choice to pursue whatever avenue they want. As I came to the end of my undergraduate studies, my goals included attending graduate school and pursuing a career in addition to being a mother. After I complete my studies, I will be confronted with the dilemma that so many women face. I will be married, starting a career, and deciding when to start a family. This leads to the question of whether I am going to continue working while raising my children or whether I am going to put my career on hold and be a stay-athome mother while my children are young. Despite the strides that feminism has made, many women feel the challenge of simultaneously pursuing a career and raising a family. Feminism has given women the right to choose, but not all aspects of society have changed to allow women to follow through with their choices. It is helpful that more men today are open-minded and are being brought up with the idea that women are equals and that various domestic duties should be shared, but I do not feel that this is yet the norm. The feminist movement provided women with more choices, but as a result, many women feel pressure to perform at the highest level both inside and outside the home. In my opinion, feminism still has many areas in which progress is necessary. Feminism is about helping and supporting each other and not about discouraging women or making them feel that any of their life choices are less valuable than others. Some of the issues that need to be addressed include helping women to balance career and family and helping them to achieve equal pay and promotion in the workplace. These issues may be advanced through government programs, such as mandatory daycare in one’s place of employment and family leave. Although society and the government have given women more rights and choices, a support system must be established so that women can utilize all of their choices and be free to pursue their goals.
Chapter 5
Working Life as a House: A Tale of Floors, Walls, and Ceilings Leanne Faraday-Brash
It may be embarrassing to admit, but I felt validated when I read a broadsheet book review about a quaint little paperback titled ‘‘Why Women Shop’’ (Minahan & Beverland, 2005). The short answer to the question of why women (or men) shop would surely be: to buy something. Undoubtedly, some people would draw the analogous (and simplistic) conclusion to the question of why women work outside the home. Their response to that may be: to earn something. And yet just as I learned (and how normalizing it was!) that women shop for a whole raft of reasons that include the feel-good benefit of retail therapy, so do we generate a plethora of explanations as to why women (choose to) engage in paid work and begin to contemplate an onslaught of potential barriers, threats, and challenges they meet along the way. Of course with various motives to work outside the home, it is humbling and important to acknowledge that not all women believe they have the luxury of a choice to work, or a particular role to accept or decline. Some women may not ever believe they are afforded the opportunity to set their sights on something as lofty and selfactualizing as a career. However, can’t they still boast the right to enjoy that which may consume their time and energy for over half their waking hours? Therefore, in the approach I have taken to this chapter, I humbly acknowledge the need of many women to work through sheer financial necessity, the schema and societal influences that may have shaped some women’s self-limiting beliefs (which should not be seen as any criticism of those women), and the fact that women who choose to be full time stay-at-home careers make enormous familial and communal contributions. They are simply not the subject of our conversation.
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I pay tribute to all women who dedicate their lives to full-time homemaking and caregiving (whether to children or others). For our purposes here, any reference to ‘‘women who work’’ does not imply that women in unpaid work do not do meaningful work, but rather, the clause ‘‘women who work’’ is shorthand for women in paid work outside the home. At the time of writing this chapter, there was an outcry in France over the return to work of French Justice Minister, Rachida Dati, five days after giving birth (Courcol, 2009). Dati, who is single, rose to prominence in 2007, when she became the first politician of North African origin to be appointed to a senior French government post. French feminists have accused her of being a poor role model to other women by succumbing to the pressure of the job, her own ambition, and her ‘‘fear of being kept out of the loop’’ as reasons offered for why she must have returned to work so early. Dati’s decision was ‘‘scandalous’’ according to Maya Sturduts, the Head of the National Collective of the Rights of Women. Women’s rights activist, Florence Montraynaud, compared Dati to working women in the 1920s who gave birth in the factories and lamented Dati’s decision, which she claimed would exacerbate the divide between ‘‘supermoms and wimps’’ in the workforce. Opposition went further in decrying her actions by saying her decision will put pressure on countless other women who might otherwise exercise their right to take longer leave of absence, which will then be used by unscrupulous employers in difficult economic times to disadvantage those women. One might also imagine, notwithstanding her single status, that Dati would have had the financial means, if not direct governmental assistance, to pay for quality child care for her newborn. Should or shouldn’t her decision be one of personal choice? If she has the ways and means to be able to return to work after childbirth (which after all is not a disease or illness), should she? Does she automatically raise the bar for other women and create an unrealistic and unreasonable expectation in employers of other women after childbirth? Is that Dati’s responsibility or her problem, and is that fair? Does the fact that she also happens to be slim and glamorous create feelings of inadequacy in every woman who doesn’t believe they have earned the moniker of ‘‘yummy mummy’’ within days of childbirth? Furthermore, is it reasonable or possibly patronizing to assume that Dati returned to work so soon, as asserted by the secretary general of the Planned Parenthood Association, because of the pressure to ‘‘defend her standing in France‘s male-dominated politics’’ rather than intrinsic dedication to her work? In this example of one woman’s experience and an aftermath of almost hysterical proportions, we collide with a myriad of issues that reflect the complexity of the demanding context and the psychosocial
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aura that surrounds women who work outside the home. If we consider all the research surrounding the psychological devaluation of women who devote themselves to full-time care giving (Adams, 2008), we could be forgiven for thinking we are damned if we do and damned if we don’t. Even in 2009, a woman rising to the top of her profession (particularly a male-dominated profession like the law) appears to acquire an automatic profile a la Dati. The hopes and aspirations of other women accompany her wherever she goes and the acerbic judgments and perceptions of men and women seem to follow her every decision and action. In this chapter, I would like to reflect on the relevant contextual factors for women working today, explore some of the difficulties and barriers that still challenge us (including some of our own making), and provide some commentary on the hot contemporary issues for women who work outside the home. In relation to specific aspects of legislation, change to Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) law and government agency direction, I will be referencing the Australian context. MAPPING THE TERRAIN There are many interesting discourses on the psychology of women and the issues they face as a longstanding minority group (in sphere of influence if not always numbers), and I don’t intend to duplicate their efforts here. One comprehensive and well-written account of women’s lives and issues of particular relevance to women is discussed in Denmark and Paludi (1993). Some political, social, and cultural markers would seem to indicate that things are certainly happening, albeit at a pace best described as painstakingly slow. WORKFORCE PARTICIPATION AND EARNING PARITY It is an all too common indictment of the gender gap that women in Australia are paid 85 cents in every male wages dollar, and the Australian disparity is typical of other Western countries. Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) (Office for Women, 2009; ABS, 2005) data suggested that on average, hourly earnings of full-time males and females (allowing for the exclusion of overtime) are $30.41 and $25.87, respectively. This is an earning ratio of 85 percent, which has narrowed by around 4 percentage points over the last decade. The original compelling metaphor of the glass ceiling was coined to describe this gap in earnings between the genders (Wirth, 2002). The gender-wages gap has long been considered a powerful and telling metric by which to analyze gender inequality. The existence of a gap reflects two discriminatory phenomena; women being paid less money to do the equivalent job of
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males—even in the same pay scale women can start at the bottom of the scale while men are paid at the middle or the top—and, women tend to dominate the so-called ‘‘pink jobs’’ (i.e., secondary labor market job roles that reflect gender stereotypes in male-dominated societies because they are seen to echo domestic responsibilities, (e.g., librarianship, nursing, teaching, secretarial). These roles are remunerated at a lower level than the so-called ‘‘blue-collar jobs’’ (manual labor requiring technical ability and strength) or ‘‘white collar’’ (e.g., salaried professionals like engineers, accountants, lawyers, some managers) with the latter roles regarded as being higher in complexity and accountability (Fontenot, 2007). Nevertheless, not all disparity can be accounted for by the differential complexity of these jobs or the higher percentages of women working part-time. Despite the remarkable changes in recent labor market structure, women in 2001 held just 1.3 percent of the top management positions in the largest Australian companies (Kee, 2006) According to the Annual Report of the Government Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Agency (EOWA), only two of the top 200 companies were chaired by women and just four had women chief executives (EOWA, 2004). Over the past few years, more women in Australia pursued tertiary study than men. It is reported that 51.7 percent of professionals with bachelor’s degrees in 2005 were women (Kee, 2006), and that is on the rise. According to a professional survey in 2008 by Beaton Consulting, women now comprise over half the graduates in accounting yet account for less than 15 percent of accounting firm partners. While one would not expect the numbers entering the profession at the bottom end to reflect in leadership composition at the top end overnight, the persisting differential is hard to ignore. Similarly, the percentages of women at lower job classifications in banking and finance (e.g., tellers) is high yet numbers of senior women in banking and finance is still very low. These findings underscore the slow tortuous progress in equity experienced by women on two distinct fronts. We see systemic discrimination, which perpetuates the cycle of disadvantage for minority groups including women and/or women can ‘‘vote with their feet’’ and elect not to pursue senior positions in sectors or companies that appear to them to be so inhospitable toward women. Thus we can see a duality of disadvantage where women are involuntarily blocked and/or potentially self-select out of what they believe will be a working life filled with unacceptable challenges once they do the sums on the payoffs and penalties. In our discussion on ceilings, floors, and walls later in the chapter, the glass ceiling and the maternal wall are representations of the first phenomenon, and the ‘sticky floor’, the second.
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WOMEN WITH POWER: THE VISIBILITY OF WORKING WOMEN Several watershed appointments in the past five years would appear to indicate that female representation at the top echelons of government and business in Australia is clearly on the rise. The Australian federal election in 2008 precipitated a change in government and the appointment of Julia Gillard to deputy prime minister. Indeed at the time of writing this chapter, our new prime minister (PM) was so busy forging ties with key governments and opinion leaders overseas that Gillard was at the helm for over two months in the PM’s first year in office (69 days according to The Australian Newspaper, November 2008). While the former conservative government had been in power for over 10 years, no woman had risen to such prominence, and people were generally critical of that government’s failure to bring about tangible equality in providing paid maternity leave, assigning women ministerial positions in large and complex government portfolios, and addressing pay inequity and government sponsored child-care; the latter two regarded as critical success factors in the fight for gender equality (Broderick, Burrow, & Ridout, 2008). Notwithstanding public acceptance of her candidacy for her parliamentary seat and subsequent appointment to a ‘‘super Ministry’’ of three portfolios, Gillard (2007), who faced unprecedented media attention for being ‘‘childless by choice,’’ said in a television interview: I think women are still making their way into politics—obviously a lot’s changed for women but there’s still a few things to change still. . . . that there’s been more attention on private life questions for me than perhaps male politicians. . . . I think that one of the problems for women is that historically there’s been no right answer—if you don’t have kids, then people say you can’t understand everyone else’s life experience, and if you do have kids, then people say who’s looking after the kids while you’re doing all of this. (Interview with Channel 7 Network)
Other notable appointments were directorships for women in large public companies including the national airline, Qantas, CEO appointments in government agencies and private organizations, a woman governor general (who had previously headed up the Federal Sex Discrimination Commission), and the biggest in my mind, the appointment of Christine Nixon, a woman from the state of New South Wales as chief commissioner of police for the state of Victoria in 2001. However, it is fair to say that these stand out because they were the exception rather than the rule. Board representation in Australian companies stands at a disgraceful 10.9 percent notwithstanding broader representation of women at middle and upper management and down from 12 percent in 2006 (Medd, 2008). As already mentioned, women still earn
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85 cents in every male dollar across all sectors, and workforce participation rates among women between 25 and 44 years is one of the lowest in OECD countries (Abhayaratna & Lattimore, 2006) even after adjusting for variances in statistical practices. The Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) blames that in large part on problems with child care and the absence of taxpayer-funded maternity leave and other measures to support primary careers. WOMEN AS CONSUMERS Interestingly, women in the almost identical age bracket (25- to 40year-olds) are the fastest-growing Australian wealth demographic and are being targeted for potential sales growth (Young, 2008). Furthermore, the proliferation of new businesses of small and medium size is attributable predominantly to women. In a study commissioned by a major non-bank lender (Wizard Home Loans, 2006), women declared they were the home managers in 93 percent of cases, that one-third made decisions on finance loans and other financial products entirely on their own, and that in 61 percent of cases they were joint decision makers on big home financial decisions. Women are becoming a consumer force to be reckoned with. However, interest in financial planner seminars on how to attract the female dollar are spawned by the recognition of business opportunity; not necessarily underpinned by sincere moral and feministic attempts to right the injustices of the past. There are still a lot of obstacles to women achieving their potential, including structural barriers to workforce participation and therefore to financial independence. Women now officially number just under half the Australian workforce (45 percent) (ABS, 2007), but sheer numbers don’t tell a story of equity and access unless we look at the proportion of women in an organization vertically. In other words, if the numbers of men and women in an organization are exactly balanced but the vast majority of positions at the top end of organizations are occupied by men, then we have achieved equity of access (to work) but not equity of outcomes (to workplace opportunities). Most human rights commentators agree it is happening but far too slowly despite almost three decades of an Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) regime that outlaws discrimination on gender grounds. WOMEN AND EEO LAW Australia has a 25-year history of gender (sex) discrimination legislation at the federal level, and for the most part the legislation has served them well. The federal Sex Discrimination Act (SDA) was passed in 1984 and outlaws direct and indirect discrimination on the basis of gender, marital status, pregnancy, potential pregnancy (being female
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and perceived to be of childbearing age), and career status/family responsibilities. The overarching principle has been one of meritocracy: the best person for the job on objective job-related criteria. Australia resisted mandating Affirmative Action in the form of positive discrimination, quotas, or even targets but organizations (particularly mid to large size) are expected to demonstrate by way of formal and regular reports to the Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Agency (EOWA) what they are doing to eliminate the barriers to women at work, such that, they may enjoy access to workplace opportunities (assuming they are the most suitable candidate for that opportunity). That is not to say individual organizations do not elect to go beyond the minimum requirement and actively promote those of minority group status. The pervasive long-term doctrine has been merit-based selection. In an era of rampant gender discrimination, the merit principle was undoubtedly a clear, fair, and unequivocal stance, but it didn’t stop organizations giving a potential job applicant the standard line— ‘‘There was another applicant more suitable’’—and seemingly getting away with it. The law (and organizational policies emanating from it) did, however, empower any would-be complainant to demand an explanation for decisions made, and it has undoubtedly resulted in more rigorous, transparent, and legally defensible processes over time. What an examination of this system some twenty-plus years on would suggest is that many working women may enjoy better access, but as per the selection example just given, not necessarily equality of outcomes. At the time of writing, state EEO legislation is exploring the notion of positive obligations on the part of employers as a way to achieve equity. There is a growing perception that EEO law, and specifically the merit principle, have not done enough and that what has been achieved has come too slowly. Comprehensive, ethically motivated, and articulate policies mounted behind perspex on the walls of lavishly appointed board rooms won’t count for anything if cowboy gatekeepers, committed to preserving the status quo, are allowed to perpetuate systemic disadvantage of minority groups with no fear or experience of actual consequences. It is the culture of organizations that have found informal, often systemic, ways to hold women back that has been our less obvious problem. The SDA also covers sexual harassment, which goes beyond unfair disadvantage of women (and men) at work in respect of workplace opportunities like promotion, pay, and benefits but to how they are treated in the context of their work. Interestingly, there have been two iterations to this legislation. Australia witnessed a watershed when changes were made on the 10th anniversary of the Sex Discrimination Act that encompassed a shift in the definition of sexual harassment. With the advent of the legislation in 1984, complainants had to argue that they suffered adverse impact in their jobs by rejecting the
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unwelcome attention of alleged sexual harassers, or believed they would, in order to have a sexual harassment complaint substantiated. With the legislative changes in 1994, the definition of sexual harassment changed to ‘‘unwelcome attention of a sexual nature that offends, intimidates or humiliates someone or makes the workplace unpleasant.’’ Thus, women and men did not have to experience unlawful workplace discrimination in rejecting the unwelcome attention. They simply had to feel emotionally or psychologically put upon. This not only marked a shift in employee relations legislation but effectively in human rights. The re-interpretation of the legislation heralded an important shift from viewing inequity (i.e., differential treatment) in the workplace as a function of unlawful direct or indirect disadvantage to issues of culture and the psychosocial elements of work relationships. Because the vast majority of people who hold senior positions in organizations are men, that the subordinate roles are commonly occupied by women (see earlier discussion on pink jobs vs. blue and white jobs), and considering sexual harassment is often an abuse of power, it is not surprising that consistently over 90 percent of complaints made in a jurisdiction on sexual harassment have been made by women against men. Structural barriers to opportunities clearly limit opportunities, but the issue of hospitable or alienating culture (as demonstrated by unwelcome behavior, including sexual behavior) will also create perceptions that will in turn drive behavior. If the belief held by senior men in a consulting engineering firm is that female applicants won’t fit in to their culture and they then disregard the applications from women, few if any women will have the chance to prove them wrong in their workplace. Thus, gender balance will remain skewed. However, women who perceive they will get a raw deal in such workplaces, hear anecdotally of other women being given a hard time, observe poor gender balance, or hear hostile sexist comments will likely vote with their feet when opportunities arise. Other women down the track, contemplating whether or not to work there, may conclude organizational culture is indeed a ‘‘cowboy culture’’ as evidenced by the poor gender ratio of professional staff or a persisting gender wages gap, therefore declining offers and maintaining the status quo. The same distaste for inhospitable or backward culture may also influence women’s decisions to remain employees or go out on their own as small business owners. It may well impact their decision to return to work after maternity leave with all the associated advantages afforded the organization that doesn’t have to start all over again. It may and does also impact women’s decisions to have children and/or delay starting a family. This has compounded implications for some as they delay until such time as they believe they have established themselves professionally only to discover they encounter fertility problems. In this argument, we
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see the difference between the ‘‘glass ceiling,’’ where disadvantage and unfair treatment morph into each other but are perpetrated by others, to what we might refer to as ‘‘the sticky floor,’’ where the fears and apprehension of women, combined with the goals they want to achieve, are best addressed by other means (e.g., becoming small independent homebusiness owners). In this paradigm, even if opportunities present themselves, women may elect not to pursue them. GLASS CEILINGS As noted earlier, the so-called ‘‘glass ceiling’’ is a powerful metaphor for invisible yet actual barriers to the ascendance of women in workplaces, often reflected and measured by a gender wages gap that can not be accounted for by number of hours worked or job complexity. Thus, the glass ceiling attests to the inequity of outcomes, not just access, for women at work. Moreover, the notion of a glass ceiling implies that the barriers are extrinsic to the hopes and aspirations of those women and are enacted and enforced by others in positions of power (presumably men). The barriers may come in the form of spoken and unspoken barriers to entry—‘‘women need not apply’’—and/ or unspoken barriers to advancement. The barriers come in the form of gender-based roles with differential income earning potential and the complementary devaluing of ‘‘pink jobs’’ financially and societally. (For a fascinating discourse on the devaluing of motherhood, see Crittenden, 2001.) The barriers can be measured quantitatively in the form of differential pay more than fifty years after the 1951 International Labor Organization (ILO) convention mandating equal pay for work of equal value was ratified and the barriers can represent indirect blockages to advancement in the form of restricted/differential access to training, coaching, and mentoring. More subtle factors are also at work here, which may involve more than the conscious rejection of everything female or feminine by male powerbrokers. The reality is that business organizations are typically still male-led and are dominated by male culture and assumptions. Corporate language is often competitive, even ruthless: idioms are based on sport and war, deals are made on the golf course, corporate boxes at the tennis are legitimate business expenses, and men receive informal mentoring and support and they know it. In the early 1990s, working as a senior consultant with a major Australian Bank, I was struck by how many times other women there told me how my ‘‘story’’ inspired them. There was nothing terribly remarkable about my story as far as I was concerned except that I had a middle-management position in a bank and several children. I think it did occur to me when I was pregnant with my third child that perhaps I was somewhat of an anomaly for the bank when they told me they
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didn’t have a policy provision on what would happen with my company car when I went on maternity leave. I was told they would have to go away and consider it. When I asked for clarification they told me they had never had a woman at my level that was still of childbearing age, had actually decided to have a baby, intended to take maternity leave, and actually return. As I tried to determine whether women at my age didn’t tend to hold such positions, or didn’t have babies or didn’t come back after babies, I was told the answer was all of the above. It was certainly the case that some women rose to the position of chief manager in the bank at that time, but every one of them resigned within a year citing lack of acceptance at best or downright sabotage at worst. The culture was relentless in its expectation of these women (almost all of whom were single and driven) or ruthless in the exclusion or harassment these women experienced, yet the bank continued to pat itself on the back for their appointment. It appeared to me even then that there were few overt suggestions these women weren’t competent, far more so that they simply weren’t welcome.1 Women face other difficulties that may be partially explained by gender attribution theory (Wagner, Ford, & Ford, 1986). Behavior of the respective genders is perceived and labeled differently. ‘‘Assertive’’ men are ‘‘nagging’’ women; strong, decisive results-oriented women can be referred to as ‘‘ball breakers.’’ A tough negotiation stance can be perceived as ‘‘aggressive.’’ In addition, women who are comfortable with their femininity are often seen by other women to be exploiting it to get ahead. With that phenomenon we observe alarmingly that women can be just as tough on other women, thus buying in to the male conspiracy. The archetypal ‘‘feminine values’’ reflect a socialization of women taught to fit in, collaborate, be ‘‘nice,’’ to be not pushy nor to sound their own trumpet. Even if they do, some women sanction them for breaking the unspoken rule of equality (Peltier, 2001). Karina Butera, an Australian sociologist, has done extensive research into intergender conflict among women and concludes that women surveyed typically said they would rather work with men and that interpersonal conflict at work was their major source of stress (Butera, 2008). One biological explanation is that to ensure the survival of the species, women must gravitate toward men, not women. However, most of Butera’s research points to psychosocial explanations for female intragender conflict. Butera adds that women do tend to be ‘‘other-oriented’’ and can go out of their way to avoid upsetting others. However, given they legitimately need reflection and emotional release, they may speak to others about negative feelings rather than directly address the party with whom they have an issue. Men expressing anger or frustration as they feel it are often described as ‘‘straight shooters’’ or using the Australian idiom, they ‘‘call a spade a spade’’
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(or a spade a shovel if they’re very direct!). Thus, women in their gender-based behavior can reinforce unsavory stereotypes among men and other women as ‘‘bitchy,’’ ‘‘dishonest’’ (i.e., indirect), or ‘‘irrational.’’ If we postulate that masculine traits are still heavily valued in organizations but only if exhibited by men, women are caught in a double bind; wanting to be taken seriously, expected to get results but judged harshly for adopting male mores. This pressure or even deep-seeded value to be ‘‘nice’’ does not explain why some women can be so hard on other women. It is also not easy to determine whether women displaying ‘‘masculinized’’ behaviors ascend in organizations because of it or feel pressured to adopt such behaviors in order to stay there. However, in an era where women have been the pervasive minority for so long at senior levels in organizations, one could intuitively hypothesize that consciously or unconsciously women might see other women as their competition for choice roles and business opportunities. It has often been said that the wise executive will nurture, mentor others, and succession plan to free himself or herself for even bigger and better things. But this takes a degree of security and emotional intelligence that may be lacking in those consumed with what I will call the ‘‘scarcity mentality.’’ It is as if those women looking around the deck on the Titanic and seeing that iceberg approaching believe it is the other women in the executive boardroom who are really competing for the few working life rafts available on the ship. This could be further exacerbated with a gender neutral but powerful cultural norm that rewards competitive behavior as people scramble over each other to get to the top. Whatever the reasons for any women treating women badly, some feminists will say we’ve had men to do that for centuries. Is it fair to expect more of women by virtue of their attribution as naturally collaborative and harmonizing? One sobering reality is that gender attribution theory as portrayed here judges women’s language, style, and behavior by a double standard. It is not fair and just to judge them by a second; a higher moral plane than that by which men might be judged. In the past few months as the global economic crisis has seen businesses crumble and the spotlight has turned sharply on executive remuneration, I do not recall reading or hearing anything that blights the entire population of men in business. The minority of women who treat women badly are responsible to themselves and accountable to the organizations that hire them. People treating other people badly at work is not a gender-based issue but rather a cultural one. As Butera says, ‘‘gone are the days when we had to fight for the attention of cavemen’’ (to procreate). Women can push hard against the glass ceiling, use the best of their feminine and masculine traits and build strong, constructive relationships and strategic networks.
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At the end of the day, the most thriving organizations I have seen are those in which emotional intelligence, meritocracy, empathy, visionary leadership, and social conscience are practiced and affirmed. Furthermore, they are cultures in which bad behavior, whether it be indirect destructive communication, bullying or unethical treatment of other staff is actively disincentivized and if it is committed, is both ‘‘called’’ and ‘‘consequenced.’’ Women and men should be able to thrive in organizations where all are genuinely affirmed for their contribution to their organization and where collective pride in what they do and why they do it is found in shared purpose and discretionary effort akin to being a ‘‘corporate religion’’ (Kunde, 2002). Putting aside issues (and double standards) around acculturated behavior, Peltier (2001) claims that women face an additional challenge, which is that women usually do not get second chances. He argues that women are given less scope to experiment and err in the learning process and that after the first big mistake, instead of being given the benefit of the doubt, they are out the door. Couple this with the selfresponsibility many women feel to pave the way and pioneer for other women (that other-orientation), and you could forgive women for deciding the challenges are insurmountable and the risks just not worth taking. THE STICKY FLOOR Let us acknowledge there are self-imposed limitations on women who could achieve more in work and career but decline opportunities or elect not to pursue them at all. I would prefer to distinguish this phenomenon as the ‘‘sticky floor’’ as opposed to the ‘‘glass ceiling’’ (Kee, 2006). Many times, well-intentioned and egalitarian senior male clients rue the decisions of female staff when those women decline to be interviewed for more senior positions. The same males are often frustrated and shocked when they hear these competent women expressing a lack of confidence in their own ability to meet the demands of the job. Some of these sincere and supportive males comment on the fact that they have never heard a male applicant express apprehension about the possibility of ‘‘letting (his) team down.’’ Indeed these feministic men have reflected on how often they find themselves seeking to lower the expectations of male applicants who feel the next step up is their birthright. In interviewing so many working women over many years, I have found their reluctance to set their sights higher usually stems from one or more realistic concerns. First, they voice some doubt they will be seriously considered for the job and don’t want the humiliation of a tokenistic recruitment exercise (thus concerns about a glass ceiling). Second, their perceptions may be that the culture that exists in that upper echelon will be inhospitable, and their attempts at success may be/will be thwarted or sabotaged (referencing the notion of the sticky floor keeping them
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where they are). Third, they feel they have seen and heard enough about the pressures on those performing in those roles to believe the demands are unrealistic and incompatible with their family obligations (thus the existence of a ‘‘maternal wall’’) with real or imagined consequences keeping them where they are as soon as they commit the seemingly ultimate crime—motherhood (Sachs & Painton, 1993). THE MATERNAL WALL Yes, we’ve come a long way from the days where a woman working for the government or as a teacher got married and received two gifts in the forms of a wedding present from all the staff and termination of her employment. This strategy was, no doubt, deemed to be the ultimate in practical workforce planning, as organizations would not have to worry nervously about whether or not the married woman in question might disrupt the workplace with a pregnancy and subsequent absence. The organization was proactive in terminating her employment before she and her new partner could get a twinkle in their eyes. While it is clearly unlawful to discriminate against any woman today on pregnancy or potential pregnancy (assuming she could perform the inherent requirements of the job), the law can scarcely monitor the cultural or psychosocial backlash against the woman who seemingly commits the ultimate career slap in the face and decides to have a baby. In some cases that is clearly observed to be the ultimate in ungracious behavior, and the men (and women) who’ve ‘‘taken that risk on them, only to have it blow up in their faces’’ may demonstrate their displeasure. A landmark case in Australia in 1998 went the way of the complainant, Marea Hickie, who had attained partnership with a law firm Hunt and Hunt and found as she returned from maternity leave that the majority of her big files had been handed on to someone else (their concern was that she wouldn’t be able to cope) and that she had ostensibly been demoted. She was awarded damages in the Human Rights Commission and subsequently went on to attain partnership in another firm (Hickie v. Hunt & Hunt, 1998). In one sense, the maternal wall is a synthesis of the glass ceiling and the sticky floor where the demands of the job and/or the culture are fundamentally inhospitable to women with children. It could mean their status as mothers is obstructing opportunities and/or they are reluctant to seize them. A woman may be discriminated against and be directly or indirectly undermined in the role because she has a child or may be harassed by those who pay out on her ‘‘lack of commitment’’ because she refuses to work ridiculous hours. As in the case of Hunt and Hunt an organization can assign ‘‘sexy’’ high-profile projects/files elsewhere citing work/life balance as their excuse to give the plum opportunities to others. Management may simply assert the working
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mother is not a team player because she won’t stay back on Friday night for drinks with the others or show enthusiasm for residential retreats and overseas conferences. However, the woman seeing this played out in front of her may not take this lying down. She can and may make changes. In the research discussed in a Time Magazine article by Andrea Sachs, 53 percent of almost one thousand Harvard graduates said they’d changed their jobs or specialties because of family responsibilities, and 25 percent of female Harvard MBAs had bugged out of the workforce completely. This is alarming if one considers that Harvard MBAs may have been more empowered and had more attractive choices and better earning capacity than some other women. On the other hand, it is also possible the Harvard grads believed their qualifications would open all doors (excessive Harvard hubris?), and they became more frustrated and disappointed sooner than most. Such can be the fear of the maternal wall that women may delay or abandon starting a family until they have got to a place (job and/or career) that they believe will make them seemingly impervious to the threat of the wall. Wheeler (2005) refers to them in her studies as ‘‘postponers’’ as opposed to ‘‘early deciders’’; the latter who are distinguished as making the decision not to have children independently of whether or not they are or aren’t in a relationship and how their partner feels about their decision. Wheeler’s study is interesting because the widely held view is that women will remain childless by choice almost exclusively because of the maternal wall. Wheeler found that while this was certainly true for many, and work was a strong driver, a distinct and substantial percentage of women expressed negative sentiment about the motherhood role and the impact of potential motherhood on a range of life aspects. In 2002, the percentage of Australian women who would not have children was 24 percent, with an estimated 7 percent having fertility problems and the remaining 17 percent making the choice. Researchers are agreed this figure will rise (ABS, 2002). According to the fourteenth annual report on pregnancy and childbirth in Australia released by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) National Perinatal Statistics Unit, over 40 percent of births in 2004 were to first-time mothers, who, at an average age of 28 years were about two years older than their 1991 counterparts. Mothers aged 35 years or older made up 12.5 percent of new mothers in 2004, compared with 6.9 percent in 1995 when the average age of first-time mothers was 26.5 years. Fertility specialists are in high demand. Assisted pregnancies and in vitro fertilization (IVF) are booming industries in this country. Having babies while single has been destigmatized to a degree, and same-sex couples are accessing assisted reproductive technologies via recent changes to legislation.
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The maternal wall can be no more than a perception based on culture and observed practice, but the maternal wall may be built of structural inhibitors to active participation including roles at senior levels. In Australian Equal Opportunity Law there are but two defenses to unlawful discrimination. The lesser one is the defense of ‘‘unjustifiable hardship’’; that is, the accommodations one might have to make for a person of minority group status are claimed to be unaffordable. Clearly, if this were relevant, it would only apply to small-ish businesses and would be hard to substantiate on purely gender grounds. The second and more substantive justification for discrimination is the ‘‘operational requirements of the business’’ or ‘‘the inherent requirements of the job.’’ Lack of workplace flexibility, narrow minded and rigid obstinacies about a requirement for workers in certain positions to work full-time can make it impracticable, even untenable, for women to pursue certain opportunities. In the context of otherwise flagrant gender discrimination the male or female manager may use the requirement of full time in a given role as a pretext to exclude women with family responsibilities or those inferred to be ‘‘potentially pregnant.’’ The Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) continually cites paid maternity leave and flexible work practices as the two most enabling of all policies/instrument to create better access and opportunities for women. The focus on paid maternity leave has raged for some years, with different organizations putting idiosyncratic policies in place on an enterprise basis. Indeed some organizations are adamant that not only do their flexible work practices improve retention and morale, they serve as a heavy-duty competitive advantage in a tight and shrinking labor market where the attraction and retention of talent rules as the number one organizational imperative. They have moved along a continuum that began with a commitment to equity (of access and opportunity), to diversity, to social responsibility to ‘‘strategic opportunity’’ (David Morgan, n.d.). While there will be a number of sociological and other variables to account for the demographic shifts and not all roads lead to the fear of the maternal wall, the desire to exercise different choices has most certainly been catalyzed in large part by (a) the removal of barriers to women’s participation in the workforce and (b) growing consciousness of the right to enjoy not just financial income or independence but enduring careers; something which should be the province of both men and women. A FINAL WORD ON SOCIETAL EXPECTATIONS AND WORK/FAMILY CONFLICT Some women would argue that while doors to workplaces have opened, there has not been a corresponding decrease in pressure to
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maintain standards in parenting, maintain the home, entertain and remain sexually active. So are we now free to do it all and have it all as long as we don’t drop the ball on anything else? The highly accessible world of women’s magazines, YouTube, and talk shows places enormous emphasis on body image, healthy eating, working out, gourmet food preparation, and agelessness. It can seem as if we’re expected to have the figure and athleticism of Lara Croft Tomb Raider while holding down the job as World Vision CEO (or find extra time to do unpaid humanitarian work), be able to entertain like Nigella Lawson, and raise perfect well-socialized children with Mensa IQs. To top it off, we have to achieve that within three weeks of giving birth to them (Google the ‘‘yummy mummy’’ phenomenon). I think I would rather just concede that Angelina wins. The old adage suggests that a picture creates a thousand words, but it may be more helpful here to reflect on the way in which a few words may tell a big (and controversial) story. While often the stuff of humorous sisterhood weekends away, nights out with ‘‘the girls,’’ and comic emails doing the rounds, the choice of language used by men and women says a lot about their ‘‘mental models’’ (Senge, 1990/2006). While these stories are anecdotal, it is not uncommon to hear working women talk about male partners who do or don’t ‘‘help around the house’’ (as the case may be!). Related to this are the comments from other women who, on establishing that their friends have partners who share the unpaid work in the home, tell their friends they are ‘‘lucky.’’ The language used would appear to indicate that this is woman’s work and they are either fortunate (or not) that partners assist them in this unpaid work. Again anecdotally, one can hear women and men say that their menfolk are ‘‘babysitting’’ (not parenting?) the children that night while women go out. A recent study of interviews with 21,000 people by the U.S. Department of Labor (2009) found that working women on average spent one hour more per day in housework and caring for family members than men while men spent approximately one hour more per day at work. In percentage terms the areas in which women and men differ the most in hours at work can be accounted for by the part-time status of some women surveyed but the biggest discrepancy in the study was in relation to unpaid work. Increasingly, research is being devoted to the ‘‘struggle with juggle’’ (Faraday-Brash, 2006) or work-to-family conflict being the extent to which work imposes itself on life at home (eg ‘‘the helicopter parent’’/ the ‘‘latchkey child’’), but more recently, has included the pressure of family-to-work conflict also (Duxbury, 2003). Statistics show that adult women are more vulnerable to depression than adult men. Thus, while the prevalence of depression is only one measure of health, increased access for women to work, better pay, and career advancement doesn’t
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automatically mean they will travel well. The happiness movement has discovered a lot about what contributes to health and well-being, and if women believe they can have it all rather than have it most, they are potentially doomed to abject disappointment (as well as accusations of delusional thinking). Regretfully, it seems clear we are still a long way from World Peace, but we can work on achieving a better form of inner peace. Defining our goals and being purposeful, negotiating for what we want, looking after other women and helping them be successful, affirming men who support our successes, furthering our own cause by refusing to succumb to age-old stereotypical versions of ourselves, and realistically appraising what is possible based on real needs and values will be the things that help get us there. Even if we move beyond equity of access at work to tangible equality of outcomes, it is humbling to remember that a person’s identity is not defined solely by their work, nor could we say that factors outside the workplace will have no bearing on a person’s status at work. What is possible for women at work is merely an extension of, or adjunct to, the societal context in which women live. Indeed, a holistic approach is required to ensure women’s standing in society is elevated. I was lucky enough to grow up in an era where women started to appreciate they could ‘‘have it most.’’ Exercising self-responsibility and owning the choices we make demonstrates the emotional intelligence we want everyone to demonstrate. My daughters truly believe they can ‘‘have it all.’’ Life may not quite live up to that version of utopia, and there may always be a struggle with juggle, but the will to strive is a big part of what makes us human and ironically, being human is not gender-specific. NOTE 1. Interestingly and heartwarmingly, the bank was headed up the past ten years by a most visionary and compassionate egalitarian leader, and engagement in the same organization under vastly different leadership would be the envy of all other major Australian banks.
REFERENCES Abhayaratna, J., & Lattimore, R. (2006, December). Workforce participation rates: How does Australia compare? Staff Working Paper (Report for the Australian Government Productivity Commission). Retrieved August 2009 from http:// www.pc.gov.au/research/staffworkingpaper/workforceparticipation. Adams, J. (2008). Women’s place is in the home: The ideological devaluation of women’s work. Report for the American Anthropological Association, 12, 2–11. Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). (2002). Australian social trends 2002. Cat. No. 4102.0. Canberra: ABS.
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Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). (2005). Trends in the gender pay gap. Cat. No. 6306. Canberra: ABS. Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). (2007). Australian social trends 2007. Cat. No. 4102.0. Canberra: ABS. Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. (2008, December 9). Media release: More births to older mother trend continuing. Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. Retrieved August 2009 from http://www.aihw.gov.au/ mediacentre/2008/mr20081209.cfm. Beaton Consulting. (2008). Annual business and professions study. Melbourne: Beaton Consulting. Broderick, E., Burrow, S., & Ridout, H. (2008). Maternity scheme is overdue in Productivity Commission research on federally funded maternity leave (Joint project with Australian Industry Group, Australian Council of Trade Unions and Human Right and Equal Opportunity Commission. Retrieved April 8, 2009 from http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/maternity-scheme-isoverdue/2008/04/07/1207420296235. Butera, K. J. (2008). Breaking down inter-gender workplace conflict. Corporate Wellness, Summer 08/09, 38–41. Courcol, C. (2009). ‘‘Supermum’’ MP angers French feminists. Retrieved January 9, 2009, from http://news.ninemsn.com.au/world. Crittenden, A. (2001). The price of motherhood: Why the most important job in the world is still the least valued. New York: Metropolitan Books (Holt). Denmark, F. L., & Paludi, M. A. (Eds.) (1993). The psychology of women: A handbook of issues and theories. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Duxbury, L., & Higgins, C. (2003, October). Work-life conflict in Canada in the new millennium: A status report. Ottawa, ON: Public Health Agency of Canada. Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Agency. (2004). Annual report. Canberra: EOWA. Retrieved August 2009 from http://www.eowa.gov.au/ EOWA_Events_LandingPage.asp. Faraday-Brash, L. (2006). Struggling with juggling. Retrieved March 30, 2009 from www.brashconsulting.com.au. Fontenot, R. (2007). Blue, pink, and white collars. Retrieved March 3, 2009 from http://hercules.gcsu.edu. Hickie v. Hunt & Hunt. (1998). Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOCA) 8.38. 2008. Kee, H. J. (2006). Glass ceiling or sticky floor: Exploring the gender pay gap. Economic Record, December, pp. 408-427. Kunde, J. (2002). Corporate religion. London: United Kingdom: Financial Times/ Prentice Hall. Medd, R. (2008). Still no cracks in the glass ceiling. Retrieved October 30, 2008, from http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/stories/s2405232.htm. Minahan, S., & Beverland, M. (2005). Why women shop: Secrets revealed. Qld: John Wiley & Sons Australia—Wrightbooks. Morgan, D. (2009, March 3). Getting off the treadmill and on the program. Office for Women. (2009). Women in Australia 2009, Chap. 3. Canberra. Peltier, B. (2001). The psychology of executive coaching: Theory and application. Sussex: Brunner-Routledge. Sachs, A., & Painton, P. (1993, May 10). The maternal wall, Time Magazine.
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Senge, P. (1990, 2006). The fifth discipline. New York: Doubleday/Currency. The Australian. (2008, November 24). Business as usual for Gillard the Caretaker. U.S. Department of Labor. (2009). American time use survey. http:// salary.nytimes.com. Wagner, D., Ford, R., & Ford, T. (1986). Can gender inequalities be reduced? American Sociological Review, 51, 47–61. Wheeler, J. (2005). Decision making styles of women who choose not to have children. Institute of Family Studies Conference. Unpublished paper. Williams, J., & Segal, N. (2003). Beyond the maternal wall: Relief for family caregivers who are discriminated against on the job. Harvard Women’s Law Journal, 26, 77–162. Wirth, L. (2002). Women in management: Closer to breaking through the glass ceiling? In M. Loutfi (Ed.), Women Gender and Work. Geneva: International Labour Office. Wizard Home Loans. (2006, March). Emerging trends in women’s home ownership. Young, V. (2008, March 12). Advisers target female dollar: wealthy women a financial catch, Investor Daily.
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Chapter 6
Women as Religious Leaders: Advances and Stalemates J. Harold Ellens
The history of women in religious ministries is an odyssey of fits, starts, and regressions; of spectacular successes and pitiful failures. This is true of all faith groups and particularly of all of the various iterations of Judaism and Christianity. The 2001 World Christian Encyclopedia of Oxford Press informs us that in Protestant Christianity alone there are 33,830 denominations worldwide (Barrett, Kurian, & Johnson, 2001). I remember my church history professor in seminary informing us, while discussing the various orders of medieval and modern Catholicism, that one should never forget that there is greater variety within the faith community of Roman Catholicism than in all of Protestantism. I am not so sure that such a statement can safely be made today, 60 years later. What can be said, however, is that the great variety of forms and institutions of religion that have marked human history until this day have been the matrix of a painful and precarious pilgrimage for women endeavoring to express their inherent desire and heroic struggle to be certified and legitimized in authentic religious leadership roles. Most Westerners can name at least five different Jewish ‘‘denominations’’ and that, undoubtedly, does not indicate the great variety of subdivisions within each of those. Likewise, such other faith groups as Buddhism, while it is constituted mainly by the distinctive schools of Mahayana, Vajrayana, Theravada, and Hinayana communities, is almost infinitely divided into more than fifty specialized subgroups within each of the four major ‘‘denominations,’’ as well independent national Buddhist communities. Recently, the various forms of Islam
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(al Qaeda, Sufism, Shi’ite, and Suni Muslims) are very much present in human awareness worldwide. Every one of these religious systems has been an arena in which the issue of women in religious leadership has been a significant contest and the source of noteworthy ferment. At least since the shift from matriarchal human communities to patriarchalism, about 5000 BCE, in all facets of society the role of women has been repressed, suppressed, and oppressed. This aspect of the human experiment has been a relatively consistent history of keeping women under control; that is, whether consciously intentional or motivated by other drivers, the story is one of power brokering in which women have been most of the time disenfranchised. The most unfortunate aspect of this tragic narrative is the fact that religious institutions have, until recently, been the most powerful agents and agencies of this injustice. The misfortune is compounded by the fact that repressing the contribution of women has been a deprivation and self-defeat of those very persons and institutions that have perpetrated and perpetuated this unwisdom and injustice. It started very early in the history of religious institutions. Though women have always been a key part of religious communities of every kind, in the last 3,000 years for which we have some kind of historical record, their role has been relatively subservient most of the time. For about 250 years, in the early centuries of the Jesus Movement and the Christian faith groups that followed it, women were quite obviously the prominent leaders of the developing religious communities. When Christendom was established by Constantine, creating the Imperial Church in 325 CE, the role of women was severely and permanently suppressed, as was the role of dissenting spiritual or theological opinion. Karen Torjeson (1993), Dorothy Irvin (1980), and Joan Morris (1973) published notable books on this issue, naming the Constantinian revolution and its women-suppressive antecedents the scandal of their subordination. In elegant elegiac prose, Torjeson (1993) regales us with a story that fixes her thesis firmly in empirical historical data. She writes: Under a high arch in a Roman basilica dedicated to two women saints, Prudentiana and Praxedis, is a mosaic portraying four female figures: the two saints, Mary, and a fourth woman whose hair is veiled and whose head is surrounded by a square halo—an artistic technique indicating that the person was still living at the time the mosaic was made. The four faces gaze out serenely from a glistening gold background. The faces of Mary and the two saints are easily recognizable. But the identity of the fourth is less apparent. A carefully lettered inscription identifies the face on the far left as Theodora Episcopa, which means Bishop Theodora. The masculine form for bishop in Latin is episcopus; the feminine form is episcopa. The mosaic’s visual evidence and the inscription’s grammatical evidence point out unmistakably that Bishop Theodora was a woman. (pp. 9–10)
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Similarly, on Santorini, the Greek Island of Thera, a gravesite bears the epitaph of a woman named Epiktas, who was a priest sometime between 200 and 400 CE. This should not surprise us as much as it does. It is clear from St. Paul’s contributions to the New Testament that most of his churches were established and led by prominent, highly accomplished women. It is difficult to discover indicators in the Pauline and Deutero-Pauline letters that there were any of the numerous congregations he established in Asia Minor, Greece, and Italy that were led by men or even had prominent men in their membership. The eventual appointment of Timothy to the role of pastor seems to be a singularly notable exception to that state of affairs. Moreover, Jesus’s twelve disciples are given prominence in the apparently male-authored narratives in the New Testament, but it does not take much reading between the lines to note that there was a larger entourage of women sharing in the Jesus Movement. In the Jesus story, they were, after all, the first to recognize his distinctiveness, the main company of disciples at his crucifixion, the first at his tomb, and the first to witness and report his resurrection. Hence, they became the first messengers of the news of the resurrection appearances around which the entire hopeful Christian faith community was formed. In the Gospel of Mary, a Nag Hammadi manuscript from the second century, Mary Magdalene is the disciple who inspires the rest of Jesus’s disciples to remember the teaching of Jesus and get on with the mission for which he had chosen them (Fiorenza, 1975). Roger Gryson (1976) represents the generations of male historians who have consistently contributed to the suppression of this kind of empirical evidence from art, archaeology, early Christian literature, and corollary ancient testimonies. He erroneously and defensively declares: From the beginnings of Christianity, women assumed an important role and enjoyed a place of choice in the Christian Community. Paul praised several women who assisted him in his apostolic works. Women also possessed the charism of prophecy. There is no evidence, however, that they exercised leadership roles in the community. Even though several women followed Jesus from the onset of his ministry in Galilee and figured among the privileged witnesses of his resurrection, no women appeared among the Twelve or even among the other apostles. As Epiphanius of Salamis pointed out, there have never been women presbyters. (p. 109)
Gryson is, of course, patently incorrect in his claims, having been unable to take into consideration the wealth of evidence to the contrary that has been generated by the significant scholarship that has developed on this issue since the publication of his book three decades ago. The work done during the late 1970s to the mid-1990s by James M. Robinson and his
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teams of scholars at the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity, deciphering and publishing the library of Gnostic manuscripts discovered at Nag Hamadi in upper Egypt, contributed greatly to our understanding of early Christian practices. In many of them, we have indications that in the second to the fifth century CE there were still lively memories and legends of women as religious leaders, indeed women ordained as bishops, in the early church. As the Constantinian revolution established a church polity model that not only suppressed women religious leadership but excluded it completely in Christendom, so also after the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, the church of the Middle Ages afforded virtually no role for woman religious leadership. The only exception to this statement is the revolutionary role some women carved out for themselves in the form of operational ministries in applied modes, down on the ground where the great needs were, so to speak. These roles were usually carried on outside the official structure of the church. They eventually led to the rise of sanctioned orders of women in ministry, usually regularized by attachment to male orders, such as the female order associated with the Franciscans (Clara), the Jesuits of St. Ignatius, and the Dominicans (Catherine of Siena). Julian of Norwich, St. Theresa of Avila, and the other noted Medieval female mystics represent a mere tip of a huge iceberg of incredibly devoted women who carried out ministry within and beyond the bounds of the Medieval Church. When Protestantism arose after the Lutheran, Calvinist, and Anabaptist Reformations, women continued to have distinctive roles in the diaconate and its ministries of mercy, consolation, and healing to suffering humanity. Regardless of the patriarchal pressure to the contrary, the presence of women in ministry has always been irrepressible. The repression and overt oppression that existed in the Christian community for 18 centuries, however, took the form of a glass ceiling that obstructed the movement of women into the offices, authority, and empowerment of ordination. Only in the mid-twentieth century did women finally manage to achieve ordination to Christian ministry in some Protestant Churches. Methodism in the United States began to ordain women to the offices of Minister of Word and Sacraments in the late 1930s. Independents and Pentecostals preceded that date but only in the cases of exceptional, independent, charismatic, self-appointed, and self-made prophets such as Amy Semple McPherson and Mary Baker Eddy. Presbyterianism began to ordain women to the offices of the word and sacraments in 1957. A similar pattern of development took place at approximately the same time in the various Jewish denominations. Of course, in Muslim communities no gain has been achieved in ordination of women to such roles as leaders of congregations, officials of mosques, or the function of Iman. So the regularization of the roles of
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women in religious leadership at the official level is very recent and sparsely distributed among the religious institutions of the Western World. In 1999, Audrey Brosnan wrote an interesting study of women going through transition in ministry roles in the Roman Catholic Church. She focused on the perplexities and pain of women in religious leadership in the Roman Catholic faith community. In a private conversation, Dr. Brosnan highlighted key factors in the historic struggles that have prevailed over the centuries, down to this present moment. She pointed out crisply that the plight of women in religious leadership in Christendom has always been a turbulent quest for their clear discernment of authentic vocation and the mode and method of ministry to which they were called. Every movement for women in religious leadership was resisted, criticized, and obstructed until they were organized into identifiable and named mass movements that could appeal to the ecclesiastical authorities for institutionalization; for example, in the form of religious orders of cloistered women. Unfortunately, even these orders were usually given authoritative and legitimated status only as adjuncts to established male orders. Thus, the Jesuits of St. Ignatius, the Franciscans, the Dominicans, the Augustinians, and the Benedictines all had women’s orders associated with them. A recent assessment of official Roman Catholic women’s orders listed approximately 100 different such orders worldwide, each having a surprising number of daughter organizations in various countries of the world (Wikipedia, 2009) None of these women in divine vocation could ever be ordained to the priesthood, of course. Only Catholic men have been ordained, and women in religious leadership have always been required to attach themselves in one way or another to ordained men. Highly accomplished women in heroic and profound forms of ministry stand out in this historic tradition over the centuries, such as Catherine of Siena in the Dominican tradition, and St. Clara in the Franciscans women’s order. The list is long. Those rare women who achieved individual notable status in Christendom before the modern era were such wellknown figures as Julian of Norwich, Hildegaard of Bingen, St. Teresa of Avila, and Joan of Arc. These set the precedent for such modern figures as Mother Theresa, St. Theresa of Lisieux, and numerous lesser known but equally significant persons still among us today. Great women today who have a vision and vocation of ministry as women in religious leadership, but who are unable to achieve ordination because of the polity constraints of their faith community, strongly wish and often militate for a place at the table where the decisions are made for the present operation and the future shape of the church. In mainline Presbyterian and Methodist churches in the United States, in which ordination is now equally accessible to women as it is to men,
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many if not most of the major committees and commissions at the national organizational level, of those denominations, are lead by women. This pattern increases every decade, if not every year. In denominations in which women still cannot be ordained, there is a sturdy undercurrent of desire for such certified roles of women religious leadership. As I write this, the Roman Catholic Curia under Pope Benedict XVI is carrying out a systematic assessment of all women religious orders with the purpose of weeding out those progressive thinking women who militate in favor of women’s ordination to the priesthood in the Roman Catholic Communion. This is a step further along a course instituted by Benedict XVI while he was still head of the Curia in Rome during the papal tenure of Pope John Paul II. A decade or more ago he carried out a house-cleaning in all Roman Catholic Seminaries in the United States. It that intervention ecumenical initiatives by the seminaries toward other denominations were curtailed, non-Catholic faculty members were removed from Catholic seminaries, non-Catholic students could no longer matriculate in or even attend the Masters of Divinity courses leading to ordination to the priesthood, and non-Roman Catholic students were systematically amortized from the Master of Arts program in Religious Studies at the seminaries. This has caused and will now increasingly cause a significant distancing of the Roman Catholic communion from other communities of Christian faith traditions, as well as from those in Catholic membership who feel that the restrictions of the church against women in religious leadership is neither biblical, nor wise, nor fair. The predicament of such women in Roman Catholic communities is paradigmatic of that of women in any denomination or walk of life in which gender is an obstruction to vocation, promotion, and achievement. The situation places women with skills, talents, natures, and divine vocations for religious leadership in an impasse in which they are unable to be true to their own authentic selves. They are forced to decide whether they should simply continue alone in the pursuit of an interior personal spirituality or persist in pressing for such ordination, promotion, and leadership roles as permit them to exercise their sense of divine vocation. Are they to be satisfied with personal contemplation of the mystery of a meaningfully transcendent private spirituality or militate for the institutionalization of their rightful sense of calling in ministry? Benedict XVI, earlier as head of the Curia and now as Pope, has rolled back the progress toward proper certification of women that was advanced by Vatican II. As a result, Catholic women in religious leadership are forced to give up the hope for certification in roles equivalent to those of religious male leaders. This spills over into the general culture in many ways, mainly in the devaluing of women in their desire for advancement in secular forms of leadership commensurate with their education/training, abilities, and style. Such generalized
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erosion of hope in church and society can corrupt the victim’s vision of her own destiny, and in the case of religious leadership issues, prompt singularly able persons into tasks and careers that are not real ministry and are inferior to their ability and vocation. This raises the profound and life-shaping issues of values, objectives, goals, and identity in terms of women’s authentic vocation. Then a woman must try to discern where one can still serve best, in spite of being shut out of the arena of esteemed and standardized ministry. This is ultimately what religious and secular women face today. Every individual woman then is faced with making that isolated personal decision. Mother Theresa of Calcutta and her similar saintly antecedents were forced into that position and resolved it by heroic individual service to the most needy in our world, person by person and situation by situation. Inadvertently, her solitary ministry grew into a communal calling for many women, through her houses of ministry, throughout the world. Women have always sublimated their loss of institutional certification and ordination by pouring their spiritual energies and sense of vocation into such community or worldwide missions. They are the ones who chose to move away from the struggle for ordination and simply immersed themselves in ministry to specific human needs, such as contemplation and prayer, teaching, or care of the needy and suffering. They are the ones who bore the burden and the heat, while they could have been those who spiritually conquered and subdued the land. Religious institutions, which resist honoring the ministry of women and the institutionalization of women’s leadership, invite thereby a counterforce to their institution in the form of a congealing group of those women who see it as a matter of ethical integrity to stay and fight. It is these women that the present papal housecleaning of the female orders is endeavoring to eliminate from places of influence. There is, of course, in every institution or society that represses religious leadership by women, a group of women who prefer to stay in the community, adapt to its prescriptions, define themselves in terms of its rubrics, and enjoy that traditional status quo. Such women or groups tend to go to the margins and work in peripheral ministries without pursuit of definitive central leadership roles. Others enter the academy and invest their energies there instead of in the church, and still others simply abandon the cause of religious service and move into a kind of freedom of forced secularity. If this were only true of the Roman Catholic Church and the Muslim congregations and Mosque-centered communities, it might be possible for most of us to ignore them and leave them to their benighted and misbegotten selves. However, the trouble, as hinted above, lies in the fact that this ancient mode of repressing women in religious institutions tends to reinforce the long-standing pattern of those same regressive values and behaviors in the culture and society in general. When
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the biblical community of Israel became an empire under David’s dynasty, prophets arose to remind them that this was not the intent of the covenant. Prophets challenged the status quo, claiming that God does not have a predestined system of order that is unfolding in history, no matter how humans behave. The prophets claimed that the world is not the way God intended it, and humans are responsible to set it right. So should women simply stay in repressive institutions and roles, acquiesce to the exploitation, and rationalize away the perfidy and immorality of such societal structures? Or is one duty bound and under ethical imperative to get out of the institution and establish an alternative structure that will function morally? Each woman must make her own decision regarding this watershed issue and discern where, for her, is the tipping point of the ethical and personal dilemma. Numerous biblical scholars, over the last three decades, have referred to the illustration of Jesus’s life and work, in which he obviously cultivated Mary Magdalene to be his equal in ministry, not his lover (Schaberg, 2002, 2006). Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza (1984, 2009) casts the issue of this ethical dilemma as the universal problem of women against empire and its patriarchal structures. A similar posture is advanced by Walter Wink (1984) in his work on the powers of human abuse and devaluation that are afoot throughout the world of contemporary human society. Wherever repression and oppression of any kind have prevailed in this world, it has often been up to women to initiate ministry and service to the marginalized, victimized, outcast, and disempowered. It was usually women that opened the doors and windows of new initiatives and experimental ministries for the needy, helpless, hopeless, and forlorn. How often throughout history the prophetic voices of women have given the sturdy and challenging leadership that delivered all kinds of persons from the denigration of their humanness, and so greatly relieved the human spirit of its travail (Wink, 1984, 1986, 1992, 1998, 2003). Surely this is the reason that Jesus’s message and style had such inordinate appeal to women, and that they have always sought official and certified ministry in his name. Jesus stood against all forms of entrenched power and oppression throughout his ministry. That was certainly the main point of his very existence. That is also the reason why, from the outset of his ministry, his interventionary voice and his unconventional claims on the sources of power in his society were suppressed and ultimately exterminated. Jesus stood against the powers of this world and so was himself oppressed, suppressed, and cast out. He cared greatly for those for whom others cared little, the outcast, suppressed, and oppressed. Women understood immediately and intuitively the sounds, signs, and significance of such a mission as Jesus’s, and its importance for the unempowered. They had been there, had done that trip, and had
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gotten the T-shirt, so to speak. So it should not surprise us that throughout history there have risen to the top of the tide of human endeavor, women of great ability and redemptive presence who have called for a legitimation of all forms of women’s religious leadership. They have long known the essential issues, have long sought deliverance, and they have militated appropriately for their opportunity to bind up the broken hearted and afford the ministry of deliverance and hope to all who are oppressed. The net outcome of this long historic struggle for the equality of women, for their freedom from sick dependencies and oppression, and for their ordination to and/or certification in religious leadership roles, turns out to be very interesting in many ways. This observation applies equally to women in the political arena, in social services agencies, in the academy, and in ordained religious roles, in those communities of faith of every religion and denomination that allows it. The fact that is most interesting about this modern day outcome is as follows. In the historically most highly regarded professions in the Western World, namely, religion, medicine, and university faculties, men are no longer the most prominent candidates or appointees. I came onto the university scene in 1970 and had a lovely time for a decade. However, in the subsequent quarter of a century, key university posts tended to be given to women or black candidates. If you were a qualified black woman, your chances were even better for an appointment. If you were a black Puerto Rican woman of Spanish extraction whose mother tongue was Hebrew, it was a cinch. The very specific reasons for this lie in two facts. First, the wholesome advantages of equal opportunity legislation, and second, the fact that, during the last two generations, males with first-line brains, so to speak, have not sought out the ministry, medicine, and the academy, as of primary interest to them. They have tended strongly, instead, to professions having to do with research, technology, and computer engineering, rather than the humanities and social sciences. At the same time, equal opportunity legal provisions opened the doors for women with first-line brains to seek and find significant appointments in ordained ministry, medicine, and university faculties. In those communions of faith and those institutions of medicine and learning that were open to senior roles for women, this began to provide the opportunity for woman of superior ability and training to acquire the leading positions in these historically esteemed professions. Thus, in Christian churches, which now ordain women to religious leadership positions, we are getting a preponderance of women with first-line brains entering our seminaries and our significant positions of religious leadership as ordained clergy. At the same time, a high percentage of the males who are going into ordained ministry, medicine, and university professorships have third- and fourth-line brains; that
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is, they are of far less ability, skill, motivation, and productivity than their women colleagues, for the most part. This is not true of all males, but a high percentage of those becoming ordained ministers, doctors, and university professors. Conversely, excellence does not mark all women entering the historically prized professions, but only a high percentage of them. This sociological and psychological shift represents a major modification in our culture. I was, for the first half of my professional career, an ordained minister in a denomination that would not ordain women to the roles of either deacon or teaching (preachers and pastors) and ruling elders. Many of us young men carried a brilliantly burning torch for the cause of women’s ordination. We were fathers of brilliant and appropriately passionate daughters whose future in ordained ministry was quite obvious. We gained some ground in the late 1970s and succeeded in getting women ordained as deacons. When we overtured the denomination to ordain women as elders and ministers, an aggressive political backwash both denied the overture for ordination of women as ministers, and rescinded the previous decision of years before regarding ordination of women deacons. After a decade of this struggle, constantly failing in our objective, I left that denomination on the grounds of its failure to measure up to the biblical and ethical imperatives for the equality of women and their opportunities as women religious leaders. This struggle continues in many religious communities, and most unfortunately of all, the Roman Catholic Church under Benedict XVI is rushing that communion rapidly into the Middle Ages. All prospects of any gains in ordained women in religious leadership in that most influential of all Christian communions is being regressed severely, with a vengeance. So the picture and prospects for women as religious leaders in the Americas, and throughout the Western World, are quite ambiguous. In the Christian denominations and non-Christian communities of faith that invite women as religious leaders, women are generally doing a brilliant work and exceedingly effective service to those institutions and their constituencies, as the effectiveness of males in comparable roles is in decline. On the other hand, in those religious groups who resist women as religious leaders, the anti-feminine prejudice is hardening and becoming more and more regressive, to the great detriment of those institutions and their constituencies, especially of the women in their communions. There seems to be more and more likelihood that women will increase in prominence and effectiveness in religious leadership where they are certified to do so; and less and less likelihood that women will ever have that opportunity in such regressive communions as the Roman Catholic Church—at least under the present Medieval papacy.
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REFERENCES Barrett, D., Kurian, G., & Johnson, T. (2001). World Christian encyclopedia (2nd ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. Brosnan, A. (1999). Discerning ministerial transition. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Catholic Theological Union, Chicago. Fiorenza, E. S. (1975). Mary Magdalene: Apostle to the Apostles. United Theological Seminary Journal, April, 22–24 Fiorenza, E. S. (Ed.). (1984). In memory of her (2nd ed.). New York: Crossroads. Fiorenza, E. S. (2009, April 16). Unpublished lecture, University of Detroit Mercy. Gryson, R. (1976). The ministry of women in the early church. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press. Morris, J. (1973). The lady was a bishop: The hidden history of women with clerical ordination and jurisdiction of bishops. New York: Macmillan. Schaberg, J. (2002). The resurrection of Mary Magdalene: Legends, apocrypha and the Christian testament. New York: Continuum. Schaberg, J. (2006). Mary Magdalene understood. New York: Continuum. Torjeson, K. (1993). When women were priests: Women’s leadership in the early Church and the scandal of their subordination in the rise of Christianity. San Francisco: Harper. Wikipedia. (2009). Denominations. Retrieved May 10, 2009, from http://www. wikipedia.com/denominations. Wink, W. (1984). Naming the powers: The language of power in the New Testament. Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press. Wink, W. (1986). Unmasking the powers: The invisible forces that determine human existence. Philadelphia: Fortress Press. Wink, W. (1992). Engaging the powers: Discernment and resistance in a world of domination. Minneapolis: Fortress Augsburg. Wink, W. (1998). The powers that be. New York: Doubleday. Wink, W. (2003). Jesus and nonviolence. Minneapolis: Fortress Augsburg.
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Chapter 7
The Feminine Political Persona: Queen Victoria, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and Michelle Bachelet Emily A. Haddad William Schweinle
Women have historically been and currently are underrepresented among international political leaders. The proportions of men and women in leadership roles have been slowly moving toward gender parity, but as of 2007, only 17 percent of national parliament members were women. In the U.S. Congress, women represent only about 16 percent of the members (Eagley & Carli, 2007). Never has a woman been elected to the U.S. Presidency, though during the 1990s, twentyfive women served as president or prime minister in other countries. Eagley and Carli (2007) note two successful women presidents who were elected to lead their respective countries while maintaining a feminine political persona and leadership style: Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia and Michelle Bachelet of Chile. Moreover, Rubin (2006) argues that the elections of Johnson Sirleaf and Bachelet suggest that people want feminine attributes in their leaders. Perhaps as important is the media attention that has been given to the feminine personae that these two women fostered in their campaigns and in their presidencies. Much of this attention seems to focus on their evident femininity, especially as displayed in their family relationships. The reign of Great Britain’s Queen Victoria provides an early paradigm for feminine national leadership. Before we present Victoria’s public persona as a model for her twentieth- and twenty-first-century
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heirs, we briefly summarize some scientific findings regarding women leaders. These findings clearly indicate that women can lead as effectively as men while maintaining a feminine leadership style. We conclude that while women are underrepresented among political leaders, the historical evidence about Queen Victoria and the current success of Presidents Johnson Sirleaf and Bachelet clearly indicate that women are able to deploy conventionally feminine attributes to their advantage in developing their public personae as leaders. LEADERSHIP STYLES: TRANSACTIONAL VERSUS TRANSFORMATIONAL From the 1950s to the 1980s, behavioral scientists tried a number of methods and measures to explain the overwhelming gender disparity in leadership. Much of this research focused on the differences between men’s and women’s leadership styles. Eagley and Johnson (1990) metaanalyzed 162 of these studies and concluded that men and women do indeed differ in their leadership styles. Generally speaking, women tend to lead with a more transformational style that emphasizes interpersonal relationships and task accomplishment, whereas men tend to lead with a more transactional style that places less emphasis on interpersonal relationships and focuses instead on the contractual exchange between leaders and followers, usually money for work (Eagley & JohannesenSchmidt, 2001; Ridgway, 2001; Walumba, Wu, & Ojode, 2004). A more transactional or masculine leadership situation tends to be based in a contingent rewards system—a system of social and other contracts between the leader and his followers. The leader communicates the desired outcomes to his subordinates. The subordinates then produce the outcomes and are rewarded for having achieved them. This system tends to create an autocratic environment in which competitive, self-confident, aggressive, dominant, and forceful people will be at an advantage (Walumba et al., 2004). These characteristics— competitiveness, self-confidence, aggression, etc.—tend to describe the male gender role throughout the world (Eagley & Wood, 1991) and are expressed by men more frequently than by women. In particular, men are more likely to display a desire to lead in a competitive and assertive style (Eagley & Johannesen-Schmidt, 2001). In contrast, a transformational or feminine leadership style is more focused on individual interactions, inspiration, motivation, intellectual stimulation, and positive influence on subordinates (Walumba et al., 2004). Feminine leaders tend to be less concerned with personal power and more concerned with the organization as a whole, as well as with its positive group dynamics. For instance, matriarchies tend to foster economic equality and balance to a society, as Goettner-Abendroth (2008) argues. The advantage inherent to a more transformational
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leadership style is that the leader or organization can become or remain a leader without having to possess or control the transactional rewards that are necessary to maintaining a transactional leadership role. This may be particularly important to organizations or nations that are in a state of relative economic and/or social collapse, where the organization and its political leaders do not possess the rewards with which to bargain for and sustain their desired outcomes. Despite the differences in leadership styles, Eagley and Johnson (1990) conclude that men and women leaders do not differ in their effectiveness. The success of one leadership style over another appears to be more contingent on context than on the gender or style of the leader. This chapter develops Duff-McCall and Schweinle’s (2009) line of argument to show that for certain female heads of state, the foregrounding of feminine characteristics forms an essential dimension not only of leadership style but also of political persona. For all three of the leaders discussed, a political persona based in part on female family roles (mother, wife) appears to complement the leadership style itself. FAMILIAL FEMININITY: QUEEN VICTORIA AS A MODEL FOR THE FEMALE HEAD OF STATE Victoria became queen of England in 1837, only a few weeks after her eighteenth birthday, and died on the throne 63 years later, in 1901. Her rule defined the age of British geopolitical ascendancy. Victoria reigned as London became Europe’s banking center, and as England became the most commercially active and fully industrialized nation in Europe. The British Empire dominated the world stage at the turn of the century; an estimated 25 percent of the globe’s population inhabited territory that belonged to England. Although the reputation of the Victorian period now has more to do with prudish morals than political or economic primacy, Victoria’s reign coincided with England’s self-conscious transition to modernity. Victoria’s direct role in the government of England and its empire was always limited, yet she offers a durable model for public rule of a modern state by a woman. A defining feature of this model is its reference to a family-based, middle-class vision of the female. Perhaps pretty as a young queen, Victoria lost what conventional feminine attractiveness she had by the time she was middle-aged, yet her popularity was greatest in the final decades of her reign. Her construction of a successful and specifically female public image depended not on physical appeal or the direct display of political power but rather on her (self-) presentation as a wife and mother. Victoria’s immediate predecessors on the throne—her uncles George IV and William IV—had led lives of excess and had been faulted for that by the public.1 Regardless of her sex, then, Victoria stood to gain
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in public esteem by distinguishing herself as someone whose personal life was irreproachable. It is possible that, as Thompson (1990) argues, Victoria’s ‘‘gender made her more acceptable as a figurehead’’ and less threatening to those who opposed the monarchy (pp. 138–139). As a female monarch, however, she faced a complicated challenge in this regard. If she had adopted the moral conventions of feminine behavior that were predominant at this time, she would have subordinated herself to her husband. At the same time, such subordination was impossible because she had to maintain an image of authority that was consistent with her royal position and responsibilities.2 In meeting this challenge, Victoria used her private family role and obligations as the basis for her public persona as a female ruler. Ultimately, Victoria’s domestic success as the mother of nine children and the devoted wife (and later, long-grieving widow) of the Prince Consort, Albert, served as figurative credentials for her sovereignty. Thus, whereas the only previous English queen of similar importance, Elizabeth I, ruled, as Homans (1998) and Duff-McCall and Schweinle (2008) have pointed out, by deferring her femininity and operating in a somewhat masculine, but at times, politically, feminine way, Victoria’s relations with the state and the public originate in her explicitly female role within the family unit.3 The extent to which Victoria’s family life pervaded public perception of her may be gauged from a brief examination of a few of the memorial volumes that appeared in both England and America just after her death in 1901.4 Generally laudatory, these books offer a compact overview of attitudes toward Victoria as her reign ended, and writers had the opportunity to consider it in toto. The tables of contents offer a place to begin. In a volume by the Marquis of Lorne, John Douglas Sutherland Campbell Argyll (1901), for instance, seven of the thirteen chapter titles refer directly to some aspect of the Queen’s personal life, and four of them to her status as a wife or widow. The authorized biography of Victoria by Windsor Castle’s librarian, Richard R. Holmes (originally published in 1897, reprinted in 1901), tells the story of the Queen’s life in ten chapters; five titles refer to her personal life, and three of those to her ‘‘married life.’’ American versions include Morris’s (1901) memorial volume, called The Life of Queen Victoria and the Story of Her Reign: A Beautiful Tribute to England’s Greatest Queen in Her Domestic and Official Life. Morris’s chapter titles suggest much more attention to the ‘‘official’’ than either Holmes or Argyll grant, but even so there are eight chapters titled with a personal focus. A volume by John Rusk (1901), also an American, presents personal and official content in proportions similar to Morris’s, but a couple of his titles integrate the two. One chapter is called ‘‘Family Life and National Duties.’’ Another, entitled ‘‘The Labors of a Monarch,’’ covers the birth of Victoria’s first two children as well as her involvement in reforming the
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postal system, among other topics. Clearly, the Queen labored in the delivery of both babies and mail. As they introduce their subject, each of these memorial writers presents Victoria as a woman whose domestic life informed her public existence. Morris (1901) says that no other British sovereign ‘‘lived so noble and pure a life and presided over such a grand era of progress as the royal lady Victoria, whose late decease plunged the nation into such a depth of grief’’ (p. xi). ‘‘The regal state and sovereign rank strike the imagination,’’ Morris adds, ‘‘but the homely virtues of Victoria, her maternal love, her life-long touching devotion to the memory of the Prince Consort, the picture of domestic felicity in which she is represented as the central and venerable figure, appeal to the common heart’’ (pp. xii–xiii). Along the same lines, Rusk (1901) announces Victoria as ‘‘one whose life and name stood not alone for the sceptered majesty of a great kingdom and empire, but also for one of the noblest and purest ideals of womanhood’’ (p. 23). She was ‘‘a queenly woman and a womanly queen’’; had she ‘‘been less worthy as a woman she could not have been so great as a queen’’ (p. 41). Argyll (1901), an Englishman, is more specific about both Victoria’s traits and her accomplishments, but he joins his American contemporaries in linking her family role with her sovereignty. He concludes his preface as follows: The English love cleanliness and healthiness, and so did their Queen, in this a typical Englishwoman. In one word, she did all that woman and sovereign could do to influence for good all movements of her time. Through a moderating, wise, motherly mind, she worked with effect for her countrymen in their relations with foreign powers, in the bettering of their own legislation, and for the social life of the whole community. She made herself understood, beloved, and revered. (p. xii)
Originally written as Victoria’s authorized biography and then republished in recognition of her death, Holmes’s volume is less effusive than the others. Yet in the elegiac final chapter of his book, Holmes too integrates Victoria’s domestic obligations with her regal ones. For example, he presents the growing Empire and the Queen’s growing family as the two factors increasing ‘‘the pressure of work’’ for her, and observes, ‘‘Whether matters of State had to be discussed or arrangements of family or household to be decided, all were settled with a soundness of judgment and an invariable kindness of heart’’ (p. 329). Her ‘‘monument,’’ he concludes, ‘‘will be . . . in the ideal of sovereignty which she created’’ (p. 330). In all of these retrospective accounts of Victoria’s life and rule, that ‘‘ideal of sovereignty’’ seems defined by the construction of public duties as somehow coinciding ontologically with the specifically female, familial duties of a wife and mother. The distinction between
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the domestic and the official—even when asserted—is thus largely erased. Visual indication of this outcome might be found in the funeral portrait that serves as the frontispiece of Rusk’s (1901) book. It shows Victoria’s body laid out, with a headdress that could be either crown or bridal veil. The Queen’s hands, crossed on her chest, are almost obscured by a large quasi-bridal bouquet, but her wedding ring is clearly visible on her finger. Although she typically wore black after the Prince Consort’s death, this portrait shows her in a light-colored dress. A large, square, white cross appears above her where the background color of the photograph has been removed. The caption reads: ‘‘The end of a glorious reign.’’ In confusing the bridal with the funereal, the portrait seems to bring together Victoria’s entire life as a woman, yet the caption and the awkwardly inserted cross summarize the life not as that of a woman, but rather as that of an imperial ruler and the head of a church. Victoria is literally lying in state.5 Although Victoria clearly played no part in the photographic representation of her body after death,6 the construction of her public persona during her lifetime depended heavily on her willingness to use both photography and publication of her own writing to mold public perception of her. The development of Victoria’s persona has been of especial interest to historians and other scholars of British culture in the past fifteen years. Plunkett (2003) terms Victoria the ‘‘first media monarch,’’ reminding us that she ‘‘was the first monarch to preside over conditions approaching a mass urban and industrial society’’ (p. 1). Plunkett argues that in responding to these pressures, she became ‘‘a populist sovereign,’’ ‘‘an overarching yet intimate figure’’ that was ‘‘always aware of its own fabrication’’ (pp. 1, 11, 10). In concluding that Victoria was, ‘‘[b]y the end of her reign . . . the symbolic hub of the British Empire’’ (p. 240), Plunkett emphasizes the ‘‘civic publicness’’ of Victoria and her family. The specific content of these public images, as both Homans and Plunkett show, has the effect of democratizing Victoria’s image (Homans, 1998, pp. 45–57; Plunkett, 2003, p. 163), chiefly by representing Victoria as a mother with her husband and children. Together, Plunkett’s emphasis on the royal family as an essential aspect of Victoria’s image-making, and Homans’s corresponding focus on the photographic representation of the marital relationship, inevitably place Victoria’s familial role at the center of her public persona.7 As such, this persona also participates, as Langland (1997) notes, in an increasingly potent discourse of domesticity that comes to define social relations in Victorian England. Langland explains, ‘‘The domestication of the monarch helped produce and was itself produced by an ideology of domesticity that [may] define the last half of the nineteenth century in England’’ (p. 23). Victoria’s own conscious and vigorous participation in this ideological production is evident in her remark late in her life, ‘‘that she knew ‘perfectly well what
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my people like and appreciate and that is home life and simplicity’ ’’ (Arnstein, 2003, p. 155).8 Throughout her reign, Victoria consistently represented herself visually and verbally as the fulfillment of this ideal, ultimately ‘‘transform [ing] the gendered body into a national icon’’ (Armstrong, 2001, p. 522). As an icon, Victoria remained defined by an explicitly familial version of femininity that corresponded to the ideals of her people. Female heads of state in the early twenty-first century can respond to the hopes of their own constituents by deploying a feminine political persona that follows Victoria’s model. The remainder of this chapter will discuss two examples, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Michelle Bachelet, as contemporary leaders whose public images are familial at the same time as they are political, and whose leadership tends to follow a transformational style associated with femininity. ELLEN JOHNSON SIRLEAF: ‘‘MA ELLEN’’ Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was sworn in as Liberia’s president in 2006 after twenty-five years of war, dictatorship, and coups in that country. Born in 1938, she is divorced and has four sons and six grandchildren. Johnson Sirleaf earned an economics degree from the University of Colorado and a Master’s degree in Public Administration from Harvard (Caballero, 2006). She was also an official at Citibank. During the 2005 Liberian presidential runoff election, the Liberian media focused on Johnson Sirleaf’s strengths of experience and credentials over the popularity of George Weah, her male opponent (Shaw, 2007). These experiences speak to her qualifications as president, but they do not define her leadership style or her political persona. Johnson Sirleaf has been described by her constituents and in the press with a number of feminine terms, including as a diminutive grandmother figure who campaigned as someone who would bring ‘‘motherly sensitivity and emotion to the presidency’’ (Johnson Sirleaf, 2006), enabling Liberia to heal after twenty-five years of civil war, dictatorship, and coups. Liberians refer to her as ‘‘Ma Ellen’’ or just ‘‘Ma,’’ a woman who sees Liberia as ‘‘someone who needs to be taken care of with the dedication and commitment that a mother takes care of a sick child’’ (Johnson Sirleaf as cited in Caballero, 2006). Comments such as this show that Johnson Sirleaf’s public persona is not simply feminine but specifically maternal. Johnson Sirleaf’s own writing speaks to a transformational leadership style in which consensus building or bridging social divisions can heal the collapse brought on by competition (in the form of sociopolitical rivalries) in Liberia. She sees the historical conflict between the various ethnic factions in Liberia as needing a transformational leader who will create consensus and a shared identity:
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Liberia stands in the midst of a crisis that is unparalleled in its history. Its systems of government and economy have virtually collapsed. Internal military conflict has caused death and destruction of enormous proportions. The social fabric of the country is torn by deep-seated rivalries. In short, the nation is at risk of losing all semblance of its identity. However, therein lies its opportunity. There is now a chance to bridge the social division between the descendents of the settlers and the descendents of the seventeen indigenous ethnic groups . . . a foundation for reconciliation can be found. (Johnson Sirleaf, 1991)
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf appears to have been very successful in leading Liberia toward positive social change. Feust (2008) argues that Liberian women have gained substantially in terms of their gender role, work and business opportunities, political influence, and educational opportunities. Furthermore, Kinder and Stanger (2008) argue that her administration has maintained political stability, improved Liberia’s financial management, and reduced corruption, though Johnson Sirleaf acknowledged in a 2008 press conference that Liberia’s troubles are far from near an end (‘‘An African First,’’ 2009). Her success as a leader is further evidenced by her being named by Forbes Magazine in 2007 as the 100th most powerful woman in the world and in 2008 as the 66th. MICHELLE BACHELET: ‘‘MAMA’’ Michelle Bachelet was inaugurated as Chile’s first female president in 2006 at the age of fifty-four. She is separated from her husband and has three children. She is a licensed pediatrician and a socialist, who, with her parents, was imprisoned and tortured under the Pinochet regime. Her father died of torture while in prison. She studied defense issues in Washington DC and was the Defense Minister of Chile before becoming its president. As Defense Minister, Bachelet helped unify Chilean military and political leadership. Despite having these impressive professional qualifications and being president, Michelle Bachelet is, like Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, referred to by her constituents as ‘‘Mama’’ and as someone who ‘‘radiates empathy and genuine concern for people’’ (Polgreen & Rohter, 2006). Her presidential campaign was based on her personal appeal, charm, and compassion for the people (Angell & Reig, 2006). In fact, her political opponents in the campaign tried to use these traits in a sexist way by overemphasizing her sympathy and caring, suggesting that these personal qualities were indicative of weakness. Her opponents’ campaign strategy did not work; it would appear that the Chilean people were looking for a maternal figure with the hope that she could help heal the wounds left by the abusive dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (Pohlgreen & Rohter, 2006). It is clear that Bachelet
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campaigned and was received by a majority of the Chilean people as a feminine maternal leader who was closer to the people than a male leader and whose ability to restore the health of the country depended upon her feminine attributes. In her inauguration address, Bachelet described her successful election as ‘‘the culmination of [Chile’s] long and painful journey from repression and dictatorship to democracy’’ (as cited in Rohter, 2006). In a particularly poignant example, Bachelet describes her own reaction when she and her mother encountered one of her torturers on the street. Instead of reacting with anger or aggressing against her torturer, Bachelet describes the man’s guilty reaction, thus acknowledging the price he is paying for having been a torturer. In focusing on his evident guilt, Bachelet also affirms a fundamental good in her torturer, which is the capacity for shame and remorse: One day I was walking with my mother and we bumped into [one of their torturers]. We identified ourselves, and what we saw next was a human being who was crying and lacked the courage to look into our eyes. A completely diminished character carrying a bag filled with guilt. (Bachelet as cited in Daniels, 2006)
Interestingly, when her political party was considering whether she was a viable candidate, Bachelet was asked what her dream was. Her reply was, ‘‘Very simple. To walk along the beach holding hands with my lover’’ (Daniels, 2006). This is a stereotypically romantic feminine dream, one that a masculine candidate would not have dared to utter for fear of seeming weak or, perhaps, feminine. Though this comment does not speak directly to Bachelet’s qualifications for the presidency or about her transformational leadership style, it does, however, reveal her as a feminine sexual being. One has to wonder whether Hillary Clinton or Sarah Palin could have responded similarly and have maintained their respective political success. For Bachelet, however, this public expression of a conventional feminine fantasy was consistent with the rest of her feminine political persona, and as such did not prove detrimental to her campaign. Bachelet’s presidential campaign and presidency have been based on a transformational political leadership model called ‘‘democracia de los acuerdos’’ (‘‘democracy by agreement’’). Under this leadership model, Bachelet and her political party, Concertaci on, have reformed the Chilean constitution, revised the Chilean tax code, increased the availability of state-run childcare, and improved the scope of anticorruption and welfare legislation (Siavelis, 2007). Bachelet is also successfully bringing greater gender equity to Chile, a predominantly Roman Catholic country in which 15 percent of babies are born to teenage mothers, and in which divorce was legalized only
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in 2004. Half of her cabinet is women. She has worked to allow prescriptions for contraception and morning-after-pills for all women over the age of fourteen. Although Chilean society is historically patriarchal, she is drafting controversial legislation that will mandate gender quotas among the political nominations to the Chilean Congress. She is working to give Chilean women more protection from abusive husbands. Bachelet’s achievements are evidence of her success as Chile’s transformational leader and of her ability to use a specifically feminine political persona to advance policy goals, which include gender parity and the rights of women. CONCLUSION This chapter speaks to possibility, not probability or proportion. Women are still underrepresented in political leadership. This may be in part attributable to a more male/transformational leadership tradition that views feminine women as being weak. Given such a context, a woman political leader may become more masculine/transformational in her leadership style, as Margaret Thatcher (Prime Minister of Britain, 1979–1990) and Golda Meir (Prime Minister of Israel, 1969– 1974) tended to do, or may become a more feminine transformational leader, who risks being perceived by voters as weak. Currently, at least two successful women leaders cultivate and maintain feminine political personae: Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Michelle Bachelet. Elected after long histories of political unrest and violence in their respective countries, both women are qualified for the positions that they hold, and both are successfully using feminine transformational leadership styles in conjunction with a feminine political persona. Queen Victoria had no choice but to adopt a transformational style of leadership to some extent, simply because as the titular head of a parliamentary monarchy, her direct role in government was constitutionally limited.9 She relied on personal relationships with her prime ministers and others in parliament to give her preferences a political life. As Arnstein (2003) explains, her persuasion was often effective, with the result that she had a greater influence in the governance of Britain and the Empire than has sometimes been assumed. The emphasis that Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Michelle Bachelet have placed on social healing and the repair of damage to the body politic suggests that they too have found that a transformational style enables them to be effective leaders, despite the very substantial differences between their contemporary contexts and that of their nineteenth-century predecessor. Moreover, as our discussion has shown, these three leaders’ deployment of a transformational style is supported, and perhaps even made possible, by their common emphasis on the sort of familial femininity
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pioneered by Victoria as she developed her public persona. All three of these heads of state have presented themselves in relation to their family roles, especially those of mother and grandmother. In turn, their people and their media have accepted their familial status not only as an essential aspect of their individual lives, but also as a basic credential for leadership. There are other current and past women heads of state who might deserve similar consideration. Violetta Chamorro, former President of Nicaragua (see Eagley & Carli, 2007, p. 95), and two current presidents—Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner of Argentina and Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo of the Philippines—all appear to maintain or to have maintained feminine political personae. Investigation of them and their peers, present and future, may confirm that public appreciation for conventional feminine roles, especially motherhood, can help to form a political persona that effectively supports a transformational leadership style.
NOTES 1. Arnstein’s (2003) comment is to the point: ‘‘Except for the time of Princess Charlotte’s courtship and marriage, for half a century the royal family had been identified with madness, with eccentricity, with profligacy, and with old age’’ (p. 33). 2. Casteras (1997) analyzes images of Victoria as a girl and young woman to show that she was a ‘‘symbolic child’’ as well as a ‘‘mother figure’’ (p. 183). For further discussion of the conflict between Victoria’s marital role and her obligation to the state, see Armstrong (2001, pp. 498–500), Casteras (1997, p. 192), Houston (1997, pp. 172–176), Plunkett (2003, p. 125), and Thompson (1990, p. 143–144). Munich’s argument that ‘‘the ideology of Victorian femininity constantly disrupts the discourse of the monarchical body’’ (p. 47) is especially relevant in this respect, as is much of the argument offered by Munich in Queen Victoria’s Secrets (1996). 3. Along the same lines, Watson (1997) notes that Elizabeth I was ‘‘culpably unwomanly because . . . she had retained absolute executive authority’’ (p. 82). Langland (1997) also offers a productive comparison of Victoria and Elizabeth I (pp. 27–29). 4. There were more than a dozen of these published 1901 and 1902. 5. A productive comparison might be made between this portrait and the three-dimensional effigy of Victoria created for her tomb just after she was widowed in 1861. In this recumbent effigy (an image of which is reproduced in Arnstein’s book), she is very clearly crowned, and her only accessory is a scepter. Although a veil descends from her crown, it is of a heavy material, not the light fabric associated with a bridal veil, and there are no flowers in evidence. The four decades that intervened between the sculpting of this effigy and the Queen’s death apparently allowed for a very different approach to the representation of the dead monarch.
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6. According to Hibbert and Thompson, Victoria left precise instructions about the preparation of her body and coffin for burial (Hibbert, 2000, p. 497; Thompson, 1990, pp. 76–77), but it is not clear from either description that Victoria issued any orders about how her lying-in-state should be photographed. 7. Arnstein makes a similar point about the coalescence of Victoria’s family life and her political authority, citing an 1851 poem by poet laureate Alfred Tennyson: Her court was pure; her life serene; God gave her peace; her land reposed A thousand claims to reverence closed In her as Mother, Wife, and Queen. (cited in Arnstein, 2003, p. 57) As Arnstein, Langland, Munich, and others have pointed out, there is plentiful evidence that Victoria’s mothering was problematic, even by the standards of her day, but this had no impact on the public presentation of her as a domestic figure. 8. As Thompson (1990) notes, Victoria’s production of a middle-class selfrepresentation ‘‘bears little relation to the actuality of her life’’ (p. 124). Our point in this chapter is not to claim that the Queen shared her subjects’ lifestyle, but rather to show how her public persona incorporated aspects of that lifestyle. Munich’s remark that ‘‘Queen Victoria acted out an imagined or ideal Victorian life in the privileged stage reserved for a monarch’’ (Munich 1996, p. 5) is very much to the point. 9. For a precise and cogent explanation of the extent of Victoria’s legal powers, see Arnstein (2003, pp. 35–37).
REFERENCES An African First. (2009, April 8). The Economist, 391, 77. Angell, A., & Reig, C. (2006). Change or continuity? The Chilean elections of 2005/2006. Bulletin of Latin American Studies, 25, 481–502. Argyll, J. (1901). V.R.I.: Queen Victoria, her life and empire. New York: Harper. Armstrong, N. (2001). Monarchy in the age of mechanical reproduction. Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 22, 495–536. Arnstein, W. (2003). Queen Victoria. Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan. Caballero, M. (2006, September 21). ‘‘Ma Ellen,’’ African symbol of hope, returns to Harvard. Harvard University Gazette. Retrieved April 15, 2009, from http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2006/09.21/11-liberia.html. Casteras, S. (1997). The wise child and her ‘‘offspring’’: Some changing faces of Queen Victoria. In M. Homans & A. Munich (Eds.), Remaking Queen Victoria (pp. 182–199). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Daniels, A. (2006, March). From torture victim to president. The Progressive, 70, 30–32. Eagley, A., & Carli, L. (2007). Through the labyrinth. Boston: Harvard Business School Press. Eagley, A., & Johnson, B. (1990). Gender and leadership style: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 108, 233–256. Eagley, A. H., & Johannesen-Schmidt, M. C. (2001). The leadership styles of women and men. Journal of Social Issues, 57, 781–797.
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Feust, V. (2008). ‘‘This is time to get in front’’: Changing roles and opportunities in Liberia. African Affairs, 107 (427), 201–224. Goettner-Abendroth, H. (2008). Matriarchies as societies of peace: Rethinking matriarchy. Off Our Backs, 38, 49–52. Hibbert, C. (2000). Queen Victoria: A personal history. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press. Holmes, R. (1901). Queen Victoria, 1819–1901. London: Longmans, Green and Company. Homans, M. (1998). Royal representations: Queen Victoria and British culture, 1837–1876. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Houston, G. (1997). Reading and writing Victoria: The conduct book and the legal constitution of female sovereignty. In M. Homans & A. Munich (Eds.), Remaking Queen Victoria (pp. 159–181). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Johnson Sirleaf, E. (1991, Spring). The causes and consequences of the Liberian civil war. International Review, 32–35. Johnson Sirleaf, E. (2006, March 8). Keynote address by HE Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, President of Liberia at the opening of the International Roundtable on Women in Politics, Paris, France. Kinder, M., & Stanger, E. (2008). What will the revitalization of Liberia’s economy mean for women at its center? Retrieved May 1, 2009, from http:// www.scribd.com/doc/4692340/KinderStanger-Policy-Brief. Langland, E. (1997). Nation and nationality: Queen Victoria in the developing narrative of Englishness. In M. Homans & A. Munich (Eds.), Remaking Queen Victoria (pp. 13–32). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Morris, C. (1901). The life of Queen Victoria and the story of her reign: A beautiful tribute to England’s greatest queen in her domestic and official life. s.i. Philadelphia: W. E. Scull. Munich, A. (1996). Queen Victoria’s secrets. New York: Columbia University Press. Munich, A. (2003). Good and plenty: Queen Victoria figures the imperial body. In T. Heller & P. Moran (Eds.), Scenes of the apple: Food and the female body in nineteenth- and twentieth-century women’s writing (pp. 45–64). Albany: SUNY Press. Plunkett, J. (2003). Queen Victoria: First media monarch. Oxford: Oxford UP Print. Pohlgreen, L., & Rohter, L. (2006, January 22). Where political clout demands a maternal touch. The New York Times, section 4, p. 4. Rubin, T. (2006). Will women show a new way? Current History, 105 (689), 100–101. Rusk, J. (1901). The beautiful life and illustrious reign of Queen Victoria: A memorial volume. Chicago: J. S. Ziegler. Shaw, I. (2007). The media’s agenda-setting role in Liberia’s 2005 presidential runoff election. African Journalism Studies, 28, 56–80. Siavelis, P. (2007, February). How new is Bachelet’s Chile? Current History, 106, 70–76. Thompson, D. (1990). Queen Victoria: The woman, the monarchy, and the people. New York: Pantheon. Walumba, F., Wu, C., & Ojode, L. (2004). Gender and instructional outcomes: The mediating role of leadership style. Journal of Management Development, 23, 124–140. Watson, N. (1997). Gloriana Victoriana: Victoria and the cultural memory of Elizabeth I. In M. Homans & A. Munich (Eds.), Remaking Queen Victoria (pp. 79–104). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Chapter 8
Women in the Military: Is It Time to Un-Gender Combat Roles? Breena E. Coates
The global war on terrorism (GWOT) has brought film footage of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq into American homes, to where pictures and videos of women in the military serving in diverse roles are commonplace. The U.S. strategy in the GWOT is now heading into its ninth year of operations. This has reopened the debate about the role of women in combat. The debate centers on the Department of Defense (DoD) ‘‘ground combat policy’’ of 1994, that states: ‘‘Service members are eligible to be assigned to all positions for which they are qualified, except that women shall be excluded from assignment to units below the brigade level whose primary mission is to engage in direct combat on the ground.’’1 The statement does not correlate with practice. In both Afghanistan and Iraq, we see women who supposedly are ‘‘protected’’ from being in combat, actually engaged in direct confrontation with the enemy, in the fluid, assymetrical nature of modern warfare. Desert Storm was a turning point for women, showing that the boundaries between front lines and non-combat zones were being blurred, and that more women in ‘‘non-combat’’2 positions were actually engaging with the enemy. Current policy that permits women to serve in so-called ‘‘defensive’’ positions is contradictory and confusing. Females cannot serve in ‘‘offensive’’ positions like multiple rocket launcher systems; they are prohibited from flying special operations by helicopter; yet, they are permitted to kill the enemy while flying Apaches (which puts them in combat risk), and have other restrictions on service, due to ‘‘combat risk.’’ Females are permitted by DoD policy to serve as police
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personnel on patrol on the streets, gunnery personnel on convoys, or can perform searches at checkpoints. These are all positions where often become part of the conflict, The DoD has used a ‘‘direct combat rule’’ policy3 that excludes women to units below the brigade level ‘‘whose primary mission is direct ground combat’’4 (Government Accounting Office, 1999). Furthermore, positions for those units that collocate (i.e., are located in supportive roles to the troops on the ground) are also prohibited for women. Yet the military would be hard-pressed to meet its mission without females serving as police, medical personnel, truck drivers, and other such positions, which are positions that put them in danger. These are, in fact, combat roles in an irregular war where the battlefield is fluid and front lines do not exist per se. Thus, argues Botters (2008), the combat exclusion rule has become ‘‘irrelevant.’’ Military women have always faced such contradictions. In the past, women were restricted from flying aircraft that could shoot back, but were permitted to fly into enemy territory in helicopters and cargo airplanes, which put them in perilous circumstances. In cognizance of the fluid battlespace, President G.H.W. Bush (the 43rd president) created the Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces (PCAWAF) to ascertain whether women could be placed in combat positions. The study, however, reiterated the objections to women in combat due to lack of physical stamina,5 biological functions like pregnancy, negative impacts on group cohesion, and a number of other issues. By a vote of ten against and two abstentions, it voted against having women serve in combat positions.6 It is well-documented that throughout the U.S. military history, when freedom has been threatened, women have shown that they have the hearts of warriors and have responded with invaluable service’’ (United States Army War College [USAWC], PAO factsheet). Today, when we speak of equality in the workplace more than ever before, it is only appropriate that women seek to be given credit for the female warrior ethos in policy and practice. This begs the following question: Why is Congress and DoD saying one thing in statute, or policy, and another in practice? Some further questions also arise from incongruence between policy and action: ‘‘Does this policy falsely try to maintain a culture of exclusion, that contradicts reality?’’ In other words, is it hypocritical in nature; and, is it time to un-gender combat roles? This chapter addresses the issues, arguments, and background surrounding the debate. GOAL DISPLACEMENT, DISTORTION, AND DRIFT The work of Chris Argyris and Donald Schon (1974, 1978) and their followers has examined how individuals create idealized maps, espoused theories, or ‘‘governing variables’’ on how to do things in
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their heads. These strategic maps are often in conflict with the actual actions of an individual. In other words, people say one thing and do another. While on occasion there is deliberate hypocrisy in organizations, very often people and organizations are completely unaware that they are saying one thing and doing another. The organizational drift (Coates, 2009) or divergence from espoused values and action can be a mild drift that corrects itself, but at other times it moves away more strongly leading to goal distortion or goal neglect (Gouldner, 1959). Goal distortion can lead to the greater pathology of goal displacement when parts of the strategic map dissociate from, and lack relationship to, what actually happens in practice (Merton, 1957)7 (see Figure 8.1). In such cases, the organization could appear to be hypocritical in the eyes of many of its constituents, when in fact, the organization is adapting to survive in an uncertain environment. The idea that the organization is being hypocritical is exacerbated over time, when espoused values continue to be pronounced by the leadership, despite evidence to the contrary from the field. Goal drift to distortion and displacement often comes about through the unintentional workings of street-level bureaucrats who make amendments to policy guidelines while operating in the field (Lipsky, 1980).8 These come about primarily due to environmental imperatives. If these policy distortions are either not reversed to be congruent with policy, or if the policy does not recognize the need to adapt to environmental conditions, then organizational truth-telling becomes compromised. It is the job of leadership to define strategy, provide
Figure 8-1. Goal Drift
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sense-making of strategy, explain emerging tensions, but also to change that strategy when it no longer applies in given cases. When this does not happen, organizational participants perceive the contradictions and become confused between values and practice. Distortion of goals from drift to displacement is also true of the idealized blueprints, or strategies for action, that are developed in complex organizations like the DoD, and this is also true of the case of the combat exclusion policy. In the case under discussion, the drift is significant—enough to raise questions about the congruence of words to deeds. It can and it does raise feelings of discomfort and anger because ‘‘women in the armed service have elected to put their lives on the line.’’9 As argued by Col. Cheri Provancha, ‘‘This war has proven that we need to revisit the policy, because they [women] are out there doing it [serving in combat positions]’’ (2005).10 Why should women care about this issue? Surely it is a good thing to have protection from harm provided to them as a group? The answer is fourfold. For one thing, there is a need to remain true to the aphorism of the Soldier’s Creed that is taken by both male and female recruits, alike. It states: ‘‘I stand ready to deploy, engage and destroy the enemies of the United States of America in close combat.’’11 Another, more important issue relates to the development and acknowledgement of a woman’s full potential in the armed forces. Under current policy this is not the case. Today, combat experience is most often the stepping stone to the highest levels of military service. Most general officers come from careers in the infantry, armor, cannon field artillery, short-range air defense artillery, and special forces. Because these are closed to women, few women serve in the General Officer ranks. It was only in 2008 that a woman, General Ann E. Dunwoody, was promoted to a four-star ranking. In a provocative essay dealing with the Army and the combat exclusion rule, Michele Putko (2008) notes that, ‘‘seeing few females ‘at the top’ has a dramatic effect on the entire female officer population.’’ Putko goes on to ask, ‘‘Why should female officers desire to serve in the Army where there seems to be reduced opportunities for advancement and where they cannot be part of the mainstream?’’ Related to this a question can be raised, ‘‘is this a form of hidden job discrimination?’’ Regrettably answers to this question have been clouded by extreme and divisive arguments on both sides of the issue (Field & Nagl, 2001). The writers suggest that perhaps those holding conservative views on the role of women in our society seek to find a scapegoat for the problems plaguing the military today and thus place exaggerated blame onto females in combat. ‘‘Much of the current debate surrounding the presence of women in the positions in which they now serve is extremist and destructive.’’ We turn now to facts in policy and law, and the espoused values that the strategic statements embody. A third argument for
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recognizing women in combat would be to provide appropriate training for women who might find themselves in combat roles, as did the women in the documentary film ‘‘Lioness.’’ If one is not supposed to be in combat, there is less training provided. Finally, women in combat may, and often do, require posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) therapy. However, as the true case of Shannon Morgan who returned with PTSD from Iraq after being caught in a firefight showed in the film the therapists did not have the context to help her. Again, this is an issue of women being invisible. HISTORY AND LAW While one may think that women in uniform is a new phenomenon arising out the Women’s Armed Forces Integration Act of 1948,12 and other civil rights legislation in the twentieth century, and as Mitchell (1998) asserts ‘‘political correctness’’ put women in the military (p. 341),13 in reality, women have served in the military since the Revolutionary War (Lindon, 2008) in positions such as laundry services, seamstresses, cooks and water bearers, and even spies. It is known that hundreds of women disguised themselves as men in order to fight (Willens, 1996) were wounded in battle alongside men. The most wellknown case is that of Deborah Sampson, who took the name of Robert Surtlief (McSally, 2007). Sampson, it is said, herself cut out a musketball from her thigh rather than go to a doctor and thus reveal her gender. Another woman, Margaret Corbin, took up her slain husband’s position in the artillery after he died at Fort Washington. Corbin was later wounded herself, and when her gender was discovered she was discharged (McSally, 2007). Another famous case was that of Lyons Wakemand, alias Sarah Wakeman, who served in the Civil War. Thus, while women served in the military, it often was a service provided in hiding, as the battlefield was seen as a male-centric workplace. Society was then not able to stomach the very idea of women serving in the military, getting wounded and killed. Today, even though it is acknowledged that the service of women is essential to getting the job done in the military, there are still lingering cultural barriers thrown up institutionally. For example, Michele Putko (2008) observed that at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and other military institutions, there is a distinct ‘‘combat arms supremacy attitude.’’ Female cadets at West Point, noted Putko, are often ‘‘advised by mentors to join the Military Police Corps which is the closest branch to Infantry that is open to women.’’ At the same time, there is ‘‘overt pressure’’ on males to join combat arms fields, and it is mandatory at West Point that at least 80 percent do so (Putko, 2008). In 1973 when Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird made the announcement of the end of the conscription (the draft), and the creation of an
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All-Volunteer Force, a new type of military force arose. The number of women joining the military increased, but they were still not permitted to serve in direct combat units or in units that collocated with such. This was known as the ‘‘Combat Exclusion Policy’’ or the combat exclusion rule. An attempt was made to rescind it in 1979 under the Carter Presidency, but the hearings died quietly, due to lack of support. The ‘‘Combat Exclusion Policy’’ was later codified in 1988 into what came to be known as the ‘‘Risk Rule,’’ which standardized procedures for women volunteers to be excluded or ‘‘protected’’ from service in combat units. As observed by an officer ‘‘the all volunteer Army cannot afford to needlessly constrain itself by coding support units as male only because they are on the same base camp or are habitually in support of a combat unit.’’14 In 1991, Congresswoman Pat Schroeder introduced a measure to allow women to fly combat missions as Navy and Air Force pilots. The measure was presented to the House Armed Services Committee, behind closed doors and with a voice vote, and it passed. In the Defense Authorization Acts of 1992 and 1993, Congress allowed women to serve on Navy, Air Force, and Marine aircraft. Secretary of Defense Aspin asked the Services to study what other possibilities might exist to open up positions to women. In 1994 the ‘‘Risk Rule’’ was repealed in response to the changing nature of warfare. In 2005 Congressman Duncan Hunter introduced a bill requiring the Army to restrict women from front lines: ‘‘. . . in Heavy Infantry Brigade Combat Teams and equivalent elements of Stryker Brigades, a total of 21,925 spaces currently open to female soldiers would be closed’’ [emphasis added.] Congressman Hunter was echoing the sentiment of conservatives that the public would not accept seeing women killed in action. However, ‘‘the old sensitivities may be a relic of the past,’’ says Putko (2008).15 To date more than 60 women have been killed in combat. Also in response to the conservative viewpoint, Army’s Vice Chief of Staff, General Richard Cody observed that in new theatre of irregular warfare, where there is no clear front line, women are already serving on the so-called ‘‘front lines.’’ He observed that the amendment would ‘‘cause confusion in the ranks and send the wrong signal’’ to soldiers fighting in the GWOT. Subsequently, upon receipt of assurances from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that DoD would review the assignment of women and provide a report to Congress, Congressman Hunter reluctantly withdrew his bill. At the end of the 2005 year, Congress passed compromise legislation that required the DoD to notify it (Congress) within 30 days if women were being assigned or collocated16 with ground combat units on the front lines. The problem is that today the shifting battlefield makes the concept of a front-line obsolete. As noted by a senior service officer: ‘‘The current debate surrounding this issue by members of Congress who have never served a day in uniform is disingenuous to the women who currently serve in the Iraqi and Afghani AORs (Note #29, USAWC survey).17
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Nevertheless, the debate around terminology such as ‘‘collocation,’’ ‘‘assignment to,’’ and ‘‘attachment to’’ linked with the matter of the shifting battlefield, tends to center around semantics and sophistry in leadership circuits. So what are the opinions of the women themselves, and the men about the issue of women in combat, about ‘‘collocated’’, ‘‘assigned to,’’ ‘‘attached to,’’ and the reality of irregular war? This issue was studied at the USAWC via a qualitative and quantitative survey in 2006. The survey results present a useful thermometer of the perceptions of senior-level officers from all branches of the military and Department of Defense executives.
OBJECTIONS TO SERVICE WOMEN IN COMBAT-UNDERLYING PREMISES Biological Thesis This argument asserts that military service frequently requires physical strength and endurance that not all women can manage. This is an old, but enduring, argument used in other venues of employment opportunity to restrict the labor of females. Nevertheless, studies have shown that women can increase strength and endurance with extra training. The Army Times, July 29, 1996, contended that in the opinion of experts in stamina studies, some women have the necessary resilience and resistance at the levels of males to greater resistance to fatigue and stress on the physical body. The Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine studied women with respect to lifting weights and jogging with weights and concluded that women were capable of matching male standards with six months of extra training (Worth, 1999). In the Persian Gulf War, twenty-three women were awarded the Combat Action Ribbon because they were engaged by Iraqi troops. As of 2007, women have been killed in action in Iraq and Afghanistan, been captured as prisoners of war, and wounded in battle. The military now trains all troops in basic combat skills. Given the blurring of lines on the modern battlefield of irregular warfare, the biological thesis ceases to be persuasive. President G.W.H Bush’s PCAWAF noted the issue of women and pregnancy as a cohesion problem. However, since birth control methods have advanced today to a single shot to make a woman infertile for six months, this is becoming less of an issue. Also related to the biological thesis is the ‘‘motherhood’’ argument that the role of women in society is that of motherhood and nurturance—which ensures the continuation of the human race and the nurturing of its young. As such society has always accorded special protections to women. It is in this vein that Congressman Duncan Hunter, Chair of the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) argued ‘‘the American people have never wanted to have
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women in combat, and this [amendment] reaffirms that policy.’’18 This statement appears to be a conservative mantra without substance, as contradicted by public opinion research. A 2003 Gallup Poll found that ‘‘8 in 10 Americans think women should either have the opportunity, or be required to serve the same combat assignments as men do.’’ Conservative activists like Phyllis Schlaffy echo Hunter’s sentiment. Schlaffly has maintained that, ‘‘The whole idea of men sending women, including mothers, out to fight the enemy is uncivilized, degrading, barbaric and embarrassing to our culture. . . . And furthermore, no one respects a man who would let a woman do his fighting for him.’’19 Liberals and pragmatists naturally present counter-claims. Their observations range from the fact that proportionate to the rest of the society women in the military make up only a small percentage of women in the nation to the need for the military to provide flexible deployment strategies and child-care opportunities for pregnant women and mothers of small children. Also related to the latter is that both men and women bear equal responsibility for the nurturing and raising of children (Burrelli, 1996). The Psychological Thesis Another argument offered is that women in combat will destroy the essential espirit de corps that bonds and unifies a military organization in combat. Such destruction, it has been argued, could spell tragedy for the group. It has also been argued by the PCAWAF women in combat would add an extra burden to American male soldiers, as their Western value system promotes the protection of women. However, organizational studies have shown that gender is not a factor for group cohesion, arguing that group bonding is created by investment in, and commitment to, the goal. This theory contends that it is leadership at all levels that creates such investments and commitments via the building of motivation and morale within the workforce. A RAND study (1997) reinforced that gender plays a ‘‘minimal’’ role in group cohesion for morale and readiness. In the military combat ‘‘workplace,’’ as in other nonmilitary venues, it is actually the goal, or end state, that motivates personnel to perform to accomplish the mission. Sexual Relationships, Sexual Abuse, and Gender Harassment Theories Former Governor Janet Napolitano once noted in the Arizona Star (2007) that ‘‘there is a distinctly troubling issue that faces the more than 160,000 female soldiers who have deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan since 2002. It has been called the ‘double whammy’: sexual abuse and trauma, combined with exposure to combat. Its effects are
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devastating.’’ While many such statements abound, levels of crime in the military including sexual harassment are lower than in the civilian sector.20 It has been noted by sociologist Laura Miller (1997) that gender harassment, rather than sexual harassment, is a more likely manifestation of men’s resentment toward women in the military and can be observed by sabotage, constant scrutiny and making women ‘‘prove’’ themselves by making them work harder.21 Again, this phenomenon has been observed in other male-dominated workplaces in the civilian sector, such as construction. Forced close contact in combat situations, it is argued, could lead to sexual abuse. However, as argued by Holm in reference to the Persian Gulf War, ‘‘men and women serving side-by-side in the Gulf demonstrated that they were capable of working together as teams; they could be comrades without ‘fraternizing,’ they could share tents without sharing beds; they could share common dangers without feigning chivalry.’’22 Finally, another argument for keeping women out of combat is the fear of them falling into enemy hands and being sexually abused. However, the counter argument is that women are sexually abused in noncombat positions as well, and this is no reason to keep them out of combat. Privacy Infringement Hypothesis The privacy issue on the battlefield is one that is not compelling either, as soldiers are trained to operate in ‘‘meager accommodations’’ where privacy is severely limited (Wan, 2006). Using the Persian Gulf War as an example, Holm has further argued that ‘‘men and women serving side-by-side in the Gulf, demonstrated that they were capable of working together as teams; they could be comrades without ‘fraternizing’; they could share tents without sharing beds; they could share common dangers without feigning chivalry’’ (Wan, 1992). USAWC WOMEN IN COMBAT SURVEY RESEARCH In 2007, a study was published by the USAWC in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, concerning opinions of senior service leaders from all branches of the military regarding the issue of women in combat, entitled: Women in Combat Compendium, at the Strategic Studies Institute, edited by Johnson and Putko. The compendium included, among other things, a quantitative research design, using a structured questionnaire. Details of the survey and its conclusions are shown below. 1. Purpose: The USAWC conducted a survey ‘‘to determine the perceptions of U.S. Army War College Students23 regarding the ground combat exclusion policy of female soldiers’’ in the academic year 2006, published in 2008.
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2. Format: The survey was a census survey, but it was anonymous and voluntary. The survey consisted of 17 questions, with responses emplaced within a Likert-type scale. 3. Population: N ¼ 300 4. Response Rate/Breakdown: A total of 300 students were surveyed with a 78 percent response rate. The breakdown by service was as follows: Army ¼ 76 percent; Air Force ¼ 8 percent; Marine Corps ¼ 6 percent; Navy ¼ 5 percent; Coast Guard ¼ 1 percent, and Department of State ¼ 1 percent. Males ¼ 89 percent and Females ¼ 11 percent. 5. Main Outcome Measures: The survey showed that the Army does not follow the ground combat exclusion policy, and that female soldiers are engaged in ground combat given the asymmetric nature of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. 6. Individual Outcomes, Based on Particular Questions: .
53 percent perceived the regulation that prohibits females collocating with direct combat units is rarely enforced or not enforced at all.
.
70 percent strongly agreed that the regulation prohibiting collocation of female soldiers with direct combat units should be revised.
.
63 percent strongly disagreed that female soldiers should NOT be assigned to direct combat units due to lack of physical strength.
.
59 percent disagreed or strongly disagreed that female soldiers should NOT be assigned to combat units due to a lack of co-ed life support facilities.
.
57 percent disagreed or strongly disagreed that female soldiers should NOT be assigned to direct combat units due to perceived lack of public support.
.
59 percent disagreed or strongly disagreed that female soldiers should NOT be assigned to direct combat units due to potential problems in assimilation or bonding.
.
78 percent disagreed or strongly disagreed that female soldiers should NOT be assigned to direct combat units to preclude exposure to trauma associated with combat.
.
74 percent strongly agreed or agreed that all soldiers regardless of gender should be assigned to positions for which they are qualified.
7. Conclusions of the Study: The study concluded that ‘‘DoD should consider a revision of the female combat exclusion policy to reflect a more realistic view of the current asymmetric nature of warfare and the combat roles female soldiers are currently engaged in’’ (USAWC, 2006).
CONCLUSION As of September 30, 2008, DoD Manpower Research Statistics, 197,765 women serve on active duty, 163,414 are enlisted personnel, and 34,351 are officers. Since the September 11, 2001, attack on America, a total of 103
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women deployed to Afghanistan, Iraq and Kuwait have lost their lives (Center for Military Readiness, 2009).24 Most of the soldiers serving in the Middle East and Afghanistan are ‘‘in harm’s way,’’ whether they serve in artillery, infantry, or armor or not. It is time to give them credit for doing so, instead of letting their service to the nation fly below the radar. Film Directors Meg McLagan and Daria Sommers (2008) did just this in their award-winning documentary film, ‘‘Lioness: There for the Action, Missing from History.’’ The film documents the soldierly solidarity, faith, and duty of five of the earliest ‘‘lionesses’’ who wound up in active fights in fierce neighborhood conflicts in Iraq. Trying to restrict women from the risks of combat is a flawed position, as women already participate in the dangers of war. Thus, the exclusion of women from combat policy should be rescinded as voiced by Rep. Sandlin in a March 2009 showing of Lioness. Is national security being undermined by having women in combat positions? The positions held against women in combat do make a persuasive arguments, and at the same time evidence from the field show that women have served with honor, valor and dedication on the front lines on a voluntary basis, as consistent with the Soldier’s Creed that each of them took as recruits: ‘‘I stand ready to deploy, engage and destroy the enemies of the United States of America in close combat.’’ This statement represents a key espoused value of the military—service in combat, regardless of gender. Because of the attention this issue has received, not changing espoused values to match enacted values might be seen as organizational hypocrisy on the part of the DoD. It is time to un-gender combat roles to reflect reality, and thereby and move the sacrifices and valor of women from the place of invisibility to visibility. In conclusion, some general recommendations can be extrapolated from this examination of the issue: . Recognize that strategy (espoused values) and practice (enacted values) do drift apart as a natural consequence of multivariate intervening factors, and that such has happened with respect to women in combat. Realize that incongruence between espoused and enacted values undermine organizational image, diminish trust among stakeholders and created confusions and contradictions that can degenerate into divisive rhetoric and shadow boxing. . Re-examine and Re-align organizational espoused values with enacted experience on a constant basis. . Rescind the collocation and ground combat exclusion policy to eliminate double standards, and adopt a gender-neutral policy in its place.
NOTES 1. Memorandum from Secretary of Defense Les Aspin to Armed Service Secretaries, January 13, 1994, entitled, ‘‘Direct Ground Combat Definition and Assignment Rule.’’
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2. These ‘‘noncombat’’ operations are known by many names—‘‘Stability and Support Operations,’’ ‘‘Operations Other Than War,’’ and ‘‘Peace Operations.’’ 3. Congress, in an attempt to retain oversight of females in combat zones, passed The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) in 2006. The NDAA requires the Secretary of Defense to notify Congress of any changes to units and assignments to which women are assigned. 4. Government Accounting Office. (1999). ‘‘Gender Issues: Trends on the Occupational Distribution of Military Women.’’ Report to the Ranking Minority member, Subcommittee on Readiness and Management Support, Committee on Armed Services, U.S. Senate, Washington, DC. 5. Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces (PCAWAF) noted that ‘‘there is little doubt that some women could meet the physical standards for group combat, but the evidence shows that few women possess the necessary physical requirements.’’ 6. Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces (PCAWAF), November 15, 1992, Government Printing Office. 7. Merton, R. (1957). Social theory and social structure. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. 8. Lipsky, M. (1980). Street-level bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the individual in public services. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. 9. USAWC Survey. (2008). Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, USAWC. Question #58. 10. For Female GIs Combat is a Fact. Retrieved from www.washingtonpost. com/wpdyn/content/article/2005/05/12AR20050S51202002.html. 11. The Soldier’s Creed. Retrieved from www.army.mil/SoldiersCreed/ flash_version/index.html. 12. Public Law 80–625. The Women’s Armed Forces Integration Act opened up places both in the active military as well as reserves in all four services, but it also placed an enlistment ceiling of 2 percent, and a 10 percent limit on femaleenlisted personnel becoming officers. 13. Mitchell. B. (1998). Women in the military: Flirting with disaster. New York: Regnery Press. 14. USAWC Survey. (2008). Strategic Studies Institute, USAWC, Carlisle, PA, Question #49. 15. Putko, C. (2008). ‘‘USAWC women in combat survey interpretation.’’ Women in Combat Compendium. Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, Carlisle, PA. 16. Center for Military Readiness. (2006). ‘‘Collocation’’ is a term that is widely used in discussions about women in combat. In a simple form, it means that forward support company personnel ‘‘embed’’ with infantry and armor maneuver battalions 100 percent of the time. 17. USAWC Survey. (2008). Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, USAWC. Question #29. 18. Wilkie, D., & Kreisher, O. (2005, May 18, 2005). Hunter plan bars women from Army ‘‘forward support.’’ Copley News. 19. Schlaffy, P. Women in military combat? What it means for American culture and defense. Heritage Lecture, #317. 20. Wan, S. (2006). Women’s role in combat: Is ground combat the next front?’’ Journal of Academic Writing, 4. 21. Miller, L. (1997). Not just weapons for the weak: Gender harassment as a form of protest for Army men. Sociology Quarterly, 60, 37–38.
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22. Holm, J. (1992). Women in the military: An unfinished revolution. Novato, CA: Presidio Press. 23. Study body consists of all military services of ranks at Colonels and LT Colonels. 24. Center for Military Readiness. (2009, March 19). Grim toll of military women killed in war.
REFERENCES Aspin, L. (1994). Direct ground combat definition and assignment rule. Memorandum, January 13, 1994. Washington, DC: Department of Defense. Botters, R. J. (2008). How the Army can meet the intent of policy and statute on ground combat exclusion for women. Women in Combat Compendium. Carlisle Barracks, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College. Center for Military Readiness (2006). Women in Combat: Background and facts— women in or near land combat. www.cmrnotes.org/WomenInCombat. asp?docIDþ271. Accessed August 25, 2009. Coates, B. E. (2009, April). Concept of goal drift. Presented at The College of Business and Public Administration, California State University, San Bernadino, CA. Field, K., & Nagl, J. (2001). Combat roles for women: A modest proposal. Parameters. Carlisle Barracks, PA: U.S. Army War College. Gouldner, A. (1959). Organizational analysis. In R. Merton, L. Broom, & L. Cottrell (Eds.), Sociology Today (pp. 423–426). New York: Basic Books. Government Accounting Office. (1999). Gender issues: Trends on the occupational distribution of military women. Report to the Ranking Minority member, Subcommittee on Readiness and Management Support, Committee on Armed Services, U.S. Senate, Washington, DC. McSally, M. (2007, May 1). Women in combat: Is the current policy obsolete? Duke Law Journal of Gender Law and Policy, 14, 1011–1059. Merton, R. (1957). Social theory and social structure. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Miller, L. (1997). Not just weapons for the weak: Gender harassment as a form of protest for Army men. Sociology Quarterly, 60, 37–38. Mitchell, B. (1998). Women in the military: Flirting with disaster. New York: Regnery Press. Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces. (1992). Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Schlaffy, P. (1991, June 3). Women in military combat? What it means for American culture and defense. Heritage Lecture, 317. The Soldier’s Creed. Retrieved August 2, 1999 from www.army.mil/Soldiers Creed/flash_version/index.html. The Women’s Armed Forces Integration Act. (1948). Public Law 80-625. June 12, 1948, U.S. Congress, Washington, DC. Tyson, A. S. (2005). For female GIs, combat is a fact: Many duties put women at risk despite restrictive policy. www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2005/05/12AR20050S51202002.html. Wan, S. (2006). Women’s role in combat: Is ground combat the next front?’’ Journal of Academic Writing.
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Wilkie, D., & Kreisher, O. (2005, May 18). Hunter plan bars women from Army ‘‘forward support.’’ Copley News, retrieved from http://www.signonsandiego. com/uniontrib/20050518/news_1n18hunter. Willens, J. (1996). Women in the military: Combat roles considered. Washington, DC: Center for Defense Information. United States Army War College (USAWC). Public Affairs Office (PAO) Fact Sheet. Carlisle Barracks, PA: USAWC. United States Army War College (USAWC). (2008). Survey. Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, USAWC. U.S. Congress. (2006). ‘‘National Defense Authorization Act,’’ H.R. 5122, also known as the John Warner Act 2006. Worth, R. (1999). Women in combat: The battle for equality. Berkeley Heightws, NJ: Enslow Publishers.
Chapter 9
Sexual Minority Women: Sources and Outcomes of Stigmatization Rhonda M. Schultz Kristin P. Beals
In undertaking an investigation into female same-sex sexual practices across continents, nations, and cultures, it is imperative that investigators first garner an understanding of the specific political, historical, and sociological factors surrounding these behaviors and/or identities. The terms ‘‘lesbian’’ and ‘‘bisexual’’ used in Western society for the identities surrounding some female same-sex sexual practices are tied to Western ideas of individualism and are not applicable in cultures where sexual identities may not be relevant. It is also important to keep in mind that identity and individualism are cultural constructs and not delimiters of advanced cultural evolution. The existence of a lesbian identity in Western society does not indicate that we have ‘‘progressed’’ beyond other societies in which no such moniker exists. In addition, the majority of quantitative research available on outcomes of the repression of samesex sexual behavior has been conducted on samples comprised primarily of individuals in Western nations and lesbian-identified women. While the authors of this specific chapter have attempted to write and operate with these understandings in mind, we cannot fully negate our own individual histories and implicit cultural perspectives. Our resources, expertise, and experiences have all been derived primarily from U.S. sources and are therefore tinctured by the values and customs of Western society. Similarly, our backgrounds in research are limited to the domain of psychology; therefore, our research perspectives may be more heavily weighted in this area. While we have attempted to incorporate
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some scholarship from queer and cultural studies into this chapter, the bulk of the resources cited have been derived from psychological books and journals. UNDERSTANDING STIGMA This chapter aims to discuss stigma against women who engage in same-sex sexual practices or adopt a lesbian identity. Stigma is a powerful tool of oppression throughout the world, which can be used in many ways, for many reasons, and by many different groups. It is important to first identify what stigma is, where it comes from, and what purpose it may serve in a given society. A common linguistic mistake to make in English is to use the terms stigma, stereotype, prejudice, and discrimination interchangeably. While these terms do bear some relationship to one another, they actually all represent somewhat different constructs. Stigma Stigma refers to the devaluation of individuals within a group based on some discernable characteristic or mark. In order for stigma to exist, two fundamental elements must be present: there must be some distinguishing feature that is recognizable and serves as a delimiter of difference, and some devaluation of the individual (Dovidio, Major, & Crocker, 2000). Devaluation of stigmatized individuals refers to the beliefs that these persons are less than human, ‘‘spoiled,’’ defective, or inferior. Goffman (1963) hypothesized that stigmas are attached to three different types of conditions: physical deformities, ‘‘tribal identities’’ (race, religion, nationality, or sex), and ‘‘blemishes of character’’ or weak will (imprisonment, ‘‘unnatural’’ passions, unemployment, mental health problems). Lesbianism or same-sex sexuality would fall under the final category of ‘‘weak will,’’ as it has been viewed by many as both an ‘‘unnatural passion’’ and a mental health problem, in spite of the fact that the American Psychological Association has not considered it such in over 36 years. Recently, it has been argued that the two most important features of stigma are how visible or concealable they are and their perceived controllability (Dovidio et al., 2000). It appears that if one can hide their stigmatized characteristic or if they cannot be blamed for having it, they will be allowed to ‘‘pass.’’ This brings to light the two-sided nature of stigma. Stigmatization is not a one-way process, and the stigmatized are not simply helpless, passive objects upon which stigma is placed. The reaction of the stigmatized is integral to the process of stigmatization (Goffman, 1963). Stigmatized individuals may shun their stigma, finding it ludicrous or misplaced, thereby rendering it less
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effective. They may also accept the stigma, internalize it, or focus heavily on it, increasing its power to harm. Internalization of the stigma against lesbians by lesbians is commonly referred to as internalized homonegativity and will be discussed in a later section. Judging from the variety of conditions outlined earlier, it appears obvious that most people will fall into at least one stigmatized group at some point in their lives. Yet stigma persists in almost all societies possibly because they may serve to enhance the lives of stigmatizers in a number of ways (Dovidio et al., 2000). Stigmatizing others can raise one’s own self-esteem, relieve anxiety, and create a perception of control. In addition, stigmatization can also serve to reinforce a culture’s norms. We will explore the various norms and institutions within different cultures that contribute to the stigmatization of lesbians and women who engage in same-sex sexual behavior. Prejudice Prejudice can be defined as an irrational and rigid belief about a group of people, which can be either positive or negative. For example, one can have a positive prejudice toward the group she considers herself a part of and a negative prejudice toward all members of another group. Unlike stigma, prejudice can extend to any type of behavior or identity and is not confined to social deviance. However, prejudice and stigma are strongly linked to one another and share a great deal of overlap in terms of application and measurement (Phelan, Link, & Dovidio, 2008). Prejudice tends to be viewed as an attitude toward a specific group of people. General acceptance for all heterosexuals and a disdain for lesbians would be an example of such a prejudicial attitude. People with prejudicial attitudes may ignore or fail to notice individual differences between members of a group. Someone who holds a prejudicial attitude toward lesbians, for example, may view a shy, passive woman who identifies as lesbian, as not being a ‘‘real’’ lesbian. This would be an example of a stereotype that all lesbians are aggressive and pushy. Stereotyping Stereotyping is a cognitive process by which one attributes certain characteristics to certain groups of people. According to Allport (1954), the vast diversity and complexity of the world around us makes it impossible to hold accurate concepts of everything in existence. While human beings need some sense of understanding to function in the world, complete understanding of everything is impossible. Therefore, we tend to create some well-formed categories consisting of more complex, comprehensive understandings and other malformed categories
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consisting of shaky and simplistic components (Allport, 1954). For example, one may hold the stereotype that all bees are black and yellow. While having a simplistic understanding of bees is probably not going to cause any trouble to the individual that holds this understanding or to bees in general, having a simplistic understanding about certain groups of people will. When a stereotype makes one unable to see individual differences within groups of people, a stereotype becomes maladaptive and likely harmful. The stereotype in the U.S. that lesbians are highly masculine women fails to address the vast differences in gender expression within the lesbian community, errantly excluding many individuals who identify as lesbian and including many individuals who do not. The employment of prejudicial attitudes and stereotyping can lead to discriminatory behaviors. Discrimination is defined as treating people differently because of their membership to a certain group. Similar to prejudice, discrimination does not necessarily mean that one treats a certain group negatively; it can also mean that a group is treated more positively. Unfortunately, when referring to the treatment of lesbians, discrimination generally refers to a negative behavior such as exclusion or mistreatment. Discrimination can manifest interpersonally, institutionally, and/or culturally (Whitley & Kite, 2006). Individuals can be discriminated against by other individuals and/or groups, policies and laws, or cultural norms and values. Discriminatory behaviors against lesbians can have severe consequences on the lives of the women they are targeted toward and the societies in which they take place.
SOURCES OF STIGMA Religion In many countries, some religious groups provide a great deal of fuel for the stigma against lesbians and women who engage in samesex sexual behavior (Miracle, Miracle, & Baumeister, 2003). While same-sex sexual behavior is generally viewed as unnatural and intolerable by most religions, there are a few exceptions in the United States where it is accepted, even blessed, according to the San Francisco Chronicle (as cited in Miracle, et al., 2003). However, the report appears bleak for most other religions, with homosexual acts being overwhelmingly condemned by virtually all other major religious institutions, such as Catholicism, Mainstream Christianity, Mormonism, Muslimism, and Orthodox and Conservative Judaism. In spite of reported ambiguity in the Quar’an regarding the ‘‘morality’’ of homosexuality, 26 Muslim countries condemn homosexual acts, and 7 of them do so with the threat of the death penalty (Helie, 2004). This widespread disdain for homosexual identities and behaviors has been linked to Christian
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and Islamic proselytizing throughout the world over the course of time and the subsequent dissemination of repressive beliefs about sexuality in general (Miracle et al., 2003). The far-flung disapproval and even contempt expressed by many religious organizations has become a painful source of stigma against lesbians and has often isolated them from a powerful source of support and happiness: religion (Ferriss, 2002; Yakushko, 2005). In Yakushko’s (2005) study of 82 lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) participants, those who attended churches they perceived as ‘‘conservative’’ reported greater stress surrounding their LGB identities and lower self-esteem than those attending churches that ‘‘fully accepted’’ their LGB identity. The often painful experience of being shunned by these hegemonic institutions can be heard in the voice of a 26-year-old Kenyan woman: I am Christian by religion and this has been a great challenge for me. All my family have entered religion very deeply despite my father being initially Hindu, so I choose to ignore religion and follow what my heart desires. I have always believed that if one has love in one’s heart that is what matters. I stopped going to church because I used to leave feeling like a sinner. (Baraka & Morgan, 2005, p. 39)
Westernization In some non-Western parts of the world, same-sex sexuality is considered a perversion sent from Western countries. Because Western countries are viewed as being accepting of homosexuality (however inaccurate this perception may be), same-sex sexual practices are often viewed as being another grand overindulgence of the decadent West. This means that oftentimes same-sex sexuality will be stigmatized as a betrayal of one’s nation or heritage (Blackwood & Wieringa, 1999). Little is known about the effects of this specific stigma on lesbians in these areas, but some information has been garnered from interviews and other research. One example is that of reactions to a hate-filled anti-gay speech made by Zimbabwean president Mugabe at the Zimbabwean International Book Fair in 1995. In addition to a number of cruel, scathing comments made in this speech about the LGB community, Mugabe articulated his sentiment that same-sex sexual behavior is the sole purveyance of Americans and that such ways are ‘‘stupid and foolish’’ (Aarmo, 1999). While many members of the lesbian community reported being scared and forced into hiding, some lesbians in attendance at the book fair stated that they had felt free and finally able to express themselves (Aarmo, 1999). A recent example of same-sex sexuality being viewed as the influence of other nations can be intuited from statements made by the Ethics Minister of Uganda. The United Nations (UN) has recently been
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organizing nations to help decriminalize homosexuality around the world, an effort that has been met with anger by some nations where same-sex sexual practices are a punishable crime. One article reported that in response to the UN’s efforts, Uganda’s Ethics Minister, James Nsaba Buturo announced that the UN was endorsing what he called ‘‘attempts by some nations to impose homosexuality on the rest of us’’ (UN ‘spreading homosexuality’, 2009). Male homosexuality is explicitly illegal in Uganda and is punishable by life imprisonment. While the law does not criminalize lesbianism specifically, it can be intuited as such (Nagadya & Morgan, 2005). Homosexuality is considered unAfrican and a threat to the family in Uganda. This is also true for many other parts of Africa, except South Africa where gay marriage and adoption by same-sex partners are both legal practices. TRIPLE MINORITY STATUS Recently, research investigating the experiences of ethnic minority LGB individuals in Western countries has begun to surface, which may lend some insight into certain cultural beliefs. However, the literature is scant, as most researchers interested in LGB populations have generally failed to address this aspect of identity in their research. Lesbians of color experience triple minority status or triple jeopardy in Western society because of their status as sexual, ethnic, and gender minorities. The experience of being a lesbian woman of color in a sexist, racist, heterocentrist society could be a difficult experience for many lesbians of color. This subject is a tricky research topic, as it is most likely that these identities are not islands, but are interrelated and share some overlap. For example, it would seem difficult to isolate one’s lesbian identity from one’s female identity, and because of this it may also be difficult to separately test the factors surrounding each (Bowleg, 2008). Many ethnic and racial minority groups in America may suffer from what is called ‘‘fear of extinction’’ (Greene, 1995). This fear leads members of these groups to believe that reproduction is a necessary part of a woman’s existence because without it, the survival of the group is threatened. The stigma against lesbianism may be aided by these specific cultural beliefs and create additional stress against racial and ethnic minority women (Greene, 1995). Another issue relevant to ethnic and racial minority lesbians is that of the perceived ‘‘whiteness’’ of the gay and lesbian identities in the United States (Harper & Schneider, 2003). The homosexual identity in the United States has been painted and perceived as a predominantly Caucasian identity and as such, adopting this identity as a racial or ethnic minority may be perceived as a betrayal to one’s community (Greene, 1995). Some ethnic minority lesbians voice the belief that they have to make a choice between their sexual identity and their ethnic identity, seeming to feel that the two
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cannot coexist within one person (Espin, 1987). In addition to these stressors, issues of class and religion can also complicate the lives of many women living as triple minorities.
MINORITY STRESS THEORY In recent years, researchers interested in the health and well-being of LGB individuals have begun using the concept of minority stress to guide some of their research. The framework of minority stress delineates the various sources of stress that LGB persons may be vulnerable to and the techniques these individuals may employ to cope with this stress (Brooks, 1981; Meyer, 2003). Meyer has conceptualized LGB minority stress as a group of three different sources of stress: the experience of stigma and discrimination, anticipated stigma/discrimination, and internalized homonegativity. These experiences can lead individuals to utilize coping or resilience mechanisms as a means by which to counteract the negative effects of minority stress (Brooks, 1981; Russell, 2003).
THE EXPERIENCE OF DISCRIMINATION One of the key components to minority stress is the experience of discrimination. Discrimination against LGB individuals occurs in any number of situations, such as employment, housing, health care, and ostracism from friends and family or legal rights such as adoption, marriage, and military service. In extreme cases, discrimination can mean that same-sex sexual relationships and behaviors have been made illegal and punishable by imprisonment, violence, or death. There are also instances of groups and individuals within societies who beat, rape, or even murder lesbians or women who engage in same-sex sexual behaviors. A 2001 Kaiser Family Foundation report found that a majority of the general American public believes that LGB individuals experience ‘‘a lot’’ of prejudice and discrimination. When polled about their perceptions of the amount of discrimination they believe they have experienced, 85 percent of lesbians and gay men claimed to have experienced some kind of prejudice or discrimination in their lifetimes (Kaiser Family Foundation, 2001). In this same study, 76 percent of LGB participants reported being discriminated against or knowing someone who has been discriminated against in the areas of employment (finding or keeping a job), applying to school (university or other), housing (renting or buying), health care, or military service. In addition to these disappointing findings, the study also reported that 74 percent of LGB participants reported having been verbally assaulted and 32 percent had been the targets of physical violence.
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Expected Discrimination The experience of discrimination may lead those who are discriminated against to come to expect discrimination from others. The belief that one will come to experience prejudice or discrimination has been referred to as ‘‘stigma consciousness’’ (Pinel, 1999). In Pinel’s work, lesbians and gay men high in stigma consciousness were more likely to have greater self-consciousness and to worry about how others viewed them. Other studies have linked stigma consciousness to a variety of negative outcomes. One study found that stigma consciousness is related to internalized homophobia, physical complaints, lesbianrelated stress (stress perceived to be brought on specifically because of lesbian identity), negative mood, and intrusive thoughts (Lewis, Derlega, Clarke, & Kuang, 2006).
Internalized Homonegativity The stigma attached to homosexuality is often consciously or unconsciously adopted by the stigmatized themselves. When LGB people internalize the stigmas and negative attitudes held by society about their behaviors and identities, it is referred to as internalized homonegativity, internalized homophobia, or internalized heterosexism. The experience of internalized homonegativity has been associated with a greater risk for a number of mental and physical health problems. In a sample of 157 U.S. lesbians, researchers found that internalized homonegativity was correlated with a number of mental health problems. In this study, which developed a separate scale for lesbian internalized homonegativity (LIH), LIH was highly correlated with lower selfesteem, depression, lower satisfaction with social support, and a higher number of somatic complaints (Szymanski, Chung, & Balsam, 2001). Internalized homonegativity has also been correlated with a number of self-destructive behaviors in lesbians, including suicide, self-mutilation, risky sexual behaviors, and alcoholism (Williamson, 2000). These studies lead us to believe that internalized homonegativity has the potential to be a extremely destructive force in the lives of some lesbians and most likely occurs because of the stigma attached to same-sex practice. The negative effects of internalized homonegativity can also carry over into lesbian relationships. Holding negative beliefs about one’s own sexuality may cause some LGB individuals to feel less satisfied or positive about their romantic relationships. LIH has been found to be associated with a decrease in satisfaction with romantic relationships and a decrease in attraction toward one’s partner (Mohr & Daly, 2008). In a qualitative study of 40 same-sex couples, half of which were female, a little less than half of the couples reported themes of internalized homonegativity toward themselves or their relationships (Rostosky, Riggle, Gray, and Hatton, 2007). One in four of couples in this study articulated
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low expectations for the durability of their relationship. One couple cited the lack of social support around them stating that this factor may cause them to feel that the relationship was bound for failure (Rostosky et al., 2007). It seems logical that in a society where there is not only little support for your relationship, but outright hostility toward it, the possibility of a break up may seem more likely. Internalized homonegativity has also been highly correlated with intimate partner violence among lesbian couples (Balsam & Syzmanski, 2005). It is believed that individuals that hold negative beliefs about homosexuals are more likely to act violently toward them. This can unfortunately mean that LGB persons high in internalized homonegativity are more likely to act violently toward members of their own community, including their partners (Balsam & Syzmanski, 2005). Intimate partner violence may be yet another devastating force threatening the health and safety of lesbians and their romantic relationships. The experience of internalized homonegativity may not be isolated to individualistic, Western cultures. It cannot be known at this time whether lesbians or women who engage in same-sex sexual behaviors in collectivistic cultures experience internalized homophobia because there is a paucity of literature or research on this subject. There is some evidence that these processes may be present in the Damara community of Namibia, as might be intuited by some excerpts from interviews conducted with women who have sex with women there: She hated me, sometimes the same kind hate each other. Once she called me and beat me up in her classroom, saying ‘What kind of child is this that is acting like a boy?’. . . This teacher, she became the school principal there and is now together with another sister. (Khaxas & Wieringa, 2005, p. 137) She told me about caressing and kissing and she told me that she felt that she was my girlfriend and that I was her man, but because of youthful shame I did not say something . . . When I got home I thought, to do this in the Bible schoolyard I have done a big sin. (Khaxas & Wieringa, 2005, p. 136)
Although there are a number of texts investigating the stigma against same-sex practices in various parts of the world, few address the issue of the internalization of this stigma. The question as to whether this experience is tied to identity seems to remain to be answered. This answer may be difficult to obtain given the quiet, hidden nature of same-sex practices in many cultures, which could be a reason for the gap in research in this area.
CONSEQUENCES OF STIGMA Stigma and discrimination impact lesbian and bisexual women in a number of ways. In the next section of this chapter we will discuss the legal, financial, social, and health impacts for lesbian and bisexual women.
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Legal and Economic Impact for Same-sex Female Couples Because lesbian couples are denied a number of rights that are afforded heterosexual couples, all-female couples have increased financial and legal burdens. For example, in states and countries that do not give same-sex couples marriage or marriage-like rights, gay and lesbian couples often have to pay lawyers to secure some of the most basic legal protections (e.g. living wills, power of attorneys, health directives). Same-sex couples also face additional legal costs in completing second-parent adoptions. These same costs are not accrued by heterosexual couples. In the United States and many other countries, tax systems treat same-sex couples as if they were complete strangers. In a recent report from the Williams Institute, Goldberg and Badgett (2009) report that same-sex couples often pay more in taxes. This occurs for a number of reasons. First, same-sex couples in the United States are taxed on health insurance benefits provided to a partner by an employer. This adds an estimated $1,000 to the taxes of same-sex families. Additionally, same-sex couples often must pay estate taxes or gift taxes that opposite-sex couples are exempt from paying. Same-sex couples who pay taxes their whole lives are denied equal social security benefits upon retirement and the death of a partner. This is estimated to cost the surviving partner of a same-sex couple on average about $8,000 a year (Furnas & Rosenthal, 2009). This brief summary highlights some of the inequities in the financial and legal system between same-sex and different-sex couples.
Social Costs for Sexual Minority Women In addition to the legal and economic costs of stigma against lesbian and bisexual women, there are innumerable social costs. Being stigmatized for being a sexual minority is unlike being stigmatized because of one’s racial, ethnic, or religious group membership, because often a sexual minority individual does not share that identity with any immediate family members. Instead of feeling connected to one’s family, lesbian and bisexual individuals may feel very isolated. Often times, sexual minority individuals must create their own communities of supportive others. In one study of gay and lesbian participants, it was found that only 33 percent of mothers and fathers were rated as very accepting of their children’s sexual orientation (Beals & Peplau, 2006). Added to the possible isolation from family members, lesbian and bisexual women may also feel isolated from their spiritual or religious communities. As discussed earlier, traditional religious views often endorse anti-gay attitudes. It can be very difficult for sexual minority women if they feel they must choose between being true to themselves
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and their religious background. Bryant and Demian, (1994) found that out of 12 possible sources of support, sexual minority individuals rated ‘‘church’’ as the least supportive and the most hostile. In a qualitative study of 14 same-sex couples and their lived experiences with religion, Rostosky, Riggle, Brodnicki, and Olson (2008) concluded that ‘‘heavy reliance on social support from family and religious communities may exacerbate minority stress in ethnic minority and religious minority GLB individuals who want to integrate their religious and same-sex relational values.’’ Lesbian women may also feel socially isolated at places of employment. In most states in the United States, lesbian and bisexual women can still be fired for their identity and as a result, may hide their identity, thus isolating themselves. This experience is epitomized in the U.S. military’s ‘‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’’ policy, which forces U. S. service members to silence themselves, forgo social support for their identity and the possibility of building community. The social costs to lesbian and bisexual women are often innumerable. Mental and Physical Health Sexual minority women have higher rates of a number of physical health and mental health concerns. Actual and perceived discrimination has been found to account for a large proportion of the disparity (Mays & Cochran, 2001). We will first describe several of the barriers to health prevention and care services. Next we will discuss the known mental health and physical health disparities. History of the Study of Lesbian Health Disparities The burgeoning gay rights movement in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s began to take notice of the existence of health disparities for sexual minority women and men. As a result, a number of community-based health centers began to emerge to provide sensitive care to the sexual minority population (Mayer et al., 2008). At the same time, a number of clinicians and doctors began to recognize that their sexual minority patients had unique needs because of the hostile and homophobic environment in which they live. In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association recognized that homosexuality was not a psychiatric illness and removed the diagnosis from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). However, removal from the manual did not eliminate the prejudice and sometimes toxic environments in which sexual minority individuals live. The Institute of Medicine in 1999 issued a call for more populationbased research to understand the clinical problems in the lesbian community. Community groups lobbied hard to have the government
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follow through on the Institute of Medicine’s report. Importantly, the Department of Health and Human Services recognized the importance of this and included lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) health in their goals for the Healthy People 2010 initiative. This momentum has led to increased information and educational materials (e.g., The Fenway Guide to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Health) for caregivers, physicians, and clinicians. Barriers to Health Care Research has demonstrated that lesbian and bisexual women often encounter barriers to receiving timely and adequate health care (Diamant, Wold, Spritzer, & Gelberg, 2000; Mayer et al., 2008). For example, in Diamant and collegues study, only 34 percent of heterosexual women reported difficulty getting care, while 47 percent of lesbians and 53 percent of bisexual women reported this problem. Mayer et al. (2008) outlined four broad areas of barriers to accessing healthcare. These included (1) reluctance to disclose sexual orientation to providers, (2) lack of LGBT knowledge and competency on the part of providers, (3) structural barriers to health insurance and visiting and decision making rights for LGBT people and their partners, and (4) lack of culturally appropriate prevention services. As Mayer and colleagues point out, each of these is troublesome alone, but the combination of these can be disastrous for the health and well-being of sexual minority individuals. Often, sexual minority women do not disclose their sexual orientation to a health care provider. These decisions often affect health care from a very early age. In a study of disclosure to physicians by LGB youth, it was found that only 35 percent had disclosed their sexual orientation to their physician (Meckler, Elliot, Kanouse, Beals, & Schuster, 2006). Participants cited confidentiality concerns as a reason for not disclosing. Interestingly, participants reported that they would be more likely to disclose if the physician would ‘‘just ask.’’ In another study, MacEwan (1994) found that to avoid the possibility of biased care, lesbian and gay participants did not disclose their sexual orientation in alcohol treatment settings. Nondisclosure may mean missed opportunities for a provider to offer specific care such as appropriate health and sex education, screening tests, and discuss individual risks (Meckler et al., 2006). Of course, disclosure will only be beneficial to the receipt of appropriate and adequate health care if the physician responds in a culturally sensitive and knowledgeable way. Several studies have found that physicians, like other people, have biases toward sexual minorities. Research has demonstrated that even well-intentioned service providers may behave differently with lesbian patients or clients (Brown,
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1996). In fact, Cochran (2001) noted that several researchers have identified attitudinal and behavioral responses on the part of providers to disclosure by sexual minority clients. For example, a practitioner may focus too much or too little on sexual orientation in therapy (MacEwan, 1994), avoid topics that make him/her uncomfortable (Hardman, 1997), and be unable to recall information that the client provided (Gelso, Fassinger, Gomez, & Latts, 1995). All of these consequences of homonegativity are thought to result in a lower quality of care (Garnets, Hancock, Cochran, Goodchilds, & Peplau, 1991). One consequence of lesbian and bisexual women having physicians that lack knowledge and sensitivity is lower satisfaction with source of health care (Diamant et al., 2000). This lower satisfaction may in turn lead to sexual minority women choosing to delay or avoid health care. The third barrier is more structural and legal in nature than the first two. Cochran and colleagues (2001) found that compared to similarly matched women, lesbians were less likely to have health insurance than their heterosexual counterparts. Many sexual minority women do not have access to quality health care because they are denied insurance benefits through a partner’s employment. Even if an employer allows a same-sex partner to be insured, the federal government then taxes the ‘‘benefit’’ as income, thus costing the couple valuable resources and possible forcing some people to forego coverage. In a study utilizing the federal government’s population survey, Ash and Badgett (2006) found that 18 percent of individuals in same-sex romantic relationships lacked health care compared to 11 percent of married heterosexual individuals. Furthermore, even when a partner has insurance, the other partner in a same-sex relationship is still uninsured 15 percent of the time, compared to 4 percent of married partners. In other words, lesbian and bisexual women are less likely to be insured than their heterosexual counterparts. As a result, lesbian and bisexual women are much more likely to forego health services because of financial reasons (Diamant et al., 2000). This translates into less preventative care and a more likely chance that acute issues become chronic. In addition, because many states to not recognize same-sex relationships with the same legal standing as marriage, partners are often not allowed visiting rights and decision-making powers, which can impede care provided. This varies greatly state by state, but most states do not have any legal protection for same-sex couples. In the United States, only four states allow same-sex marriages (with another 10 having some form of legal protection). Around the world, only seven countries perform same-sex marriages, with another four recognizing same-sex marriages performed elsewhere. Women who are in relationships with other women are often denied the legal protections that are granted to heterosexual relationships. Some of these legal protections aid in receiving quality and culturally sensitive health care.
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Finally, Mayer et al. (2008) identified the lack of LGBT-specific prevention services as a barrier to quality health care. There is a dearth of services that deal with the effects of a stigmatizing society. These include a lack of services that target negative health behaviors and the increased prevalence of mental and physical health issues in the LGBT community. In summary, because of the stigma of a sexual minority status, many barriers exist to receiving timely and adequate healthcare. This failure to receive timely and adequate healthcare may translate into greater mental and physical health disparities between heterosexual and lesbian/bisexual women. In the following section, the research on existing health disparities is described. Mental Health Disparities Early work by Evelyn Hooker in the 1950s with small community samples found no differences in the psychological adjustment of sexual minority individuals and heterosexuals (Hooker, 1993). This work was critical to the removal of homosexuality as a psychiatric diagnosis (Cochran, 2001). However, in the years since Hooker’s important work, large representative samples have revealed that lesbians and gay men have a higher prevalence rate of certain mental health disorders. In particular, sexual minority individuals appear especially susceptible to the disorders that are most sensitive to minority stress (Cochran, 2001). These include depression, anxiety, and substance abuse disorders (Cochran, Sullivan, & Mays, 2003). A number of large-scale, nationally representative samples have found that lesbian and bisexual women have higher rates of certain psychiatric syndromes than heterosexual women (e.g., Cochran & Mays, 2000; Gilman, Cochran, & Mays, 2001; Sandfort, de Graaf, Bijl, & Schnabel, 2001). Furthermore, lesbian women were more likely than heterosexual women to have used mental health services in the prior year (Cochran, 2001; Cochran et al., 2003). In a large survey of women in Los Angeles County, Diamant and Wold (2003) found that lesbians reported more poor mental health days when compared to heterosexual women. A number of studies have used population-based surveys to extrapolate rates of disorders among lesbian and bisexual women. The evidence is quite strong that sexual minority women experience higher rates of certain disorders as a result of prejudice and stigma in society. Depression and Anxiety Disorders In a nationally representative sample of middle-aged adults in the contiguous United States, lesbian and bisexual women reported higher prevalence of anxiety disorder and greater likelihood of having a second
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co-morbid disorder compared to heterosexual women (Cochran et al., 2003). In a more recent study of Latino and Asian American adults (Cochran, Mays, Alegria, Ortega, & Takeuchi, 2007), 6.4 percent of female participants identified as lesbian or bisexual (or reported recent same-sex sexual behavior). Those participants identified as lesbian or bisexual were more likely to have evidenced recent and lifetime history of depressive disorders compared to their heterosexual counterparts. Furthermore, research has found that lesbian women who report depression are more likely to be taking medication for depression than heterosexual women who report depression (Diamant & Wold, 2003). This may signal that the lesbian women are experiencing more severe depression or have fewer ways to cope with depression than heterosexual women. This depression may at times manifest itself in a higher incidence of suicide attempts among sexual minority women. These data can be very difficult to interpret for a number of reasons, including identifying sexual orientation of participants. However, there is some evidence that lesbian and bisexual women may have slightly higher suicide attempt rates compared to heterosexual women. In a study of Asian and Latino women, those identifying as lesbian or bisexual were marginally more likely to have attempted suicide than the heterosexual participants (Cochran et al., 2007). Drug Dependency Often individuals use and abuse drugs as a way to cope with depression, anxiety, and stigma. A number of research studies have indicated that women who have female sexual partners are at greater risk of illicit drug use (e.g., Cochran, Ackerman, Mays, & Ross, 2004; Crothers, Haller, Benton, & Haag, 2008; Sandfort et al., 2001). Reports have provided greater evidence of lifetime use of a number of drugs including stimulants, tranquilizers, cocaine, and marijuana. Similar findings also emerged for use in the prior month. This use seems to translate into more drug dependency disorders. For example, Cochran and Mays (2000) found that the lesbian women in their sample were more likely to have drug and alcohol dependency syndromes. In a nationally representative sample of Asian and Latino adults, lesbian and bisexual women were more likely to have a recent history of a drug use disorder (Cochran et al., 2007). In a study of 2,011 lesbian and bisexual women living in California (Corliss, Grella, Mays, & Cochran, 2006), it was found that 27 percent of women showed lifetime patterns of drug use that were categorized as either high or moderate risk. Approximately 40 percent of women with more problematic drug use had sought professional services. Interestingly, for these women, living with a romantic partner acted as a protective factor against drug use.
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In a more generalized study that compared lesbian and bisexual women from seven different studies around the United States with standardized samples of women, it was found that lesbian and bisexual women had greater alcohol use than the general population of women (Cochran et al., 2000). In the United States, the research suggests that women who identify as sexual minorities use and abuse alcohol and drugs at higher rates than women who identify as heterosexual. It appears that living in a society that stigmatizes women for forming relationships with other women may push these women to use drugs and alcohol as one way to cope with the stigma. As we will see in the next section, drug and alcohol use may translate into greater physical health concerns among sexual minority women. Physical Health Disparities In addition to mental health disparities between heterosexual and sexual minority women, research has also found a number of physical health disparities. The root of these disparities is complex, but part of the explanation is likely the barriers to health care discussed above and specific behavioral risk factors and preventative practices associated with a sexual minority identity. BEHAVIORAL RISK FACTORS AND PREVENTATIVE HEALTH PRACTICES A number of studies indicate that lesbian and bisexual women may be more likely to engage in behaviors known to be risk factors for a number of physical health concerns. For example, in a study that compared self-identified lesbians with a national sample of women, it was found that the lesbian women were more likely to be smokers than heterosexual women (Aaron et al., 2001; Diamant et al., 2000; Gruskin, Greenwood, Matevia, Pollack, & Bye, 2007). Smoking is a known risk factor for a number of physical health concerns including pulmonary and cardiac diseases and cancer. In addition, lesbian and bisexual women were also more likely to drink alcohol compared to control samples. In Diamant and colleagues study, it was found that almost three-fourths of lesbians and bisexuals used alcohol compared to onehalf of heterosexuals. Furthermore, lesbians and bisexual women were much more likely to report drinking 3 or more drinks almost daily. Studies have also found that lesbians are more likely to be overweight or obese compared to controlled samples of heterosexuals (Cochran et al., 2000), which is a known risk factor for a number of health conditions. For example in one study, 48 percent of lesbian women compared to only 32 percent of women in the national sample were overweight (body mass index [BMI] 27.3 kg/m2). Contradictory
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to past reports, the lesbian women in this sample appeared to participate in physical activity at about the same rate as the national sample of women. In fact, lesbian women were slightly more likely than other women to report vigorous activity. Additional research is needed to sort out the research on weight and exercise. Despite an increased need for health screening and preventative services, research indicates that lesbian and bisexual women may fail to obtain proper care. As discussed earlier, whether for fear of discrimination from a doctor, a lack of health insurance, or a misunderstanding of the risks, lesbian and bisexual women often are found to have poorer rates of preventative health screening compared to heterosexual women. Two large studies have found that lesbian women were less likely to have had a papanicolaou (pap) test in the past two years compared to heterosexual women (Aaron et al., 2001). Failure to see gynecologists and have recommended examinations is of particular alarm because many lesbian women do not have a history of oral contraceptives, pregnancy, and breastfeeding, all of which are protective factors for ovarian and other cancers (American Cancer Society, n.d.). The combination of risky behaviors and a failure to obtain preventative health screenings may account for some of the physical health disparities that are discussed in the next sections. OUTCOMES Although the evidence is mixed, a number of studies have found that lesbian and bisexual women have higher incidence of a number of physical health outcomes. A few of the studies are reviewed below. In one study of 4,023 women who participated in the Los Angeles County Health Survey, it was found that lesbian and bisexual women had a higher rate of being diagnosed with heart disease. Importantly, this finding persisted even when controlling for age, race, education, income, health insurance, tobacco use, and obesity (Diamant & World, 2003). Furthermore controlling for those same variables, bisexual women also reported more ‘‘poor physical health days’’ compared to the heterosexual sample. In another large-scale study that included heterosexual, lesbian, bisexual, and heterosexual-with-homosexual-experience women, several physical health differences emerged (Cochran & Mays, 2007). For example, bisexual women reported a greater number of health conditions than heterosexual women. These health conditions included digestive complaints, back problems, and chronic fatigue syndrome. Heterosexual women with homosexual experiences reported more back problems and asthma than other heterosexual women. And finally, lesbian women reported having arthritis more than other heterosexual women. However, most of these health disparities became nonsignificant once the researcher factored in
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psychological distress. The root of the problem may lie in the experience of minority stress that contributes to psychological distress. As discussed earlier, both lesbian women and bisexual women report higher levels of psychological distress than heterosexual women. Drawing from psychological research on women who identify as lesbian or bisexual, it is clear that the impact of stigma is far-reaching. Stigma effects sexual minority women in a number of ways including in legal domains, in terms of economic resources, family and friend relationships, and in terms of health and well-being. More research is needed to understand how the consequences of stigma and minority stress are experienced around the world. The next section discusses ways in which lesbian and bisexual women may cope with stigma and minority stress. COPING The experience of minority stress may lead lesbians and women who engage in same-sex sexual behavior to adapt coping strategies to deal with the stressors they experience. Considering the weight of the research we have presented up until this time, the outlook may seem bleak for members of the LGB community. However, many of the individuals within these communities do not express high levels of the negative outcomes associated with stigma and minority stress (Herek & Garnets, 2007). Numerous means of coping with minority stress have been seen in gay, lesbian and bisexual populations in the United States, which may serve as a buffer against some of the aforementioned negative outcomes. Recently, various anti-gay legislative efforts in individual states within the United States have provided researchers with the opportunity to examine the coping skills employed by sexual minority persons. At the forefront of this research is the work performed by Russell (2003) investigating responses to an amendment to the Colorado State Constitution stripping sexual minority persons of protections as minorities, including nondiscrimination. This amendment was designed to remove sexual minorities from protected status and make it illegal for them to file complaints based on discriminatory treatment as minority persons. A study of LGB people in Colorado revealed that this anti-gay campaign was very stressful for many participants. The coping skills employed by these participants fell neatly into 5 categories: movement perspective, confronting internalized homonegativity, expression of affect, connecting to community, and successful witnessing (Russell, 2003). Taking a movement perspective entails stepping back from an antigay experience and seeing it as a small part of a larger picture, progressing toward optimal changes (Russell, 2003). In other words, individuals taking a movement perspective may not focus on a specific
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incident such as being the victim of a derogatory slur, but may instead consider it to be a lingering fragment of a gradually dissolving heterosexist society. This way of thinking could be very helpful to persons experiencing set backs such as the passage of anti-gay legislation. The movement perspective can be seen in statements such as the following: I am 100 percent opposed to Amendment 2 (like I really need to say that) but I think that it’s doing good for the gay/lesbian/bisexual community in the long run. People are now being forced to deal with something they’d rather ignore. They’re being educated and taught that there is more to homosexuality that ‘‘perverted sex.’’ This will eventually be seen as the catalyst for the successful civil rights movement of the ‘90’s. (Russell, 2000, p. 198).
As part of the broader theme of seeing an anti-gay action as a small part of a larger picture, individuals who take the movement perspective may articulate beliefs about these actions as being helpful for the community’s understanding of homophobia and its implications. Taking a movement perspective may help to alleviate the powerlessness and isolation caused by anti-gay actions. By focusing more on one’s self-efficacy and actions, LGB individuals may be able to diffuse the negative consequences associated with anti-gay efforts aimed at them (Russell, 2003). In addition, the ability to have your voice heard and understood by others (successful witnessing) can serve as another form of resilience. The social support offered in these situations can help individuals to reduce feelings of powerlessness and isolation that could result from anti-gay actions. While Russell’s research found that anti-gay actions (campaigns and legislation) could lead to an increase in internalized homonegativity for some individuals, she also found the opposite. For some individuals, anti-gay actions serve as a forum in which they can investigate and confront their own internalization of negative beliefs about the LGB community and its members (Russell, 2003). Some participants in Russell’s study reported that the anti-gay campaign and amendment allowed them to examine their own beliefs about their community and themselves. This experience may have allowed them to dispel some internal shame surrounding their identities. The act of coming out as a result of these anti-gay efforts may be evidence of such a shedding of internalized negative beliefs (Russell, 2003). Another interesting finding from Russell’s research was that while certain negative emotions such as anger could be stressful to participants, they could also be evidence of resilience when expressed in a useful way. It is possible that if lesbians can harness anger, sadness, and negative affect in a way that promotes action, these emotions can help them to become more resilient and relieve stress associated with
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anti-gay actions. In addition to this, interaction with the LGB community may also serve as a way to battle the stress of anti-gay actions. The community can be both a source of information about being LGB and a forum for activism, both of which may help buffer stress (Herek & Garnets, 2007; Russell, 2003). Participation in the community may foster a collective identity because it expands an individual’s resources to the level of the entire group (Herek & Garnets, 2007). As a part of this community, individuals have a new set of norms with which to compare themselves against, norms which are more accepting of their sexuality or sexual identity than those of the mainstream, heterosexual community (Meyer, 2003). Through the lesbian community, lesbians can engage in fruitful social comparison outside of mainstream heterosexual norms, which can lead to the amelioration of the stress that feeling shunned or outcast by the mainstream community can create (Meyer, 2003). While there may be many obstacles for lesbians and women who engage in same-sex sexual practices around the world, human beings are also a very adaptive species and may sometimes be able to combat these negative influences with the use of coping strategies. The formation of communities of like-minded women and individual-level coping strategies may be powerful sources of strength and resilience in the face of great disparity for women engaging in same-sex sexual practices and identities throughout the world.
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Lewis, R. J., Derlega, V. J., Clarke, E. V., & Kuang, J. C. (2006). Stigma consciousness, social constraints, and lesbian well-being. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 53, 48–56. MacEwan, I. (1994). Differences in assessment and treatment approaches for homosexual clients. Drug and Alcohol Review, 13, 57–62. Mayer, K. H., Bradford, J. B., Makadon, H. J., Stall, R. Goldhammer, H., & Landers, S. (2008). Sexual and gender minority health: What we know and what needs to be done. American Journal of Public Health, 98, 989–995. Mays, V. M., & Cochran, S. D. (2001). Mental health correlates of perceived discrimination among lesbian, gay, bisexual adults in the United States. American Journal of Public Health, 91, 1869–1876. Meckler, G. D., Elliot, M. N., Kanouse, D. E., Beals, K. P., & Schuster, M. A. (2006). Nondisclosure of sexual orientation to a physician among a sample of gay, lesbian, and bisexual youth. Archives of Pediatric Adolescent Medicine, 160, 1248–1254. Meyer, I. H. (2003). Prejudice, social stress and mental health in lesbian, gay and bisexual populations: Conceptual issues and research evidence. Psychological Bulletin, 129, 674–697. Miracle, T. S, Miracle, A. W., & Baumeister, R. F. (2003). Human sexuality: Meeting your basic needs. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Mohr, J. J., & Daly, C. A. (2008). Sexual minority stress and changes in relationship quality in same-sex couples. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 25, 989–1007. Nagadya, M., & Morgan, R. (2005). ‘‘Some say I am a hermaphrodite just because I put on trousers’’: Lesbians and tommy boys in Kampala, Uganda. In R. Morgan & S. Wieringa (Eds.), Tommy boys, lesbian men and ancestral wives: Female same-sex practices in Africa (pp. 25–50). Johannesburg: Jacana Media. Phelan, J. C., Link, B. G., & Dovidio, J. F. (2008). Stigma and prejudice: One animal or two? Social Science and Medicine, 67, 358–367. Pinel, E. C. (1999). Stigma consciousness: The psychological legacy of social stereotypes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 76, 114–128. Rostosky, S. S., Riggle, E. D. B., Brodnicki, C., & Olson, A. (2008). An exploration of lived religion in same-sex couples from Judeo-Christian traditions. Family Processes, 47, 389–403. Rostosky, S. S., Riggle, E. D. B., Grey, B. E., & Hatton, R. L. (2007). Minority stress experiences in committed same-sex couple relationships. Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, 33, 392–400. Rowen, C. J., & Malcom, J. P. (2002). Correlates of internalized homophobia and homosexual identity formation in a sample of gay men. Journal of Homosexuality, 43, 77–92. Russell, G. M. (2000). Voted out: The psychological consequences of anti-gay politics. New York: New York University Press. Russell, G. M. (2003). Stressor and resilience factors for lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals confronting antigay politics. American Journal of Community Psychology, 31, 313–328. Sandfort, T. G. M., de Graaf, R., Bijl, R. V., & Schnabel, P. (2001). Same-sex sexual behavior and psychiatric disorders: Findings from the Netherlands
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Mental Health Survey and Incidence Study (NEMESIS). Archives of General Psychiatry, 58, 85–91. UN ‘‘spreading homosexuality around the world’’—Uganda (2009, April 4). Retrieved April 19, 2009, from http://www.thezimbabwemail.com/world/ 2087.html. Whitley, B. E., & Kite, M. E. (2006). The psychology of prejudice and discrimination. Belmont, CA: Thompson Wadsworth. Williamson, I. R. (2000). Internalized homophobia and health issues affecting lesbians and gay men. Health Education Research: Theory and Practice, 15, 97–107.
Chapter 10
Special Issues for Women with Disabilities Martha E. Banks
OVERVIEW OF AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION GUIDELINES REGARDING CULTURAL COMPETENCE Development of culturally relevant rehabilitation psychology can be aided by application of the American Psychological Association’s Guidelines on Multicultural Education, Training, Research, Practice, and Organizational Change for Psychologists (American Psychological Association [APA], 2003). Guideline #1 indicates, ‘‘Psychologists are encouraged to recognize that, as cultural beings, they may hold attitudes and beliefs that can detrimentally influence their perceptions of and interactions with individuals who are ethnically and racially different from themselves’’ (p. 382). This involves ‘‘Psychologists are encouraged to learn how cultures differ in basic premises that shape worldview’’ (p. 382). Psychologists are encouraged to be aware of their attitudes and work to increase their contact with members of other racial/ethnic groups, building trust in others and increasing their tolerance for others. The second guideline ‘‘Psychologists are encouraged to recognize the importance of multicultural sensitivity or responsiveness, knowledge, and understanding about ethnically and racially different individuals’’ (p. 385). As a way to implement this guideline, ‘‘[p]sychologists are also encouraged to understand the stigmatizing aspects of being a member of a culturally devalued ‘other group’ ’’ (p. 385). This involves more than awareness of overt experiences of prejudice and discrimination. Individual rehabilitation psychologists developing cultural competence have increased awareness of the negative value of their own group in the
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cultural hierarchy, an understanding of stereotype threat as it impacts on a person’s functioning in assessment or during treatment, and recognition of the uncertainty of the attribution of the stigmatizing comments and outcomes. ‘‘Understanding a client’s or student’s or research participant’s worldview, including the effect of being in a stigmatized group, helps to understand his/her perspectives and behaviors’’ (p. 385). For clients with disabilities, it is important for the rehabilitation psychologist to consider cultural factors in symptom presentation, meaning of disability, motivation and willingness to seek treatment, social support networks, perseverance in treatment, differences in perspectives and experiences of people with lifelong and recently acquired visible and invisible disabilities, and acknowledgment of women of all ethnicities and People of Color with disabilities as members of multiple stigmatized groups. Guideline #4 addresses research: ‘‘Culturally sensitive psychological researchers are encouraged to recognize the importance of conducting culture-centered and ethical psychological research among persons from ethnic, linguistic, and racial minority backgrounds. Major demographic shifts in the United States . . . are underway’’ (p. 388). As a result, it will be necessary to expand to include the issues facing aging baby boomers, new immigrants, younger individuals of Latino heritage, and biracial people; Women with Disabilities are members of all of those groups. ‘‘[W]hen research does not adequately incorporate culture as a central and specific contextual variable, behavior is misidentified, pathologized, and, in some cases, psychologists are at risk of perpetuating harm’’ (p. 388). ‘‘Thus, psychological researchers are encouraged to be grounded in the empirical and conceptual literature on the ways that culture influences the variables under investigation, as well as psychological and social science research traditions and skills’’ (p. 389). Therefore, cultural considerations should be incorporated into research generation and design, assessment, analysis, and interpretation. Multicultural research considerations are similar to the Participatory Action Model endorsed by APA and the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research: ‘‘Culture-centered psychological researchers are encouraged to report on the sample group’s cultural, ethnic, gender, and racial characteristics and to report on the cultural limitations and generalizability of the research results as well’’ (p. 389). It is also recommended that researchers design the study to be of benefit to participants and to include participants in the interpretation of results. They are encouraged to find ways for the results to be of benefit to the community and to represent the participants’ perspectives accurately and authentically. (p. 390)
Guideline #5 concerns the importance of culturally relevant approaches to treatment: ‘‘Psychologists strive to apply culturally-appropriate skills in
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clinical and other applied psychological practices’’. . . . (p. 390). It is not necessary to develop an entirely new repertoire of psychological skills to practice in a culture-centered manner. Rather, it is helpful for psychologists to realize that there will likely be situations where culture-centered adaptations in interventions and practices will be more effective (p. 390). Treatment best occurs when accurate assessment has been made. A client’s symptoms must be evaluated within his or her cultural context, using culturally appropriate assessment tools (Ackerman & Banks, 2002). Rehabilitation psychologists use a broad repertoire of interventions to provide culturally relevant treatment (Ackerman & Banks, 2003; Corbett, 2003; DiCowden, 2003; Mukherjee, Reis, & Heller, 2003; Nabors & Pettee, 2003). WOMEN WITH DISABILITIES AS A CULTURAL GROUP Banks and Kaschak (2003) recognized a broad range of disabilities experienced by women. They classified them as ‘‘ ‘Men’s’ Illness Overlooked in Women and ‘Women’s’ Illness Misdiagnosed or Dismissed’’ and ‘‘Dormant and Part-Time Disabilities.’’ These included traumatic brain injury; chronic health problems (e.g., diabetes, cardiac disease, chronic fatigue syndrome, HIV/AIDS) (Beatty, 2003; Feist-Price & Wright, 2003), pain (Kendall-Tackett, Marshall & Ness, 2003), psychiatric disorders, learning disabilities (Hoffschmidt & Weinstein, 2003); situational disabilities, such as migraines, motion sickness, morning sickness in pregnancy, social anxiety, and gastric distress during menses; limited vision, deafness, and limited mobility. Women’s disabilities occur within a variety of life circumstances, some of which involve the social construction of disability and its impact on identity. Women with Disabilities struggle with lack of accommodation in education and employment in ways that are often different from men (Vande Kemp, Chen, Erickson, & Friesen, 2003). In addition, Women with Disabilities are confronted with a variety of sexuality issues (Crawford & Ostrove, 2003; Dotson, Stinson, & Christian, 2003; Mona, 2003). All Women with Disabilities deal with intersections of gender, disability, ethnicity, and social class. Women with Disabilities face multiple stigma and discrimination based on age (youth, old age), ethnicity, weight status (obesity, underweight), and disbelief when they experience invisible disabilities. The nondominant status of Women with Disabilities impacts negatively on education, employment, and reproduction. Labeling is an issue for Women with Disabilities as it influences personal identity. For some women, there is pride in being identified with a group of people with whom they have challenges in common. For other women, the idea of having a disability suggests an undesired vulnerability (Feldman & Tegart, 2003). Public images of Women with Disabilities are quite limited. Most training materials for psychologists
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do not include images of Women with Disabilities. At the other end of the spectrum, there is a subset of pornography that specifically exploits Women with Disabilities (Elman, 1997; Fiduccia, 1999; see also Farley, 2003). A SPECIFIC REHABILITATION ISSUE: SAFETY CONCERNS FOR WOMEN WITH DISABILITIES Women with Disabilities are at higher risk for physical abuse and psychological abuse than women without disabilities. The risk is further increased if the women need to rely on others for assistance. While there has been some consideration given to violence perpetrated by individuals, including family members and health professionals, there are also social systemic risk factors. Some of the high risk factors for Women with Disabilities include financial and other dependence, inadequate support for personal assistants, and dangers endemic to treatment settings. While many people consider treatment settings as safe havens for People with Disabilities, in some instances they represent risk for Women with Disabilities, due to mistreatment at hands of others, including other clients and treatment professionals (McCarthy, 1998). Such revictimization is, of course, unethical. Disch (2006) described the long-lasting negative effects that sexual abuse by professionals can have on women. There are many types of abuse experienced by Women with Disabilities. While all women are at risk for violence, there are specific types of violence that are related to disability (Banks, 2007). These include disabilityrelated emotional abuse, disability-related physical abuse, disability-related sexual abuse, abuse related to disability-related settings, abuse related to helping relationships, and disability-related financial abuse. Disability-related emotional abuse can involve actual or threatened abandonment (Nosek, Foley, Hughes, & Howland, 2001) and isolation (Crawford & Ostrove, 2003). Intolerance and rejection (Nosek, Foley et al., 2001), refusal to acknowledge disability (Corbett, 2003), family prioritization of men’s disabilities over women’s disabilities (Nabors & Pettee, 2003), unrealistic demands on Women with Disabilities to carry out prescribed family roles (Nabors & Pettee, 2003), and family members’ refusal to develop skills to communicate with a Woman with a Disability (Corbett, 2003) are further examples of disability-related emotional abuse. Transportation limitations (Marshall, Sanderson, Johnson, Du Bois, & Kvedar, 2006), such as lack of, inconsistent, limited availability of, or need for advanced appointments for specialized transportation services, represent a systemic safety issue, as Women with Disabilities are confronted with limited ability to leave abusive situations. Disability-related physical abuse can take several forms. In addition to the beating often associated with violence against women, Women
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with Disabilities are subjected to withholding of or other prevention of the use of orthotic or other assistive devices or medication (BeckMassey, 1999; Curry, Hassouneh-Phillips, & Johnston-Silverberg, 2001; Nosek, Foley et al., 2001; Saxton, Curry, Powers, Maley, Eckels, & Gross, 2001), adult children’s allowing access of known abusive relatives to Women with Disabilities, and family refusal to allow access to personal assistants (Bergeron, 2005). Perhaps the most common type of disability-related sexual abuse is spousal rape (Nosek, Foley, et al., 2001). People providing assistance sometimes use the threat of physical violence to coerce sexual activity (McCarthy, 1998); this can happen in the home as well as in treatment settings. Blurring the line between appropriate touching as an essential part of the job of providers and inappropriate touching makes assessment of sexual abuse difficult at times; this can happen during bathing or dressing (Saxton et al., 2001). Nosek, Foley, and colleagues documented fondling or forcing sexual activity in return for accepting help as sexual abuse of Women with Disabilities. Mona (2003) noted that, in personal assistance for sexual expression, there might be confusion between helping an individual with sexual activity and participating in sexual activity. Of particular concern to rehabilitation psychologists is abuse related to disability-related settings, because the chances of implementing institution-wide change are good. Many inpatient institutions have, for convenience, desegregated units that were gender-segregated in the past. The desegregation has, in some instances, created a particular risk for Women with Disabilities when they are not adequately protected from males in inpatient settings; for example, when abuse is discounted or excused as ‘‘symptom’’ of males’ disabilities (Banks, 2007; McCarthy, 1998). ‘‘In institutions men routinely pay for, and women routinely accept payment for, sex . . . Sex is seen as a commodity that can be exchanged and it is a oneway exchange, i.e. the men pay the women, not the other way around’’ (McCarthy, 1998, p. 547). Sexual abuse by staff members occurs under the guise of provision of healthcare (Nosek, Foley, et al., 2001). In the treatment setting, additional forms of abuse occur. In some facilities, there is an overuse of seclusion, restraint, and rapid tranquilization (Sequeira & Halstead, 2001). Therapy can be rendered harmful or ineffective by therapists’ discounting of impact of disability (Farley, 2003; Williams & Upadhyay, 2003). Therapists’ misattribution of psychological presenting complaints to physical disability can result in clients’ receiving the wrong or no treatment (Mukherjee, Reis, & Heller, 2003). In many training facilities, Women with Disabilities experience exposure of their nude body to others (e.g., health care students) without permission (Mona, Cameron, & Crawford, 2005). There is disability-related abuse related to helping relationships. With personal assistance, there is a power imbalance between the
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provider and the recipient. It is important to consider who provides personal assistance and who monitors it. Most personal assistance is provided in private, resulting in little protection in the event of violence or other abuse. If a Woman with a Disability needs personal assistance, she is unlikely to be strong enough to defend herself (Banks, 2007). Nearly two-thirds of the People with Disabilities who need personal assistance are women (Kennedy & LaPlante, 1997, as cited by Mona, 2003). Coble (2001) observed that many People with Disabilities who need personal assistance are inexperienced in the selection of effective or trustworthy personal assistants; she provided detailed recommendations to assist in interviewing and evaluation of potential candidates (see also Saxton et al., 2001). Some types of abuse related to helping relationships include rough handling (Mona et al., 2005); not responding or delaying response (Mona et al., 2005); lack of understanding by police and other helping professionals of the nature of personal assistance relationships, due to societal assumptions that Women with Disabilities are incompetent (Chang et al., 2003; Gilson, DePoy, & Cramer, 2001; Mona et al., 2005; Nosek, Howland, & Hughes, 2001; Saxton et al., 2001); infantilization (Nosek, Foley, et al., 2001; Saxton et al., 2001); and inappropriately attempting to transform a business relationship into a personal friendship (Saxton et al., 2001). Saxton and colleagues (2001) described disability-related financial abuse that can involve ‘‘[T]heft of jewelry, money, and personal belongings; forgery; purchase of personal items when shopping with the participant’s money; and withdrawal of extra money during ATM transactions performed for the woman. A unique form of financial abuse commonly reported was assistants showing up late or not working their full time, but still receiving full compensation’’ (p. 405). Bergeron (2005) discussed abuse of durable power of attorney. Corbett’s (2003) examination of Women with Color with Disabilities included an examination of family refusal to consider financial limitations of Women with Disabilities (Banks & Ackerman, 2006); families expected equal financial contribution for care of other family members and large contributions to family reunions.
SUMMARY Rehabilitation Psychologists Treating Abused Women with Disabilities Rehabilitation psychologists have a responsibility to determine whether a Woman with Disabilities is in danger of being abused and should explore the nature and extent of any discovered or suspected
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abuse. Abuse is an ongoing problem for Women with Disabilities as noted by Banks (2007): Women with Disabilities, on average, endure domestic violence for longer periods than women without disabilities (Coker, Smith, & Fadden, 2005; Curry et al., 2001; Li, Ford & Moore, 2000) and are at high risk for being abused by multiple perpetrators (Hassouneh-Phillips & Curry, 2002).
Family members, particularly intimate partners, are more apt than strangers to inflict violence that causes disabilities. In some cases it is not clear which came first: the abuse or the disability. There is a cycle of abuse and disability, in which it is possible for abuse to result in disability (Plichta, 2004) and for a disability to be exacerbated by abuse (Banks, 2007; Campbell & Kendall-Tackett, 2005; Curry et al., 2001; Zlotnick, Johnson & Kohn, 2006). Abuse can lead to early death; unchecked intimate partner violence has been shown to end with the death of the victim (Thompson, Saltzman, & Johnson, 2003). As a result, there is a critical need for rehabilitation psychologists to pay simultaneous attention to multiple issues. While disability is clearly a focus, it is important to determine disability before and after abuse. Treatment must address safety. Safety planning is complicated for Women with Disabilities, in part due to lack of accessible services (Zweig, Schlichter, & Burt, 2002). As noted earlier, some inpatient settings represent particular danger for Women with Disabilities. Independent living is an option for some women, but vulnerability must be considered (Hendey & Pascall, 1998). Leaving abusive relationships is often difficult in situations in which the Woman with Disability is dependent upon an abuser (Olkin, 2003; Saxton et al., 2001). The risk of intimate partner violence escalates at the point of separation; leaving is extremely dangerous for abused women (Heise, Ellsberg, & Gottemoeller, 1999; Kyriacou et al., 1999). Women are most likely to be murdered when attempting to report abuse or to leave abusive relationships (Wuest & Merritt-Gray, 1999). Campbell and Soeken (1999) observed ‘‘women with dangerous batterers may stay with them out of fear’’ (p. 35). Brice-Baker (1994) described cultural issues which trap immigrant women into staying in violent relationships—fear of deportation, cultural belief systems about why abuse occurs, economic limitations, and language barriers. In addition, Fleury, Sullivan, Bybee, and Davidson (1998) noted that victims prevented from calling police or who had no telephone available, suffered more physical injuries than victims who had access to help. It is important that professionals not fall prey to myths that victims are unlikely to leave abusive relationships, that victims are passive and self-defeating, and that physical violence is
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more devastating that psychological violence (Gortner, Berns, Jacobson, & Gottman, 1997). Rehabilitation psychologists have developed a broad range of interventions and are well prepared to work as members of interdisciplinary teams to address the complexities of issues faced by Women with Disabilities. The field of rehabilitation psychology has moved from the traditional model through the medical model and social model to the integrative model (Seelman, 2004). Incorporating social situations of Women with Disabilities into the integrative model is the next logical step toward building truly culturally competent rehabilitation psychology.
REFERENCES Ackerman, R. J., & Banks, M. E. (2002). Epilogue: Looking for the threads: Commonalities and differences. In F. R. Ferraro (Ed.), Minority and crosscultural aspects of neuropsychological assessment (pp. 387–415). Heereweg, Lisse, The Netherlands: Swets & Zeitlinger Publishers. Ackerman, R. J., & Banks, M. E. (2003). Assessment, treatment, and rehabilitation for interpersonal violence victims: Women sustaining head injuries. In M. E. Banks & E. Kaschak (Eds.), Women with visible and invisible disabilities: Multiple intersections, multiple issues, multiple therapies (pp. 343–363). New York: Haworth. American Psychological Association. (2003). APA guidelines on multicultural education, training, research, practice, and organizational change for psychologists. American Psychologist, 58, 377–402. Banks, M. E. (2003). Preface. In M. E. Banks & E. Kaschak (Eds.), Women with visible and invisible disabilities: Multiple intersections, multiple issues, multiple therapies (pp. xxi–xxxix). New York: Haworth. Banks, M. E. (2007). Women with disabilities, domestic violence against. In N. A. Jackson (Ed.), Encyclopedia of domestic violence. New York: Taylor & Francis (pp. 723–728). Banks, M. E., & Ackerman, R. J. (2002). Head and brain injuries experienced by African American women victims of intimate partner violence. Women & Therapy, 25, 133–143. Banks, M. E., & Ackerman, R. J. (2006). Health disparities: Focus on disability. In K. J. Hagglund & A. W. Heinemann (Eds.), Handbook of applied disability and rehabilitation research (pp. 45–70). New York: Springer. Banks, M. E. & Kaschak, E. (Eds.). (2003). Women with visible and invisible disabilities: Multiple intersections, multiple issues, multiple therapies. New York: Haworth. Banks, M. E., & Marshall, C. (2004). Beyond the ‘‘triple-whammy’’: Social class as a factor in discrimination against persons with disabilities. In J. L. Chin (Ed.), The psychology of prejudice and discrimination: Combating prejudice and all forms of discrimination. Volume 4: Disability, religion, physique, and other traits (pp. 95–110). Westport, CT: Praeger. Beatty, L. (2003). Substance abuse, disabilities, and Black women: An issue worth exploring. In M. E. Banks & E. Kaschak (Eds.), Women with visible
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and invisible disabilities: Multiple intersections, multiple issues, multiple therapies (pp. 223–236). New York: Haworth. Beck-Massey, D. (1999). Sanctioned war: Women, violence, and disabilities. Sexuality and Disability, 17, 269–276. Bergeron, L. R. (2005). Abuse of elderly women in family relationships: Another form of violence against women. In K. A. Kendall-Tackett (Ed.), Handbook of women, stress, and trauma (pp. 141–157). New York: BrunnerRoutledge. Brice-Baker, J. R. (1994). Domestic violence in African-American and AfricanCaribbean families. Journal of Social Distress and the Homeless, 3, 23–38. Campbell, J. C., & Kendall-Tackett, K. A. (2005). Intimate partner violence: Implications for women’s physical and mental health. In K. A. KendallTackett (Ed.), Handbook of women, stress, and trauma (pp. 123–140). New York: Brunner-Routledge. Campbell, J. C., & Soeken, K. L. (1999b). Women’s responses to battering over time: An analysis of change. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 14, 21–40. Chang, J. C., Martin, S. L., Moracco, K. E., Dulli, L., Scandlin, D., Loucks-Sorrel, M. B., et al. (2003). Helping women with disabilities and domestic violence: Strategies, limitations, and challenges of domestic violence programs and services. Journal of Women’s Health, 12, 699–708. Coble, A. C. (2001, Winter). When the challenge of maintaining personal care attendants becomes the focus of treatment. Rehabilitation Psychology News, 28, 7–8. Coker, A. L., Smith, P. H., & Fadden, M. K. (2005). Intimate partner violence and disabilities among women attending family practice clinics. Journal of Women’s Health, 14, 829–838. Corbett, C. A. (2003). Special issues in psychotherapy with minority deaf women. In M. E. Banks & E. Kaschak (Eds.), Women with visible and invisible disabilities: Multiple intersections, multiple issues, multiple therapies (pp. 311–329). New York: Haworth. Crawford, D., & Ostrove, J. M. (2003). Representations of disability and the interpersonal relationships of Women with Disabilities. In M. E. Banks & E. Kaschak (Eds.), Women with visible and invisible disabilities: Multiple intersections, multiple issues, multiple therapies (pp. 179–194). New York: Haworth. Curry, M. A., Hassouneh-Phillips, D., & Johnston-Silverberg, A. (2001). Abuse of women with disabilities: An ecological model and review. Violence Against Women, 7, 60–79. DiCowden, M. (2003). The call of the wild woman: Models of healing. In M. E. Banks & E. Kaschak (Eds.), Women with visible and invisible disabilities: Multiple intersections, multiple issues, multiple therapies (pp. 297–310). New York: Haworth. Disch, E. (2006). Sexual victimization and revictimization of women by professionals: Client experiences and implications for subsequent treatment. Women & Therapy, 29, 41–61. Dotson, L. A., Stinson, J., & Christian, L. (2003). ‘‘People tell me I can’t have sex’’: Women with disabilities share their personal perspectives on health care, sexuality, and reproductive rights. In M. E. Banks & E. Kaschak (Eds.), Women with visible and invisible disabilities: Multiple intersections, multiple issues, multiple therapies (pp. 195–209). New York: Haworth.
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Elman, R. A. (1997). Disability pornography: The fetishization of women’s vulnerabilities. Violence Against Women, 3, 257–270. Farley, M. (2003). Prostitution and the invisibility of harm. In M. E. Banks & E. Kaschak (Eds.), Women with visible and invisible disabilities: Multiple intersections, multiple issues, multiple therapies (pp. 247–280). New York: Haworth. Feist-Price, S., & Wright, L. B. (2003). African American women living with HIV/AIDS: Mental health issues. In M. E. Banks & E. Kaschak (Eds.), Women with visible and invisible disabilities: Multiple intersections, multiple issues, multiple therapies (pp. 27–44). New York: Haworth. Feldman, S. I., & Tegart, G. (2003). Keep moving: Conceptions of illness and disability of middle-aged African-American women with arthritis. In M. E. Banks & E. Kaschak (Eds.), Women with visible and invisible disabilities: Multiple intersections, multiple issues, multiple therapies (pp. 127–143). New York: Haworth. Fiduccia, B. F. W. (1999). Sexual imagery of physically disabled women: Erotic? Perverse? Sexist? Sexuality and Disability, 17, 277–282. Fleury, R. E., Sullivan, C. M., Bybee, D. I., & Davidson II, W. S. (1998). ‘‘Why don’t they just call the cops?’’: Reasons for differential police contact among women with abusive partners. Violence and Victims, 13, 333–346. Gilson, S. F., DePoy, E., & Cramer, E. P. (2001). Linking the assessment of selfreported functional capacity with abuse experiences of women with disabilities. Violence Against Women, 7, 418–431. Gortner, E., Berns, S. B., Jacobson, N. S., & Gottman, J. M. (1997). When women leave violent relationships: Dispelling clinical myths. Psychotherapy, 34, 343–352. Hassouneh-Phillips, D., & Curry, M. A. (2002). Abuse of women with disabilities: State of the science. Rehabilitation Counseling Bulletin, 45, 96–104. Heise, L., Ellsberg, M., & Gottemoeller, M. (1999, December). Ending violence against women. Population Reports, Series L, Number 11. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health, Population Information Program. Retrieved December 9, 2006, from http://www.jhuccp.org/pr/ l11edsum.stm. Hendey, N., & Pascall, G. (1998). Independent living: Gender, violence and the threat of violence. Disability & Society, 13, 415–427. Hoffschmidt, S. J., & Weinstein, C. S. (2003). The influence of silent learning disorders on the lives of women. In M. E. Banks & E. Kaschak (Eds.), Women with visible and invisible disabilities: Multiple intersections, multiple issues, multiple therapies (pp. 81–94). New York: Haworth. Kendall-Tackett, K., Marshall, R., & Ness, K. (2003). Chronic pain syndromes and violence against women. In M. E. Banks & E. Kaschak (Eds.), Women with visible and invisible disabilities: Multiple intersections, multiple issues, multiple therapies (pp. 45–56). New York: Haworth. Kyriacou, D. N., Angelin, D., Taliaferro, E., Stone, S., Tubb, T., Linden, J. A., et al. (1999). Risk factors for injury to women from domestic violence. New England Journal of Medicine, 341, 1892–1898. Li, L., Ford, J. A., & Moore, D. (2000). An exploratory study of violence, substance abuse, disability, and gender. Social Behavior and Personality, 28, 61–71. Marshall, C. A., Sanderson, P. R., Johnson, S. R., Du Bois, B., & Kvedar, J. C. (2006). Considering class, culture, and access in rehabilitation intervention
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and research. In K. J. Hagglund & A. W. Heinemann (Eds.), Handbook of applied disability and rehabilitation research (pp. 25–44). New York: Springer. McCarthy, M. (1998). Sexual violence against women with learning disabilities. Feminism & Psychology, 8, 544–551. Mona, L. R. (2003). Sexual options for people with disabilities: Using personal assistance services for sexual expression. In M. E. Banks & E. Kaschak (Eds.), Women with visible and invisible disabilities: Multiple intersections, multiple issues, multiple therapies (pp. 211–221). New York: Haworth. Mona, L. R., Cameron, R. P., & Crawford, D. (2005). Stress and trauma in the lives of women with disabilities. In K. A. Kendall-Tackett (Ed.), Handbook of women, stress, and trauma (pp. 229–244). New York: Brunner-Routledge. Mukherjee, D., Reis, J. P., & Heller, W. (2003). Women living with traumatic brain injury: Social isolation, emotional functioning and implications for psychotherapy. In M. E. Banks & E. Kaschak (Eds.), Women with visible and invisible disabilities: Multiple intersections, multiple issues, multiple therapies (pp. 3–26). New York: Haworth. Nabors, N. A., & Pettee, M. F. (2003). Womanist therapy with African American Women with disabilities. In M. E. Banks & E. Kaschak (Eds.), Women with visible and invisible disabilities: Multiple intersections, multiple issues, multiple therapies (pp. 331–341). New York: Haworth. Nosek, M. A., Foley, C. C., Hughes, R. B., & Howland, C. A. (2001). Vulnerabilities for abuse among women with disabilities. Sexuality and Disability, 19, 177–189. Nosek, M. A., Howland, C. A., & Hughes, R. B. (2001). The investigation of abuse and women with disabilities: Going beyond assumptions. Violence Against Women, 7, 477–499. Olkin, R. (2003). Women with physical disabilities who want to leave their partners: A feminist and disability-affirmative perspective. In M. E. Banks & E. Kaschak (Eds.), Women with visible and invisible disabilities: Multiple intersections, multiple issues, multiple therapies (pp. 237–246). New York: Haworth. Plichta, S. B. (2004). Intimate partner violence and physical health consequences: Policy and practice implications. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 19, 1296–1323. Saxton, M., Curry, M. A., Powers, L. E., Maley, S., Eckels, K., & Gross, J. (2001). ‘‘Bring my scooter so I can leave you’’: A study of disabled women handling abuse by personal assistance providers. Violence Against Women, 7, 393–417. Seelman, K. (2004, January–March). Trends in rehabilitation and disability: Transition from a medical model to an integrative model (part 1). Disability World, Issue 22. Retrieved October 20, 2006, from http://www.disabilityworld.org/01-03_04/access/rehabtrends1.shtml. Sequeira, H., & Halstead, S. (2001). ‘‘Is it meant to hurt, is it?’’: Management of violence in women with developmental disabilities. Violence Against Women, 7, 462–476. Thompson, M. P., Saltzman, L. E., & Johnson, H. (2003). A comparison of risk factors for intimate partner violence-related injury across two national surveys on violence against women. Violence Against Women, 9, 438–456. Vande Kemp, H., Chen, J. S., Erickson, G. N., & Friesen, N. L. (2003). ADA accommodation of therapists with disabilities in clinical training. In M. E.
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Banks & E. Kaschak (Eds.), Women with visible and invisible disabilities: Multiple intersections, multiple issues, multiple therapies (pp. 155–168). New York: Haworth. Williams, M., & Upadhyay, W. S. (2003). To be or not to be disabled. In M. E. Banks & E. Kaschak (Eds.), Women with visible and invisible disabilities: Multiple intersections, multiple issues, multiple therapies (pp. 145–154). New York: Haworth. Wuest, J., & Merritt-Gray, M. (1999). Not going back: Sustaining the separation in the process of leaving abusive relationships. Violence Against Women, 5, 110–133. Zlotnick, C., Johnson, D. M., & Kohn, R. (2006). Intimate partner violence and long-term psychosocial functioning in a national sample of American women. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 21, 262–275. Zweig, J. M., Schlichter, K. A., & Burt, M. R. (2002). Assisting women victims of violence who experience multiple barriers to services. Violence Against Women, 8, 162–180.
Chapter 11
Body Dissatisfaction and Disordered Eating: The Globalization of Western Appearance Ideals Jaehee Jung Gordon B. Forbes
In every known human society, women decorate and modify their bodies to make them more attractive. Although beauty standards show enormous variability across time and culture, one constant feature of human beings has been their willingness to bear great financial expense and endure painful and dangerous procedures in the pursuit of these standards. One of the reasons these efforts have persisted is the strong relationship between women’s feelings about their bodies and their physical and mental health (Grogan, 2008). A large research literature indicates that dissatisfaction with the appearance of one’s body is associated with depression, social anxiety, sexual dysfunctions, psychosomatic illnesses, and a host of other feelings and experiences that devastate women’s self-esteem and diminish their quality of life (Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997; Grogan, 2008). The most extreme manifestations of dissatisfaction with appearance are lifethreatening eating disorders. This chapter will summarize what is known about cultural differences in body dissatisfaction and eating disorders. Both body dissatisfaction and eating disorders are complex phenomena with multiple and sometimes conflicting definitions and determinants. Body dissatisfaction occurs when a woman has a negative or unfavorable body image. The term body image refers to how a woman perceives and evaluates
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her body. Body image includes perceptions of the appearance of her physical body (i.e., short, tall, fat, thin, athletic); self-evaluations and emotional reactions to her body (i.e., attractive, ugly, sexy, disgusting); perceptions of how others perceive, evaluate, and respond to her body (i.e., people think I am good looking, people think I am fat); and perceptions of her body’s functioning (e.g., athletic, healthy, weak). Eating disorders are conditions in which people’s diet and eating behaviors impair their quality of life and/or pose significant risks to their physical or mental health. We will focus on conditions associated with medically unnecessary and potentially harmful practices intended to alter the body through restricted caloric intake. The most severe form of eating disorder is anorexia nervosa. The salient feature of anorexia nervosa is a potentially life-threatening, self-induced starvation. Along with the starvation comes important physiological changes (including neurohormonal changes leading to the cessation of menstruation), the terror of becoming fat, and the false perception that the sufferer’s underweight body is fat. Another form of eating disorder is bulimia, also called bulimia nervosa. This refers to self-induced vomiting for purposes of weight control. The vomiting typically occurs following a period of actual or perceived excessive food consumption (binging). Bulimia usually occurs in people of average to above average weight. It may also occur in individuals suffering from anorexia nervosa and/or be accompanied by the abuse of laxatives or stimulant drugs.1 Estimates of the prevalence of eating disorders among Englishspeaking Western societies show substantial variation depending on how disordered eating is defined and measured and on how the data are collected. The best available recent information indicates that during their lifetime about 1 percent of American women will develop anorexia nervosa, and an additional 1.5 percent will develop bulimia (Hudson, Hiripi, Pope, & Kessler, 2007). Less information is available on the Western countries of continental Europe, but research in the last decade suggests that body dissatisfaction and eating disorders in continental European countries are roughly comparable to the levels found in English-speaking countries (Makino, Tsuboi, & Dennerstein, 2004; Miller & Pumariega, 2001; Swami et al., 2009; Wardle, Haase, & Steptoe, 2006). Although there are certainly differences within and between these countries, we will usually follow the common practice of discussing them as the single class of Western. BODY DISSATISFACTION IS FAR MORE THAN EATING DISORDERS It is important to recognize that studies of women with eating disorders involve only women whose symptoms are so severe and
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debilitating that they are diagnosed as suffering from a mental illness. For every woman with a diagnosed eating disorder, there are literally dozens of women with some, but not all, of the symptoms associated with these disorders. For example, as high as one-third of college-aged women (the demographic group with one of the highest rates of eating disorders) have at least one of the symptoms associated with eating disorders (Prah, 2006). However, even this figure fails to reflect the magnitude of body dissatisfaction or how it impacts the daily lives of ordinary women. This is because women who do not have symptoms associated with clinical eating disorders may still experience substantial dissatisfaction with their bodies. Surveys indicate that approximately 50 to 70 percent of American women are dissatisfied with one or more aspects of their bodies, particularly their weight (Cash & Henry, 1995; Frederick, Peplau, & Lever, 2006; Garner, 1997). Importantly, these high levels of weight and body dissatisfaction are found in women of all ages, show only a modest decline over their lifespan, and are found in most Western samples (Cash, 2002; Forbes et al., 2005; Tiggemann, 2004). The consequences of body and weight dissatisfaction include a pattern of constantly ‘‘watching one’s weight’’ (which may be present as early as 7 years of age, e.g., Dohnt & Tiggemann, 2006), calorie counting, self-consciousness about eating in public, shame and guilt over actual or perceived appearance flaws, and a woman’s ever-present anxious concern with appearance and other’s perceptions of her body. The cumulative effect of these experiences is lower self-confidence, lower self-esteem, and a reduced quality of life. These consequences are experienced by many, arguably most, Western women of all ages (Bordo, 1993; Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997; Rodin, Silberstein, & Striegel-Moore, 1984). In fact, body dissatisfaction is so common among Western women that it was labeled as a ‘‘normative discontent’’ a quarter of a century ago (Rodin et al., 1984). Body dissatisfaction among ordinary Western women has increased sharply over the last 30 to 40 years (Cash & Henry, 1995; Garner, 1997). Similarly, body dissatisfaction and disordered eating have begun to appear in areas of the world where they were once very rare. Although understanding the nature and extent of body dissatisfaction is a crucial step in reducing and treating life-threatening eating disorders, it is also important to recognize that it has the potential to improve the quality of life for many millions of ordinary women around the world (Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997). The rest of this chapter will address this goal. The first section will examine the history of body dissatisfaction and the contribution of feminist theory to the understanding of cultural differences in body dissatisfaction and disordered eating. The second will review the research on cultural similarities and differences in eating disorders and body dissatisfaction. This
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section will also identify major gaps in our knowledge and suggest how feminist theory may guide future research. HISTORY OF EATING DISORDERS AND BODY IMAGE Life-threatening food refusal among Western women has been described for several hundred years. Before the nineteenth century, published descriptions of food refusal usually occurred in a religious context (e.g., Bynum, 1987). Although it was described as a psychiatric syndrome in the 1870s, it was considered extremely rare for much of the following century. In his clinical training in the 1960s the second author can recall a supervisor commenting that he had seen only two cases of anorexia nervosa in over 30 years of clinical practice. Similar experiences have been reported by many mental health practitioners trained before the mid-1970s (e.g., Gordon, 2000). Public and professional interest in anorexia nervosa increased greatly in the late 1970s and 1980s. In 1983, the tragic death of the gifted popular singer Karen Carpenter focused both media and professional attention on anorexia nervosa and the previously almost unknown disorder of bulimia. In the early 1990s, Princess Diana’s public acknowledgment of her long struggle with bulimia focused public attention on a disorder that by then approached epidemic proportions among young women in the United States and United Kingdom. By the 1990s, it was generally recognized that dissatisfaction with the appearance of one’s body was an ‘‘essential precursor’’ to eating disorders (Polivy & Herman, 2002). (For a history of anorexia nervosa and other eating disorders, see Brumberg, 1988.) EATING DISORDERS AND BODY DISSATISFACTION AS CULTURE-LIMITED PHENOMENA For many years, body dissatisfaction, particularly weight dissatisfaction, excessive dieting, and life-threatening eating disorders, were thought to be culture- and social class-limited phenomena that occurred primarily or exclusively among affluent white women in English-speaking Western countries (Nasser, 1997; Prince, 1983). Two seemingly compelling sources supported this view. First, over a century of reports by mental health practitioners, and more recent reports by researchers, indicated that eating disorders are much more common among upper class white women than women from lower classes or ethnic minorities (Brumberg, 1988).2 Second, a large anthropological literature demonstrated that the majority of human societies associated slender women’s bodies with illness, poverty, and diminished fecundity (Brown & Konner, 1987; Cassidy, 1991). Conversely, almost 80 percent of societies associate moderate to
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high levels of body fat in women with health, physical attractiveness, social status, and fertility (Brown, 1991). The ‘‘fattening huts’’ of some African cultures, where girls are force-fed large quantities of food to make them gain weight and become more appealing brides, are well known (Brown & Konner, 1987; Swami & Furnham, 2008).3 By the early 1980s, mental health practitioners and researchers from non-Western countries were beginning to report cases of anorexia nervosa in societies where it was previously unknown or extremely rare. By the late 1990s, it was clear that even if the culture-limited perception of body dissatisfaction and disordered eating was once true, this was no longer the case. To the contrary, these disorders were now found in many developed and developing societies, and their prevalence in non-Western societies was increasing (Gordon, 2000; Nasser, 1997; Nasser, Katzman, & Gordon, 2001). THE GROWTH AND SPREAD OF BODY DISSATISFACTION The spread of body dissatisfaction and disordered eating is often attributed to what Lee (2004) characterized as the ‘‘. . . toxin of Westernization’’ (p. 617). However, Westernization, or perhaps more appropriately modernization (e.g., Kagitcibasi, 2005), is a complex and multidimensional phenomenon. It encompasses economic and political structures; fashion and popular culture; social roles and expectations of others; and a host of other values, expectations, and worldviews. All, some, or none of these may be related to body dissatisfaction and eating disorders. In addition, it is possible that different aspects of modernization are related to body dissatisfaction in different cultures (e.g., Sheffield, Tse, & Sofronoff, 2005). As a consequence, attributing the spread of body dissatisfaction to the nonspecific influence of modernization or Westernization does little to further our understanding of the phenomenon. MODERNIZATION AND WESTERN MEDIA Although it is likely that many aspects of modernization influence body perceptions, the most extensively studied, and certainly the most vilified, aspect of modernization is Western media. Most research has focused on media’s ubiquitous portrayals of extremely thin female bodies, its emphasis on diet and weight control, and the always implicit, and frequently explicit, message that with sufficient effort all women can and should look this way (Holmstrom, 2004; Thompson, Heinberg, Altabe, & Tantleff-Dunn, 1999). For convenience, this is often labeled the ‘‘thin body ideal.’’ Critics of Western media, particularly Western television, can draw on a large body of feminist criticism and empirical research showing the pernicious effect of the thin body ideal on the body image of women in both the developed and the
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developing world (e.g., Bordo, 1993; Jeffreys, 2005; Wolf, 1991). For recent reviews of television’s role in body dissatisfaction and disordered eating, see Gilbert, Keery, and Thompson (2005); Ward and Harrison (2005); and Cafri, Yamamiya, Brannick, and Thompson (2005). The work of Becker, Burwell, Herzog, Hamburg, and Gilman (2002) is a particularly dramatic example of the influence of Western television in the developing world. In their frequently cited study, Becker and her associates found that the introduction of Western television to the traditional culture of Fiji was quickly followed by increased body dissatisfaction, dieting, and behaviors associated with disordered eating (e.g., self-induced vomiting) among young women. Although most research and theoretical discussions emphasize the role of television and, to a lesser extent motion pictures, the print media, particularly magazines, are also an important influence. Studies have shown that exposure to thin models in popular women’s magazines contributes to body dissatisfaction; decreases self-esteem and confidence; and produces negative feelings of guilt, anxiety, shame, and depression (Pinhas, Toner, Ali, Garfinkel, & Stuckless, 1999; Tiggemann & McGill, 2004). Similarly, exposure to thin models in magazines has been linked to eating disorder symptomatology in both adolescent girls and adult women (e.g., Harrison, 2000; Pinhas et al., 1999; Vaughan & Fouts, 2003). In the last 10 years ‘‘pro-anorexia’’ Web sites and social networking sites have appeared that encourage young women to pursue extremely thin bodies through severe dieting, vomiting, and other extreme weight-loss techniques (Morris, Boydell, Pinhas, & Katzman, 2006). Although scholarly research on the influence of these sites is still very limited, a recent study found that exposure to these sites increased body dissatisfaction among college women (Bardone-Cone & Cass, 2007). THEORETICAL MODELS OF BODY DISSATISFACTION The two most common theoretical approaches to the understanding of body dissatisfaction are sociocultural theory and feminist theory. The influence of Western media plays a crucial role in both theoretical models. Sociocultural Theory This theory seeks to understand body dissatisfaction as a consequence of social and cultural variables (Thompson et al., 1999). Most of the research based on sociocultural theory has focused on the role of the thin body ideal and the unrelenting pressure from media, peers, and parents to attain it. Although it is clear that Western media is a major vector in transmitting the thin body ideal to non-Western culture, it is also clear that many other factors are involved (e.g., Anderson-Fye, 2003, 2004; Anderson-Fye & Becker, 2004). Feminist
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theory suggests that rapid social change may be one of the important additional factors. Feminist Theory This theory, which may be viewed as an expanded form of sociocultural theory, also recognizes the important role of the unrealistic body ideals portrayed in the media. However, feminist theory goes an important step further: it emphasizes and describes the social and political purposes served by these body ideals. According to theorists such as Bordo (1993), Dworkin (1974), and Faludi (1991), the purpose of unrealistic appearance standards is to perpetuate gender inequality. This goal is pursued through two mechanisms. First, attention is diverted from women’s competencies and accomplishments; instead it is focused on superficial aspects of their appearance. Second, women’s emotional and financial resources are diminished and their selfconfidence is undermined by expensive, exhausting, and usually futile attempts to conform to unrealistic appearance standards. For a review of these theories, see Jeffreys (2005). Wolf (1991), in describing beauty standards as a backlash against American women’s strivings for gender equality, captured a central feminist argument when she stated, ‘‘The more legal and material hindrances women have broken through, the more strictly and heavily and cruelly images of female beauty have come to weigh upon us’’ (p. 10). Both sociocultural theory and feminist theory would predict that the more a society is exposed to Western media and Western appearance standards, the greater the level of body dissatisfaction and disordered eating within that society. However, feminist theory goes a step further and suggests that increases in body dissatisfaction and disordered eating should be largest in societies in which women have made the greatest and most rapid strides toward social, economic, and political equality. SOCIAL CHANGE AND BODY IMAGE Consistent with feminist theory, rapid social change, particularly rapidly changing roles of women, has been identified as an important factor in increasingly unrealistic appearance standards and increased body dissatisfaction in Western societies (Nasser et al., 2001). This relationship has been reported by clinicians treating young women with eating disorders (e.g., Bruch, 1980) and has been widely recognized by theorists (e.g., Travis, Meginnis, & Bardari, 2000). Consistent with these observations, Silverstein and Perlick (1995) reported that the two decades in the twentieth century with the greatest change in Western women’s roles, the 1920s and 1970s, were also the decades in which Western fashion models were the most slender and least curvaceous. Indeed, as the social and gender role changes associated with first and
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second wave feminism spread through much of Western society, the bodies of appearance icons such as Miss America and Playboy centerfolds became increasingly more slender and increasingly discrepant from the body of the average woman that was becoming progressively heavier (Spitzer, Henderson, & Zivian, 1999; Sypeck, Gray, & Ahrens, 2004). It seems likely that this growing discrepancy between appearance ideals and the bodies of average women is a significant contributor in the increases in body dissatisfaction and disordered eating (Spitzer et al., 1999). Just as social change has also been identified as an important factor in body dissatisfaction and disordered eating in Western societies, it has also been identified as an important factor in nonWestern societies (e.g., Catina & Joja, 2001; Gordon, 2000; Lee & Lee, 2000; Nasser, 1997, Tsai, 2000). According to feminist theory, societies with strong patriarchal traditions, rigid gender roles, and very rapid social change, including rapidly expanding opportunities for women, would be particularly likely to embrace unrealistic appearance standards and have relatively high levels of body dissatisfaction. As we will see in the next section, reports from rapidly developing countries in East Asia, such as China (Jung & Forbes, 2007; Lee & Lee, 2000; Li, Hu, Ma, Wu, & Ma, 2005) and Korea (Kim & Kim, 2003; Kim & Yoon, 2000; Ryu, Lyle, & McCabe, 2003), as well as the rapidly developing former socialistic countries of Eastern Europe (Catina & Joja, 2001; Forbes, Doroszewicz, Card, & Adams-Curtis, 2004), are consistent with this expectation.
CROSS-CULTURAL RESEARCH ON BODY IMAGE There has been very little systematic research on cross-cultural differences in body dissatisfaction and disordered eating. Unfortunately, even under the best of circumstances, cross-cultural comparisons are very difficult.4 In the case of research on body dissatisfaction and disordered eating, four problems are particularly serious. First, much of the available literature, particularly from traditional cultures and developing countries, is based on a single sample from a single culture. That is, these studies do not include specific comparison samples from other cultures. To place information from these studies into a cross-cultural context, their results must be compared with the results of studies employing samples from other cultures. Unfortunately, this practice is fraught with almost insurmountable difficulties. Among other things, large differences in how the samples are selected and crucial concepts are measured often makes it impossible to draw conclusions about possible cultural differences. Second, nearly all available studies have employed convenience samples. As the term implies, these samples consist of whatever
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participants are readily available to the researcher. In the case of clinical reports, these samples almost always consist of patients with identified eating disorders. Because only a small minority of women with eating disorders seek professional services, particularly in cultures where these services are limited and highly stigmatized, women in these samples are usually from the highest socioeconomic stratum and have very severe symptoms. Results from such samples are not representative of most women in their culture. In the case of research reports, most studies have been done with college women. Similarly, these samples are not representative of most women in their society. Third, studies almost always depend on the use of Western measures that must be translated into the local language. The use of translated measures is always problematic (Forbes, in press). Even when translations are carefully done, it is often difficult to determine whether the concepts measured in the translation are the same as the concepts measured in their native culture and language (Brislin, 1986). In addition, when specific diagnostic instruments or criteria are employed researchers make the assumption, usually implicitly, that the symptoms of a disorder are the same in all cultures. However, the specific symptoms associated with eating disorders may vary across cultures (Lee, Chiu & Chen, 1989; Lee et al., 1993). Similarly, because both physical features and appearance standards vary across ethnic and cultural groups, the specific features associated with body dissatisfaction may show cultural or ethnic differences as well (e.g., Jung & Lee, 2006; Kaw, 1993; Root, 1990). Fourth, studies have often defined and measured eating disorders and body dissatisfaction in many different ways. Often relationships among these measures are unknown. As a consequence, differences among cultures must often be determined using different definitions and different measurement techniques. In the case of eating disorders these problems are lessened by the existence of standard diagnostic criteria and several widely used measures. However, the problem is much more serious in the area of body dissatisfaction because there are no standard criteria and very little consistency in measurement. In recent years, there have been some notable efforts to study reasonably large numbers of countries using the same measures (e.g., Etcoff, Orbach, Scott, & D’Agostino, 2004, 2006; Ojala et al., 2007; Wardle et al., 2006). The 26-country, 40-sample study of preferred body type and body dissatisfaction by Swami et al. (2009) is particularly important. AN OVERVIEW OF CULTURAL DIFFERENCES There is a substantial and growing body of research on ethnic differences within English-speaking countries. For reviews of these differences, see Smolak and Striegel-Moore (2001) or Wildes and Emery (2001). These studies provide helpful information on ethnic differences within
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a society, and it may be tempting to interpret these studies as if they provided information on the participants’ culture of origin. However, studies of immigrant samples, particularly if they represent postimmigration generations, at best provide only incomplete and potentially misleading information about the participants’ culture of origin. Studies of ethnic differences within a specific culture are important, but they are no substitute for cross-cultural studies (Forbes, in press). The best source of information on cross-cultural differences would come from carefully designed investigations with three important features. First, they would employ multiple measures of body dissatisfaction with established cross-cultural validity. Second, they would employ samples that are comparable in age, education, and socioeconomic class. Third, the samples would be drawn from cultures that systematically vary along dimensions that are theoretically linked to differences in body dissatisfaction. For example, such an investigation might include samples of college women from three or more countries that vary in their level of exposure to Western media. Because there are formidable obstacles to conducting such studies, our knowledge of cross-cultural differences is based on studies that usually fall far short of these standards. WESTERN CULTURES AS A BENCHMARK Because the vast majority of the research on body dissatisfaction and disordered eating has been done with white English-speaking samples, these samples have become the de facto standard to which samples from other cultures are compared. Although it can be argued that this reflects Eurocentric ideas, perhaps even racist or colonialistic biases (e.g., Kim, Yang, & Hwang, 2006; Sinha, 1996), there are several reasons why it is useful to use the results from Western studies as a convenient benchmark. First, far more is known about body dissatisfaction and disordered eating in these samples. Comparison of new information with the established body of information often enriches our understanding of both. Second, until very recently body dissatisfaction and disordered eating appeared to be much more common in Englishspeaking countries. As a consequence, these counties form a natural endpoint on a dimension of severity. Third, the variables with the strongest theoretical linkages to body dissatisfaction and disordered eating (e.g., Western media, increases in gender equality) are greatest in Western societies. This further supports their use as a natural endpoint on theoretically important dimensions. BODY DISSATISFACTION AND DISORDERED EATING AROUND THE WORLD Until recent years, Western researchers have had little interest in body dissatisfaction or eating disorders in non-Western societies. In addition,
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research with these groups has been discouraged by a lack of resources and language and geographic obstacles and limited by the number of local mental health practitioners and researchers. Although a growing number of cross-cultural studies are available, most have included very limited samples of non-Western cultures, and very few have been done in traditional cultures. In addition, most studies have included only highly advantaged samples, most commonly college students. These samples have been exposed to more Western influences, particularly media, notions of gender equality, and other variables known to be associated with body dissatisfaction and disordered eating. It is very important to recognize that in developing and undeveloped countries, particularly those who were once part of the Spanish or British empires, there are often extremely large cultural and political differences between the wealthy, who are often descendents of European colonialists, and the very poor, who are often descendents of indigenous groups. As Swami et al. (2009) demonstrated, differences attributable to socioeconomic class and rural or urban dwelling within developing countries are substantially larger than the differences found between countries. This means that generalizing from highly advantaged samples, especially in postcolonial countries, to all segments of a society is both hazardous and unwarranted. However, studies of advantaged samples are important because it is likely that the level of body dissatisfaction and disordered eating found in these samples predicts what will be found in the general population as a society modernizes. Of necessity we will usually discuss countries in large geographic or cultural groups. This means that we will make broad generalizations that will unavoidably obscure both important differences between cultures and ethnic and regional differences within cultures. Because there is clear evidence that body dissatisfaction and disordered eating are increasing around the world (e.g., Nasser et al., 2001), we will emphasize the contributions of studies published after 1995. EAST ASIAN COUNTRIES The first clinical and research reports to question the common belief that eating disorders were limited to affluent Western women came from East Asian countries. These countries seemed like a most unlikely source of such reports. This is because traditional East Asian beauty standards include round faces and mildly plump bodies (Han, 2003), and these countries have long associated slenderness with poverty, poor health, and low fecundity (Lee, 1999). In addition, East Asians tend to have smaller and more slender bodies than Western women. As a consequence, it would be substantially easier for them to achieve the very slender Western body ideal in the unlikely event that they wished to pursue it (Lee, 1999).
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Although there were earlier reports of anorexia nervosa and eating disorders in Japanese samples (e.g., Lerner, Iwawaki, Chihara, & Sorell, 1980; Suematsu, Ishikawa, Kuboki, & Ito, 1985), the well-known work by Sing Lee and his associates in Hong Kong (e.g., Lee, 1991, 1993, 1998, 1999; Lee, Ho, & Hsu, 1993) appears to have been the primary impetus for Western researchers to reconsider the conventional wisdom that these disorders were extremely rare in East Asia. Lee’s reports from Hong Kong were followed by reports from other non-Western nations indicating that both body dissatisfaction and disordered eating were found not only in East Asia but also in many developed and developing societies around the world. In addition, this research indicated that both the frequency and severity of these disorders were increasing in non-Western societies (for a review, see chapter 3 in Gordon, 2000). Although results showing relatively high incidences of body dissatisfaction and disordered eating in East Asian samples are no longer rare or unexpected, recently studies have appeared indicating that some East Asian groups actually have greater body dissatisfaction than Western comparison samples. Jung and Forbes (2006, 2007) found that Korean and Chinese college women scored higher than U.S. college women on ten measures of body dissatisfaction and two measures of disorder eating. Jung, Forbes, and Lee (in press) found similar results with five measures of body dissatisfaction and two measures of disordered eating in samples of early adolescent girls in Korea and the United States. In their important study of over 10,000 college women from twenty-two countries, including the United States and 13 other Western countries, Wardle et al. (2006) found that women from Korea, although they had the lowest body mass index (BMI)5 of any group, were the most likely to try to lose weight. Similarly, Swami et al. (2009) found that women from Korea preferred the most slender bodies. There is also good evidence of high levels of body dissatisfaction in Japan. For example, Wardle et al. (2006) found that women from Japan, although they had the third lowest BMI, were the most likely to perceive themselves as overweight. Similarly, large crosscountry surveys by Etcoff et al. (2004, 2006) found that Japanese samples had higher levels of body dissatisfaction than eighteen other samples from thirteen different countries, including such benchmark Western countries as the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Italy. These remarkable results are particularly relevant to feminist theory. As previously noted, both sociocultural theory and feminist theory emphasize the role that Western media plays in the spread of body dissatisfaction and disordered eating to non-Western countries. Consequently, as East Asian countries modernize and are increasingly exposed to Western media, both theories would predict that they would show an increase in body dissatisfaction and disordered eating.
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However, only feminist theory specifically links body dissatisfaction to changing roles for women. According to feminist theory, unrealistic appearance standards represent a backlash against women’s strides toward gender equality. This is a very important issue because the Confucian values that have long formed the foundation of many East Asian societies include rigid, restrictive, and repressive gender roles for women. The central and organizing element in these roles is women’s subordination and submissiveness to men: girls are to be submissive to their fathers, wives are to be submissive to their husbands, and widows are to be submissive to their eldest sons. Women’s roles and opportunities in modern East Asian societies like Japan or Korea, and in rapidly modernizing societies such as China, are radically different from traditional women’s roles. As a consequence, feminist theory would predict a patriarchal backlash that would emphasize particularly severe and unrealistic appearance standards. In turn, these standards would result in high levels of body dissatisfaction. Because the speed and magnitude of changing roles for women in these East Asian societies has been much greater than in Western societies, feminist theory would predict that women in these societies would have greater body dissatisfaction than Western women. However, conventional sociocultural theory, or theories that appeal to the nonspecific effects of Westernization, would not make such a prediction. LATIN AMERICA Most discussions of body dissatisfaction in Latin American countries have focused on Brazil because of Brazil’s well-known interest, sometimes characterized as an ‘‘obsession,’’ with beautiful bodies and cosmetic surgery (Finger, 2003). As a reflection of this interest and social values of equality, Brazil is the only nation where government health care routinely provides cosmetic surgery for the poor (Edmonds, 2007; Finger, 2003). As the cosmetic surgeon Ivo Pitanguy observed, in Brazil, ‘‘The poor have a right to be beautiful’’ (Edmonds, 2007). Depending on the source, Brazil has either the highest volume of cosmetic surgery in the world or is second only to the United States (e.g., Edmonds, 2007; Finger, 2003; Woodsworth, 2001). Consistent with these reports, in their samples of women from ten countries, Etcott et al. (2006) found that urban Brazilian women have the highest level of cosmetic surgery and were the most likely to consider cosmetic surgery. (For an anthropological perspective on Brazilian beauty ideals and cosmetic surgery see Edmonds, 2007) Interestingly, Brazilian cosmetic surgery practices suggest that exposure to Western appearance standards has changed Brazilian body preferences. Traditionally, appearance standards have emphasized
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relatively large buttocks and relatively small breasts. Consistent with these standards, until recently breast augmentation was uncommon, and most breast surgeries were reductions (Karp, 2001). However, breast augmentations now greatly outnumber reductions, and there has been a substantial increase in the size of the augmentations (Finger, 2003; Karp, 2001). It has been suggested that the popularity of breast augmentations has been one of the reasons why the international demand, particularly from the United States, for Brazilian fashion models has increased (Karp, 2001). To the extent that cosmetic surgery reflects body dissatisfaction, Brazil would be expected to have a high level of body dissatisfaction. Consistent with this expectation, Etcoff et al. (2004) found that Brazilian women’s level of dissatisfaction with their physical attractiveness was second only to a sample from Japan. Similarly, Brazilians have a high rate of dieting (Ectoff, 2006) and high scores on standard measures of disordered eating (Nunes, Barros, Olinto, Camey, & Mari, 2003). Results from other Latin American countries generally indicate levels of body dissatisfaction that are less than East Asian countries but approach levels found in Western countries. For example, a crosscultural study of university women in 23 countries found that the percentage of Columbian and Venezuelan women who perceived themselves as overweight or who were trying to lose weight was less than in Japan but approximately equal to Western countries (Wardle et al., 2006). Similarly, a recent study in five Latin American countries found that 50 to 62 percent of urban dwelling eighth- and ninth-grade girls wanted to be thinner (McArthur, Holbert, & Pe~ na, 2005).6 In addition, Swami et al. (2009) found that the level of body dissatisfaction among college women in Chile was equal to the level found in U.S. samples. (For an important discussion of how changing social conditions, particularly changing roles for women, place Argentinean women at high risk for body dissatisfaction and disordered eating, see Meehan and Katzman [2001].) AFRICA Most research from sub-Saharan Africa has been conducted with samples from South Africa. This research generally indicates that white South African adolescents and college students have levels of body dissatisfaction and disordered eating that are roughly comparable to those found in Western Europe (e.g., Caradas, Lambert, & Charlton, 2001; Szabo & le Grange, 2001; Wassenaar, le Grange, Winship, & Lachenicht, 2000). However, until the end of apartheid it appeared that body dissatisfaction and eating disorders were very rare in black or colored (mixed race) South Africans. As Szabo and le Grange (2001) noted, limited mental health resources in black clinics and hospitals, along with
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the racist belief that disorders found among affluent white women would not occur among Africans, probably resulted in an underidentification of these problems during apartheid. Even allowing for this bias, it seems clear that both body dissatisfaction and disordered eating have greatly increased since the end of apartheid (Szabo & le Grange, 2001). In fact, most recent studies have shown no meaningful differences in the incidence of these problems in black, colored, and white adolescents or college students (e.g., Caradas et al., 2001; le Grange, Louw, Russell, Nel & Silkstone, 2006; Senekal, Steyn, Mashego, & Nel, 2001; Wassenaar et al., 2000). Importantly, there have been some reports that black college women actually scored higher than white college women on measures of eating pathology (e.g., le Grange, Telch & Tibbs, 1998). Consistent with feminist theory, Szabo and le Grange (2001) suggest that role conflicts, particularly the conflict between the greatly expanded roles and opportunities for women and traditional African values, play an important role in body dissatisfaction and eating pathologies. To the extent that these observations are accurate, there is a clear possibility that in the not too distant future black and colored South African women, like East Asian women, will have greater body dissatisfaction than their Western cohorts. With the exception of a few single case studies of severe eating disorders (e.g., Buchan & Gregory, 1984), very little information is available on body dissatisfaction and disordered eating in other subSaharan countries. Recent research in Tanzania (e.g., Eddy, Hennessey, & Thompson-Brenner, 2007; Hennessey, 2008) and Nigeria (e.g., Izevbigie & Owie, 2006; Toriola, Dolan, Evans, & Adetimole, 1996) indicate that levels of body dissatisfaction and disordered eating approach those of Western Europe. However, studies from Ghana suggest that, although possibly diminishing, the preference for relatively large women’s bodies is still present in both college students (Cogan, Bhalla, Sefa-Dedeh, & Rothblum, 1996) and adult women (Frederick, Forbes, & Berezovskaya, 2008). There has been very little research from North Africa. Popenoe’s (2004) important work suggests that among traditional North African societies, a preference for large women’s bodies persists. However, evidence from Egypt, the most highly developed North African country, indicates that college women have levels of body dissatisfaction and symptoms of disordered eating that are approximately equal to those of college women in Western societies (e.g., Ford, Dolan, & Evans, 1990; Nasser, 1994a, 1994b).7 Taken as a whole, research in African countries indicates an increase in body dissatisfaction and eating disorders as the nations modernize. In the most developed sub-Saharan country, South Africa, the incidence of body dissatisfaction and disordered eating equals, and on some measures exceeds, the levels found in English-speaking Western
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countries. Similarly, in Egypt, body dissatisfaction and disordered eating approximate levels found in Western Europe. However, there is evidence that the traditional African preference for larger women’s bodies persists, particularly in relatively undeveloped rural areas (e.g., Frederick, Forbes, & Berezovskaya, 2008; Swami et al., 2009). INDIAN PENINSULA Recent studies of young women in India have reported levels of body dissatisfaction and disordered eating that are similar to, although perhaps slightly lower than, the levels found in Western countries and Japan (Gupta, Chaturvedi, Chandarana, & Johnson, 2001; Kayano et al., 2008; Rubin, Gluck, Knoll, Lorence, & Geliebter, 2008). However, these were highly advantaged urban samples. Information on body dissatisfaction in less advantaged rural Indian women is not available. Similarly, recent studies among advantaged young women in Pakistan reported levels of body dissatisfaction and disordered eating that were similar to, but modestly lower than, levels found in Western countries (Mahmud & Crittenden, 2007; Mujtaba & Furnham, 2001). However, studies of women in very conservative and traditional Kashmir indicated levels of body dissatisfaction and disordered eating that were substantially lower than those found in samples from the United Kingdom (Choudry & Mumford, 1992; Mumford, Whitehouse, & Choudry, 1992). Importantly, both Mumford, Whitehouse, and Choudry (1992) and Mahmud and Crittenden (2007) reported that body dissatisfaction and disordered eating were most common in the participants who were the most Westernized. SOUTHEAST ASIA AND POLYNESIA This large area includes a wide variety of societies and nations. Some parts, such as Singapore, are highly developed, whereas others, such as some of the remote areas of New Guinea and Borneo, have been relatively untouched by development. In keeping with other research using Chinese samples, ethnic Chinese women in Singapore had greater body dissatisfaction and a higher incidence of eating disorders than Europeans and Australians (Soh, 2008). In contrast, women living in remote areas of New Guinea exhibited the traditional preference for relatively large bodies (Wesch, 2006). Consistent with the previously cited work of Becker et al. (2002) and Lee and Lee (2000) linking economic development and exposure to Western culture to body dissatisfaction and disordered eating, Wesch’s data suggested an increasing preference for smaller bodies and greater body dissatisfaction among New Guinea women living in a town with electricity and access to Western media.
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Studies of college students and adolescents in the Philippines indicate relatively high levels of behaviors associated with disordered eating. For example, Madanat, Hawks, and Novella (2006) found that Filipino college students had a much greater incidence of behaviors and attitudes associated with disordered eating than a U.S. comparison sample. Similarly, Kayano et al. (2008) found more behaviors associated with bulimia among Filipino women students than among European and Japanese comparison groups. Similarly, Lorenzo, Lavori, and Lock (2002) found that abnormal eating attitudes among Filipino high school students were comparable to those typically reported in Western samples. Studies in Malaysia also report high levels of body dissatisfaction and disordered eating. For example, there is evidence of very high levels of body dissatisfaction and high levels of dietary restraint and binge eating among secondary school girls (Soo, Shariff, Taib, & Abu Samah, 2008). Similarly, high levels of behaviors associated with disordered eating were reported among ethnic Malay college students (Edman & Yates, 2004). Research generally suggests that Western appearance standards, particularly the thin body ideal is minimizing, if not eliminating, traditional preferences for heavier female bodies in much of Southeast Asia. Interestingly, Sharps, Price-Sharps, and Hanson (2001) found that this change is detectable even in rural Thailand. Although women in this region typically engaged in heavy agricultural labor, they preferred a smaller body than Thai men and a smaller body than a U.S. comparison sample. The results suggest that the Western thin body ideal is influencing women’s desired body size even when larger bodies are better adapted to the long hours of harsh physical labor that characterizes their daily lives. SUMMARY Research over the last 30 years has made it clear that the once common understanding that eating disorders and body dissatisfaction were found primarily or exclusively among advantaged white Western women is not true. Indeed, body dissatisfaction and eating disorders are found in almost every society that researchers have studied. However, isolated, traditional, and underdeveloped societies, particularly those in which food is scarce, may continue to show a preference for larger bodies. Even among these groups these preferences are diminishing. One of the most remarkable findings from cross-cultural studies is the small size of the differences found in body dissatisfaction. As Swami et al. (2009) have noted, differences within societies, particularly those associated with education and urban residence, are usually substantially larger than differences between societies. The relatively small differences found between societies are, at least in part, a result of the
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convenience samples usually used in most studies. These samples are typically highly advantaged, urban dwelling, college women. As such, they are the most likely members of their society to experience the values and roles associated with modernization. These values include both Western appearance standards and Western values of gender equality: the two variables most closely linked to body dissatisfaction and disordered eating. As the thought-provoking and important work of Anderson-Fye (2003, 2004) indicates, the values and experiences of modernization do not appear in a vacuum. Instead, they are seen through the lens of the culture into which they are introduced. With its emphasis on unrealistic appearance standards as a cultural backlash against gender equality, feminist theory makes a unique contribution to identifying those societies in which appearance standards will be the most unrealistic, the pressure to attain them the most severe, and the consequential increases in body dissatisfaction and disordered eating the largest. Feminist theory would predict that the rapidly modernizing cultures of East Asia, with the enormous contrast between centuries-old, Confucian-based, repressive and oppressive gender roles and the radically different roles and opportunities now available to women in these societies, would lead to sharp increases in body dissatisfaction and disordered eating. Viewed from this perspective, it is not surprising that recent research shows that college women in Korea, Japan, and China have greater body dissatisfaction and disordered eating than Western college women. As modernization and market economies continue to impact traditional and developing societies, women in other societies may also develop levels of body dissatisfaction and disordered eating that exceed the levels found in their Western sisters. Scattered evidence suggests that this may be happening already in South Africa and the rapidly developing countries of South America. NOTES Although this chapter will be restricted to the experiences of women, men also experience body dissatisfaction and eating disorders. The absence of any discussion of these disorders in men reflects the context in which this chapter appears, and it is not intended to suggest that the experiences of men are unimportant. For a review of weight and shape concerns in men see McCabe and Ricciardelli (2004). For a review of eating disorders in boys and men see Muise, Stein, and Arbess (2003) and Freeman (2005). 1. The formal diagnostic criteria for anorexia nervosa, bulimia, and other eating disorders can be found in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the American Psychiatric Association, Fourth Edition (American Psychiatric Association, 1994) and the ICD-10 Classification of Mental and Behavioural
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Disorders (World Health Organization, 1992). There are many excellent references on the diagnosis and treatment of eating disorders. The interested reader should consult recent edited volumes or handbooks, such as Thompson (2004). 2. The effects of both social class and ethnicity, although still present, may have diminished in recent years (Gard & Freeman, 1996; Grabe & Hyde, 2006; McClelland & Crisp, 2001). 3. The most extreme preference for large female bodies appears to be found among the Azawagh Arabs of Niger. Here, the forced feeding of girls begins at the age of 5 or 6 and continues until marriage. Even following marriage many women continue to eat large amounts of food in an effort to become as large as possible. For an insightful and sensitive description of this society, see Popenoe (2004). 4. A complete discussion of the complex problems associated with crosscultural research is far beyond the scope of this chapter. The interested reader can find more information in van de Vijver and Leung (1997) and Ember and Ember (2001). 5. Body mass index is a widely used measure of body size. It is computed with the formula: BMI = Weight in Kilograms/Height in Meters2. 6. In a sixth sample from Havana, Cuba, 29 percent wanted to be thinner, and 31 percent wanted to be heavier. This may be a consequence of food scarcity and Cuba’s relative isolation from Western beauty ideals. 7. For insightful historical and cultural discussion of women in Egypt, including parallels between the new veiling phenomenon and anorexia nervosa, see Nasser (2003).
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Gordon (Eds.), Eating disorders and cultures in transition (pp. 24–33). New York: Brunner-Routledge. Thompson, J. K. (Ed). (2004). Handbook of eating disorders and obesity. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Thompson, J. K., Heinberg, L. J., Altabe, M., & Tantleff-Dunn, S. (1999). Exacting beauty: Theory, assessment, and treatment of body image disturbance. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Tiggemann, M. (2004). Body image across the adult life span: Stability and change. Body Image, 1, 29–41. Tiggemann, M., & McGill, B. (2004). The role of social comparison in the effect of magazine advertisements on women’s mood and body dissatisfaction. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 23, 23–44. Toriola, A. L., Dolan, B. M., Evans, C., & Adetimole, O. (1996). Weight satisfaction of Nigerian women in Nigeria and Britain: Inter-generational and cross-cultural influences. European Eating Disorders Review, 4, 84–94. Travis, C. B., Meginnis, K. L., & Bardari, K. M. (2000). Beauty, sexuality, and identity: The social control of women. In C. B. Travis & J. W. White (Eds.), Sexuality, society, and feminism (pp. 237–272). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Tsai, G. (2000). Eating disorders in the Far East. Eating and Weight Disorders, 5, 183–197. van de Vijver, F., & Leung, K. (1997). Methods and data analysis for cross-cultural research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Vaughan, K., & Fouts, G. (2003). Changes in television and magazine exposure and eating disorder symptomatology, Sex Roles, 49, 313–320. Ward, L. M., & Harrison, K. (2005). The impact of media use on girls’ beliefs about gender roles, their bodies, and sexual relationships: A research synthesis. In E. Cole & J. H. Daniel (Eds.), Featuring females: Feminist analyses of media (pp. 3–23). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Wardle, J., Haase, A. M., & Steptoe, A. (2006). Body image and weight control in young adults: International comparisons in university students from 22 countries. International Journal of Obesity, 30, 644–651. Wassenaar, D., le Grange, D., Winship, J., & Lachenicht, L. (2000). The prevalence of eating disorder pathology in a cross-ethnic population of female students in South Africa. European Eating Disorders Review, 8, 225–236. Wesch, S. L. (2006). Factors related to appearance satisfaction among women native to the mountain Ok area of Papua New Guinea. Retrieved from ProQuest Digital Dissertations (AAI3187220). Wildes, J. E., & Emery, R. E. (2001). The roles of ethnicity and culture in the development of eating disturbance and body dissatisfaction: A meta-analytic review. Clinical Psychology Review, 21, 521–551. Wolf, N. (1991). The beauty myth: How images of beauty are used against women. New York: Morrow. Woodsworth, N. (2001, August 25). Operating on two levels Nicholas Woodsworth visits Rio de Janeiro, cosmetic capital of the world, to meet ‘‘Jekyll and Hyde’’ surgeon who uses his skills on both rich and poor. Financial Times (London), 1. World Health Organization. (1992). The ICD-10 classification of mental and behavioural disorders: Clinical descriptions and diagnostic guidelines. Geneva, Switzerland: World Health Association.
Chapter 12
Sexual Violence to Girls and Women in Schools around the World Susan Strauss
The joy of inquiry and learning in the classroom can sometimes be vanquished by the power of the educational system and by the teacher, thereby infringing on the right of a girl or woman to learn, develop, and be nourished in a safe environment free from fear. Academia is a microcosm of society complete with gendered dynamics where the inequality between the sexes is ripe for exploitation (Zalk, 1990). Unfortunately, schools are not a safe haven for children, particularly girls, and women who are deluged with sexual violence (Education For All Global Monitoring Team, 2003) to such a degree that it becomes a normalized aspect of school life (Leach, 2006; Mirsky, 2003; Plan, 2008). Schools that condone and approve of other types of violence, such as corporal punishment and bullying, will also support sexual violence (Jones, Moore, Villar-Marquez, & Broadbent, 2008; Leach, 2006). This chapter focuses on sexual violence to girls and women at school; however, the behavior does not occur in a vacuum; it is influenced by nonsexual violence and the culture in which it resides. Sexual harassment, including sexual assault, by boys and male teachers perpetrated on girls at or around school is a worldwide abomination studied by numerous nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and by the two-year worldwide United Nations (UN) Study on Violence Against Children (United Nations, 2006). Sexual violence is a violation of the rights of girls, threatening their right to achieve an education, and injuring their psychological and physical well-being (Amnesty International, 2008; Jones & Espey, 2008; Jones et al., 2008; Leach, 2006;
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Mirsky, 2003; Ward, 2005). Leach asserted that sexual violence to girls in schools has far reaching consequences to society: It undermines the pursuit of internationally agreed public health goals to enable adolescents to deal in a positive way with their sexuality and to reduce unintended pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections including HIV infection. For girls and young women, it severely limits their ability to achieve their educational potential. For society, therefore, it undercuts the transformatory power of education. Female education has been shown not only to contribute to improved family health but to be a major driver of social and economic development. (p. 1)
Gathering information for this chapter proved to be an exciting and sometimes frustrating challenge. Some secondary sources are used due to language differences in, or difficulty attaining, the primary sources. Some study results were found in online newspapers and posted on Web sites, which make it impossible to determine the methodology used in comparison with study outcomes from other research and to determine the actual level of sexual harassment throughout the world. Searching for information required attempts to contact international agencies, NGOs, and international researchers, sometimes, unfortunately, without responses in return. Some references were unavailable; for example, in the search for one particular book, only one copy was found—in a library in Germany. One major challenge in studying the literature of sexual violence in schools around the world is the lack of a standardized gendered framework and an operationalized definitional construct (Witkowska, 2005). A study that explored school violence in 37 nations by Akiba, LeTendre, Baker, and Goesling (2002) rarely recognized sexual violence, other than rape, to integrate within the framework of school violence, thereby degendering the construct. Likewise, Smith’s (2003) research from 17 European countries was not sensitive to the sexual violence construct. This makes defining sexual violence across cultures a difficult task. The methodology and context shape the findings (Mirsky, 2003). These data represent different methodologies and timeframes in different languages and from a variety of cultures—meaning that there can be a potential of perceived bias on the construct of sexual violence in schools (Barak, 1997). Cultural differences may account for what countries define as sexual harassment (DeSouza & Solberg, 2003), sexual violence, and sexual bullying. Many countries do not use the term sexual harassment, but rather use other terms such as sexual bullying (Duncan, 1999), gender-based violence (Dunne, Humphreys, & Leach, 2003), sexual abuse (Leach & Sitaram, 2007), and sexual violence (Mirsky, 2003), among others. In searching the databases for information, all of the above terms were
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used. As Barak (1997) noted, ‘‘it is not the phenomenon of sexual harassment that is different among countries, but rather the way it is being behaviorally manifested, which is probably due to different behavioral standards related to different cultures’’ (p. 268). With this thought in mind, this chapter will use the terms mentioned interchangeably to demonstrate the broad scope of the phenomenon. Some sexually harassing behaviors may be found in some of the literature addressing school bullying (Stein, 2003, 2005). However, the literature on bullying was not searched in researching sexual violence in schools for this chapter because the term, bullying, is a gender-neutral reference to behaviors that are not often studied through a gendereddynamic lens, even though some behaviors that are labeled as bullying, would fall within sexual harassment (Stein, 1995). Whatever the term used, the behaviors are generally indistinguishable and include a progression of behaviors from sexist and misogynist comments, verbal sexual comments, physical fondling, sexual assault, and rape. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), ‘‘For many young women, the most common place where sexual coercion and harassment are experienced is in school’’ (WHO, 2002). Gendered violence against girls and women in education is a pandemic that transcends race, culture, geography, religion, and class (Ward, 2005). With the electronic communication age comes cyber-harassment/ bullying through e-mails, text messaging, Facebook, and mobile phones. Dalaimo (1997) stated that ‘‘a closer look reveals that the same types of inequalities and discrimination that plague the physical world are also present in the virtual world. Power is inherently unequal, and electronic communication is no exception’’ (p. 101). Though not all online perpetrators are classmates, students are sometimes unaware who the harasser may be and when the harassment continues during school, it distracts them from their schoolwork and can be psychologically traumatic (Shariff, 2004). Shariff and Gouin (2006) and Barak (2005) describe this cyber violence in many forms including, rude, offensive, sexist, homophobic, misogynist and vulgar messages or photos, and pornography sent to groups and individuals via text messaging, chat rooms or Web-logs. Sexual harassment occurs in public places of the school (Leach, 2006; Mirsky, 2003; Stein, 1995; Timmerman, 2003), with faculty and staff observing the behavior and often colluding with the perpetrators by not intervening to stop the abuse. The message to the boys and the girls is that sexual violence is an accepted school norm; this, then, can be a catalyst for increased sexual violence within the school and the community. When teachers do intervene, even in instances of sexual assault, the boys face few consequences by the school. Sexual violence is a reflection of gender inequality and manifests itself specifically to cultural beliefs and tenets that also condone
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gender-based violence (Amnesty International, 2008; Human Rights Watch [HRW], 2001a; Leach, 2006; United Nations, 2006). Some teen girls may even be killed by their families to reestablish the family’s honor for being abused (Amnesty International, 2008; United States Agency for International Development, 2008). Gender violence is relegated by culture. The following statement by Leach (2006) acknowledged the tapestry of sexual violence. Violence in the schools cannot be divorced from violence in the home, the community and the workplace. This violence originates in the imbalance in power between males and females, in the gendered hierarchy and separation of tasks and responsibilities and in socially accepted views of what constitutes masculine and feminine behavior. The school, alongside the family, is a prime site for the construction of gender identity and gender relations built on socially sanctioned inequalities. (p. 27)
Most of the research on gendered violence of girls in and around schools has approached the issue from a heterosexual construct and ignored girl-to-girl violence and student-to-teacher violence (Leach & Humphreys, 2007). Both genders can be victims of sexual violence at school, but the research demonstrates that girls are the more likely targets of sexual assault and heterosexist sexual harassment (Leach, 2006; Ward, 2005). This chapter focuses on the sexual harassment of female students by male classmates and teachers; it will not address the sexual violence toward female faculty, female-to-female aggression, female-tomale harassment, or sexual violence to males. DEFINITION OF SEXUAL HARASSMENT IN ACADEMIA For the purpose of standardizing a definition of sexual harassment for this chapter, two definitions from the United States will be used. The U.S. Department of Education, Office of Civil Rights (OCR) defines sexual harassment as the following (2000): Unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal, nonverbal, or physical conduct of a sexual nature by an employee, by another student, or by a third party, which is sufficiently severe, persistent, or pervasive to limit a student’s ability to participate in or benefit from an education program or activity, or to create a hostile or abusive educational environment. (p. 264)
The National Advisory Council on Women’s Educational Programs asserted that, Academic sexual harassment is the use of authority to emphasize the sexuality or sexual identity of the student in a manner which prevents or
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impairs that student’s full enjoyment of educational benefits, climate, or opportunities. (Paludi & Barickman, 1991, p. 4)
Till (1980) grouped the sexual harassment experiences of college women into five categories, with each category advancing in severity from the previous one. Using Till’s categories, and correlating with definitions from case law, Fitzgerald, Gelfand, and Drasgow (1993) recategorized Till’s five groups of behaviors into three: gender harassment, sexual coercion, and unwanted sexual attention. Gender harassment is the most commonly experienced harassment (Barak, Fisher, & Houston, 1992; Vaux, 1993) and includes a sweeping range of behaviors that denote misogyny, including sexist comments, taunts, and pornography, to name a few. Unwanted sexual verbal and nonverbal offensive behaviors constitute unwanted sexual behavior. And finally, sexual coercion is the exchange of grades for sex. These three categories of sexual harassment will be used to discuss the construct throughout the chapter. SEXUAL VIOLENCE IN SCHOOL LAWS, INTERNATIONAL TREATIES, AND CONVENTIONS It is beyond the limits of this chapter to discuss whether various countries have national laws outlawing sexual harassment, and to review the laws of those countries which do address sexual violence in their schools. However, whether a country has specific laws outlawing sexual harassment in education, there are a number of international laws, treaties, declarations, and conventions that the majority of countries have ratified that do outlaw the behavior. Treaties carry legal weight and declarations are a political catalyst for a variety of abuses against women and children (Education For All Global Monitoring Report Team, 2003). International human rights law requires countries to prevent and to intervene against human rights violations including sexual assault and rape. In addition, monitoring of any government treaty is required to ensure implementation of the treaty and compliance with its requirements (Mirsky, 2003). According to law professor Fionnuala Ni Aolain at the University of Minnesota, in 1995, the United Nations implemented the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), which all countries have ratified except eight including the United States, which requires that women and men receive equal treatment, including the right to an education (International Women’s Day Celebration: Transforming the World Through Women’s Voices, March 14, 2009 in Minneapolis, MN). Gender-based violence is considered a form of discrimination and is therefore outlawed by CEDAW. Violence against women is defined by CEDAW as, ‘‘any act of gender-based
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violence that result in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women’’ (United Nations, 1993). The declaration recognizes the vulnerability of girl children and specifically singles out schools as a location of gender violence. Governments worldwide, except the United States and Somalia (Education For All Global Monitoring Team, 2003), committed to the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). CRC requires countries to protect children from sexual abuse and sexual exploitation and to provide equal education to both genders (HRW, 2001a). The right to education is also proclaimed in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, with both ensuring equal education to both males and females (HRW, 2001a; Education For All Global Monitoring Team, 2003). In addition, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) requires equal rights for men and women and to establish effective redress for abuse. In 1996, the WHO created two resolutions recognizing that gender violence to women and children was a public health priority (WHO, 2002) In 2000, Dakar hosted the United Nations Millennium Summit, and announced the eight UN Millennium Development Goals. Goal number two is to achieve universal primary education by 2015, and goal three requires gender inequality in all levels of education by 2015 (http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/gender.shtml). Kazue (2004) asserted that legalization is not the sole answer: It is, however, important to bear in mind that legislation and regulation from above is not the only way to deal with sexual harassment, a phenomenon that is deeply rooted in culture, gender norms and gender power structures. Without genuine respect for women and women’s human rights, sexual harassment can still happen despite laws and orders. Sometimes, the effect of legislation and regulations can be superficial and very limited. (p. 13)
Jones et al. (2008) identified twenty-eight international and regional treaties addressing human rights, women’s rights, children’s rights, sexual violence, and the right to an education. To see expanded lists of international treaties and covenants concerning this issue, refer to Galey (1999) and United Nations Secretary-General’s Study on Violence against Children (2006).
SEXUAL HARASSMENT IN EDUCATION IN NORTH AMERICA The United States and Canada have pioneered much of the initial research on sexual harassment in schools. Both quantitative and qualitative studies dealing with sexual harassment in primary, secondary,
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and postsecondary educational settings exist; however, researchers have only begun to scratch the surface of this egregious behavior. Secondary Schools Canada Twenty-three percent of female teenagers in a Canadian school study experienced a minimum of one sexual assault, including touch, threats, and indecent exposure, with 4 percent of the girls victimized ‘‘often’’ (Bagley, Bolitho, & Bertrand, 1997, p. 363). In comparing a group of teenage girls who had never experienced sexual harassment/ assault to a group that had experienced the behavior, 15 percent of those who were victimized ‘‘often’’ attempted suicide or made suicidal ‘‘gestures’’ compared to only 2 percent of the nontargeted girls (p. 361). Female students were more upset than their male classmates. Yet, Canadian high school girls have become so desensitized to experiencing and witnessing sexual harassment and assault, they view it as normal behavior (Alcoba, 2008). Sexual harassment by adult school employees was reported by 37.5 percent of both genders (Winters, Clift, & Maloney, 2004). Another study conducted at a Canadian high school demonstrated that 33 percent of students stated they had been sexually harassed within the previous 2 years; 29 percent were sexually touched or grabbed, and 7 percent of female students were sexually assaulted at school (Alcoba, 2008). Research of twenty-three Canadian schools showed that 30 percent of ninth-grade girls and 28 percent of eleventhgrade girls were sexually pinched or grabbed, 46 percent of girls were the brunt of sexual gestures, jokes, leers, or comments (Rushowy, 2008). The results of a survey of two high schools conducted by a school safety panel discovered that 19 percent of girls had been sexually assaulted at school within the previous two years. United States Sexual harassment to students in the United States has been studied since the 1980s (Strauss, 1988). The largest study was in 1993 when the American Association of University Women (AAUW) researched the construct of sexual harassment throughout the country. The results showed, among other findings, that 85 percent of Caucasian girls, 84 percent of African American girls, and 82 percent of Hispanic girls in grades eight through eleven experienced sexual harassment (AAUW, 1993). The AAUW repeated their study in 2001 with similar findings; 83 percent of girls were sexually harassed, with 30 percent of those girls indicating it occurred often. The behaviors girls identified as most
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upsetting were being labeled a lesbian, sexually offensive graffiti, spreading sexual rumors, having their clothes pulled at or pulled off/ down, and being forced to do something sexual other than kissing. Their victimization occurred most often in the hallways and classrooms (AAUW, 1993; Stein, 1995). An expanded study of the AAUW’s 1993 research found that the most severe harassment was experienced by girls (Lee, Croninger, Linn, & Chen, 1996). Research by Lee et al. and by Fineran and Bennet (1999) showed there was a relationship between the victim and the harasser, in that roughly the same number of victims of sexual harassment admitted to also sexually harassing at least one other student. Fineran and Bennet found that 87 percent of girls were sexually harassed by their peers, and 77 percent of girls admitted to sexually harassing their peers. Sexual harassment has its roots in primary grades (AAUW, 1993; Murnen & Smolak, 2000; Strauss, 1994, 2003). The U.S. Department of Education, Office of Civil Rights (OCR) (1993) posited that even though girls in the primary grades may not understand sexual harassment in the same way older students understand it, they are not so na€ve as to understand that the sexually obnoxious behavior and comments directed toward them exhibit malice just because they are girls. New York schools are finding that children as young as six are molesting other children (New York Targets Very Young for Sex Offenses, 2000). Those that bully in sixth grade were found to sexually harass in seventh grade, according to Pellegrini (2001). The author discovered that there was no difference between genders in their sexual harassment encounters as seventh graders. Often missing from the discourse on school shootings is the gendered aspect of the phenomenon (Klein, 2006). Girls were the intended targets in 11 of 13 highly publicized shootings in the United States over a period of six years, including the incident of a six-year-old boy killing his six-year-old female classmate. Klein argued that sexual harassment played a role in instigating the shooting episodes, yet absent from the media was any analysis of the sexual antecedents and hegemonic masculinity as a factor in the shootings: Violence against girls is easy to render invisible because the behavior that precedes actual incidents is often perceived as normal; even after fatalities have occurred, the gendered components of crimes do not seem to register . . . ‘normal’ violence against girls—indeed, social acceptance of male hostility towards girls—tends to aid in concealing even the most dramatic incidents. (p. 148)
Special needs students, those with behavioral, cognitive, or physical challenges, are vulnerable to sexual harassment as both a victim and a
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perpetrator (Young, Allen, & Ashbaker, 2004). Disabled students experienced more sexual harassment incidents than nondisabled students, but there were no significant mental health differences between the two groups as a result of their victimization (Fineran, 2002). When students are disabled and sexually harass another student, teachers must intervene. According to the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Civil Rights (1993), the student’s special education status cannot be used as a defense for sexual harassment. The HRW researched sexual harassment of U.S. gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered (GLBT) students and found they are unmercifully and relentlessly harassed by their peers, teachers, staff, and administration (George & Thonden, 2001). The students were verbally, physically, and sexually assaulted; they were spit and urinated on, thrown against lockers, cut with knives; some feared going to the bathroom alone, others dropped out of school, some ran away from home, participated in risky sexual behavior, were diagnosed with depression and committed suicide. School officials, who were not actively involved in the harassment of these students, gave tacit approval by ignoring incidents that they observed, or of which they were informed. Many research projects have been conducted by the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) and can be found at their Web site (http://www.glsen.org/cgi-bin/iowa/all/research/index. html). One example is a 2007 survey of over 6,000 students which found that 60 percent did not feel safe at school (33 percent skipped school as a result), probably because 86 percent of GLBT students were harassed due to their sexual orientation. Sexual harassment by teachers is considerably less frequent than sexual harassment by peers (AAUW, 2001; Lee et al., 1996). If students younger than 18 are sexually harassed by a teacher or school official, criminal child abuse statutes, criminal sexual assault or rape laws, as well as other criminal and civil charges, may be instituted against the perpetrator (Strauss, 2003). One of the highest reports of teacher sexual abuse was the Texas Civil Right Project, in which 58 percent of female students acknowledged being victimized by school employees (Texas Civil Rights Project, 1997). In contrast, the 1993 AAUW study found that 25 percent of girls experienced sexual harassment by school employees (AAUW, 1993). Research by Lee et al. (1996) found 16 percent of students had been harassed by a teacher, 2 percent by a school administrator, and 44 percent by another school employee. Sexual abuse by school teachers and staff are a challenge to study because students generally do not report the abuse nor do they tell their parents (AAUW, 1993). The most common adult school abuser is a male, well liked by students, parents, and teachers, and involved in extra-curricular activities with students such as athletics, art, and debate (Shakeshaft & Cohen,
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1995). Examples of the abusive behavior include sexually offensive verbal comments such as calling female students boobies, complimenting a girl on her nice legs, and commenting on the student’s sex life. Physical examples include touching a female’s breasts and genitals, fondling, and tickling. Male victims’ complaints were taken more seriously by school officials than were female victim’s complaints; female accuser’s honesty was sometimes questioned, whereas there were rarely any misgivings about a male student’s accusations. This discounting or minimizing of female students experiences further victimizes them because of their gender. Superintendents were mixed on where to devote their support—to the victim or the teacher; and abusers were often just transferred to another school district rather than terminated or have their teaching license revoked (Hendrie, 1998). Colleges and Universities Canada According to Osborne (1992), Canadian universities are bastions of sexually hostile environments rife with sexual assault on campuses and sexual harassment by college women’s peers and professors. Roughly 5 percent of women residents at McMaster University Residency Training Programs were sexually assaulted by their male supervising medical doctor (Cook et al., 1996). Females were more likely to experience discrimination based on their sexual orientation, targeted with offensive comments about their body and their attire, and subjected to sexist teaching materials. Women, who experienced behaviors that fit the objective definition of sexual harassment, often do not subjectively identify their experiences as sexual harassment (Fitzgerald et al., 1988). With this discrepancy in mind, Barak et al. (1992) researched the phenomenon with female students at a Midwestern Canadian university. The women’s accounts of their experiences demonstrated significant differences with their subjective perception. Only 1.5 percent of the women who were targeted with gender harassment by a professor identified the behavior as sexual harassment. Of those same women, 97 percent stated they had not been sexually harassed. When inquiring about sexual coercion or sexual assault, only 40 percent of the women who had objectively experienced these behaviors, subjectively labeled their experiences as such. The researchers (Barak et al., 1992) correlated these results with other variables to determine whether they impacted the women’s subjective perceptions compared to their objective experiences. Women who were younger, erotophobic, tended to repress threatening situations, who had not experienced severe forms of sexual harassment, or who had the need for social approval, were unlikely to perceive the incidents with their professors as sexual harassment.
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United States Numerous studies of sexual harassment to U.S. college women indicate that 70 percent have experienced the behavior—including gender harassment—from a minimum of one college professor (Barickman et al., 1990; Dziech & Weiner, 1990; Fitzgerald et al., 1988; Sandler, 1997). Thirty to 40 percent of graduate women experienced sexual harassment by faculty (Barickman et al., 1990). Between 70 and 90 percent of college women experience sexual harassment by their male classmates. Kelley and Parsons (2000) found that 19 percent of female graduate students and one in five undergraduate and graduate female students had been sexually harassed. Undergraduates were more likely to identify their male peers as the harasser while graduate women named male faculty as the perpetrator. The students experienced gender harassment and sexual coercion with equal frequency. Most of the women ignored the behavior or talked about it with a friend or family member; only 8 percent reported it through official channels within the university. More than 60 percent of presidents at research institutions acknowledged that sexual harassment was a problem at their university (Boyer, 1990). Frannklin, Moglen, Zatlin-Boring, and Angress (1981) discussed two forms of gender harassment in college and university classrooms. The first form reported by female students included faculty’s use of female stereotypes in addressing women students or in their pedagogy. Examples included name calling such as, fat housewives, dumb blondes, and dirty, as well as the use of Playboy centerfolds during anatomy class, and offensive comments about women’s anatomy. This behavior created a bond between the male faculty member and the men in the course at the expense of the women students. The second type of gender harassment was faculty’s sexist comments about women’s physical appearance, and if women were enrolled in a traditionally male course such as engineering, implying lower expectations relegated towards the women. A wide variety of behaviors may constitute sexual harassment, according to Sandler (1997). These include asking for sex, sexual graffiti, ogling or ‘‘elevator eyes,’’ staring at body parts, fondling or grabbing, sexually offensive jokes or comments, threatening rape or other forms of abuse, calling women sexist or misogynist names, ongoing unwanted sexual attention or asking for dates, sexually offensive gestures, ridiculing, sending letters or e-mails or gifts, exposing genitals, and sponsoring degrading activities such as a wet t-shirt contest, among others. The U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics conducted The National College Women Sexual Victimization (NCWSV) study of 4,500 two- and four-year college and university women in 1996 (Fisher, Cullen, & Turner, 2000). The study measured sexual harassment including sexual coercion (penetration), unwanted sexual contact with force or threats but no penetration, and stalking both on and
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off campus. Almost 3 percent of the women experienced a raped or an attempted rape; 13 percent were stalked; 6 percent were shown pornography; 5 percent experienced someone exposing their genitals; a little over 2 percent were seen naked without granting permission; 50 percent experienced sexist comments, whistles, and catcalls; 20 percent received obscene phone calls; and 10 percent had sexual rumors spread about her. The AAUW Educational Foundation conducted a national study to determine the extent sexual harassment occurs at American colleges and universities (Hill & Silva, 2005). First-year college students were the most likely victims, with more than one-third targeted. While almost two-thirds of students experience sexual harassment, only 10 percent report it to school officials. Although both male and female students are targeted, their experiences are quite different. Male students’ sexual orientation is questioned by homophobic name calling. Women are more likely to experience sexual jokes and comments, leers, and sexual gestures. Roughly a third of students experience physical sexual harassment, including being forced to do something sexual and being fondled (Hill & Silva, 2005). The harassment occurs throughout the campus. GLBT students are more likely to be sexually harassed than their heterosexual classmates. The most likely perpetrator of sexual harassment to both female and male students is a male; however, one-third of women admitted to harassing someone. White students were more likely to be victimized, and there were similarities in how white, black, and Hispanic students both discerned and responded to sexual harassment; however, black and Hispanic students were more willing to report incidents of sexual harassment to college officials. SEXUAL HARASSMENT IN EDUCATION IN LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN Data on sexual violence in schools in Latin America and the Caribbean is scarce. The few reports that exist often categorize school violence as a political construct tied to gangs and drug trafficking rather than as sexual violence (Dunne et al., 2003). Girls who live in Nicaragua, Panama, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and the Dominican Republic reported sexual coercion by teachers, including the threat of lowering their grades if they didn’t comply with their sexual demands (United Nations Secretary-General’s Study on Violence Against Children, 2005). Secondary Schools Brazil DeSouza and Ribeiro (2005) discovered that within the previous 12 months, 24 percent of Brazilian high school students experienced a
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minimum of one sexual harassment incident, with boys the most likely perpetrator. Eight percent of students (no differentiation between genders) in fifth to eighth grade were bystanders to sexual violence in school (World Bank, n.d.) They also found that if both male and female students bullied, they were more likely to sexually harass other students as well. Ecuador, Haiti, and Jamaica Twenty-two percent of Ecuadorian teen girls were victims of sexual abuse within and about the school (World Bank, 2000, cited in Blaya & Debarbieux, 2008). Amnesty International (2008) reported that sexual abuse of girls in Haiti is common by both teachers and administrative staff. Girls in Jamaica experience their breasts and buttocks touched and pressure to engage in sex so often that it is considered the norm (DevTech Systems, USAID, 2005, cited in, Amnesty International, 2008). Colleges and Universities Puerto Rico Ramos’s (1999) quantitative and qualitative research of sexual harassment at the University of Puerto Rico (UPR) demonstrated that 65 percent of female students experienced a minimum of one sexual harassment incident, and 35 percent indicated that they had not experienced any incidents. Of those who experienced sexual harassment, 61 percent reported gender harassment, 28 percent identified unwanted sexual attention, and 2 percent indicated they had experienced sexual coercion. In addition, 49 percent experienced a combination of both unwanted sexual attention and gender harassment. Interestingly, of those women who reported experiencing at least one of the items on the sexual harassment survey, only 81=2 percent labeled their experience as sexual harassment; they were more likely to label their experiences as offensive. These results are similar to Hernandez (1988, cited in Ramos) who found that 63 percent of Puerto Rican women experienced sexual harassment. Torres (1989, cited in Ramos) reported that 73 percent of victims were harassed by professors, 15 percent by their classmates, and 12 percent by directors or a librarian. Not surprisingly, those students who were more tolerant of the behavior were not as distressed (Ramos, 1999). Other women reported psychological ramifications such as fear, anger, depression, and humiliation. Academically they experienced lowered grades and loss of excitement and fervor about school. Those women who were harassed by a professor reported feelings of hopelessness due to the university’s
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perceived lack of caring and their complex procedures, fear of retaliation, and the recognition that a tenured professor was protected from consequences. Coping responses included silence, avoiding the harasser, denial of the behavior, dropping a professor’s/harasser’s class, informing the harasser the behavior was unwanted, and seeking out someone to talk to (Ramos, 1999; Torres, 1989, cited in Ramos). Puerto Rican women view avoidance as an assertive response to harassment by perceiving it as taking control of the situation (Ramos, 1999). It is rare for a victim of sexual harassment to report the behavior. The qualitative interviews demonstrated that the women blamed the sexual harassment by men to factors other than the men themselves; for example, the way women dress, and on nature and society, thereby negating any male responsibility for their own behavior. In addition, the male harassers were viewed as perverts, sick, obsessed, weak, and with psychological problems. SEXUAL HARASSMENT IN EDUCATION IN EUROPE Research on sexual violence in schools is limited in the European Union. Smith (2003) compiled school violence studies from seventeen countries, but the construct of gendered violence towards girls and women was quite limited. Witkowska and Menckel (2005) indicated that addressing the sexual component of school violence is lacking in various European Union programs and projects. Secondary Schools England Duncan’s (1999) study of four urban multi-ethnic secondary schools in England identified numerous forms of what he labeled as sexual bullying, including physical assault, sexual name calling, negative commentary regarding physical appearance, verbal attacks, sexual gossip, and propositioning. Duncan’s observations demonstrated sexual power struggles (p. 131), and a sexualized comment ‘‘during what would otherwise be civilized exchanges, is the marking out of gendered role limits; reminders that relationships are ultimately structured by power and that power is gendered’’ (p. 128). His findings supported the framework of gendered bullying occurring between boys, from boys to girls, between girls, and from girls to boys. Girls are called slags, sluts, bitches, whores, and slappers for various types of behavior such as flirting, being unfaithful to their boyfriend, or demonstrating their sexuality in the clothes they wear (Bell, 2008). One study found that 80 percent of students thought girls and women brought on their own victimization by their attire. Boys pull down or
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pull up a girl’s skirt, tell a girl he wants to finger her, and taunt girls because of the clothes they wear or because of their weight. Boys use electronic means to sexually bully their female classmates (and staff) when they send sexual messages or pornography via their cell phones. As three 14-year-old boys gang raped an 11-year-old girl, they filmed it from the camera on their phone and sent the video to students at school. A British Broadcasting Company (BBC) news program reported that government statistics showed there were 3,500 fixed-period expulsions and 140 expulsions from school in England due to sexual misconduct, including sexual assault and rape (Murphy, 2009). Of those, 280 expulsions were from the primary grades, and twenty involved children five years old. These statistics are considered an underreporting of the abuse partially because it is excused as typical behavior. Female students in Larkin’s study (1994) identified how sexual harassment was normalized in their schools. First, sexual harassment was rarely, if at all, discussed at school; second, the regularity and pervasiveness of the behavior; and third, the interpretation of the behavior by others, especially the male perpetrators, that the behavior was fun and no big deal.
Netherlands Twenty-two high schools in the Netherlands were studied by Timmerman (2003) for evidence of sexual harassment to teenagers. Ninety percent of the perpetrators were male faculty and staff, and 87 percent were male classmates with girls more likely to be targeted by the harasser than were the boys. One in four girls was sexually harassed, and 20 percent of the harassment was perpetrated by their teachers in the form of nonverbal sexual advances. Verbal sexual harassment was experienced most often. Girls were twice as likely to experience more physical forms of sexual harassment as were their male peers, and were also more likely to experience combined types of sexual harassment. One percent of the girls experienced a rape or attempted rape within the school. Teacher harassment of girls often occurred in public places, with 69 percent of all students asserting it occurred in the teacher’s classroom, followed by hallways and the cafeteria (Timmerman, 2003). These results acknowledge that sexual harassment by teachers was not proscribed. Peer sexual harassment was reported to occur in small groups in classrooms, hallways, in the immediate area outside the school, and other public places. Girls were more likely to report psychosomatic consequences to their health when sexually harassed by teachers than when harassed by their peers.
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France Sexual violence to students by teachers has occurred in France (Bodin, 2005). Though the gender of the victim and the position of the perpetrator was not revealed, 556 sexual abuse incidents were reported in France during one academic year, and 12 percent were rapes (Blaya & Debarbieux, 2008). According to the ‘‘Collectif feminist contre le viol’’ (cited in Blaya & Debarbieux, 2008), a little over 3 percent of sexual attacks occurred within the school. Bodin (2005) found 11=2 percent of French students experienced sexual abuse. Finland Sexual harassment was experienced by 41 percent of 15-year-old Finish female students, yet only 2 percent reported it to school officials (Honkatukia, 2000, cited in Laheelma, 2002). Gender conflicts between male and female students were perceived by teachers as merely joking, flirting, or playing (Aaltonen, 2002). Sexual harassment was not a term that was used in their descriptions of the behavior because gender tends to be invisible; consequently the gender-neutral term, bullying, was used to define aggression even from males to females. According to the author, the victim of bullying was blamed. Germany and Belgium Bodin (2005) found that a little more than 6 percent of German students and 1 percent of Belgium students experienced sexual abuse. It is not known who the perpetrators were or the gender of the students. Spain Ninety percent of both girls and boys reported sexual harassment, with verbal harassment as the most common (Vicario, 2008). There was no difference in the amount of sexual harassment each experienced, with 90 percent reporting their victimization. However, the type of harassment varied in their assertions of homophobic barbs and sexual comments, but further delineations were not provided. Sweden The Swedish National Agency for Education researched sexual harassment to grade school children and found over 50 percent experienced sexually offensive name calling; pressure to have sex was found in 7 percent of the students, and 4 percent were sexually assaulted, including 1 percent by teachers (Skolverket, Dnr 01–2001: 2136, cited in
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Witkowska, 2005). In a study done of students in grades nine through eleven, 50 percent reported experiencing sexual harassment (Kullenberg & Ehrenlans, 1996, cited in Witkowska, 2005). Using the criterion of inappropriate and unacceptable, Witkowska (2005) studied sexual harassment of 17- and 18-year-old students in a Swedish high school. Demeaning comments about their sexuality and gender, sexual comments and conversations, and rating the level of girls’ attractiveness, were experienced by 56 percent to 77 percent of the girls. Between 23 percent and 44 percent of the girls experienced these behaviors anywhere from daily to monthly. Less than 40 percent of the girls were subjected to sexual name calling, pressure for sex, and sexual rumors. Nonverbal sexual harassment was less frequent than verbal, with ranges of 8 percent to 61 percent. Sexual assault reports ranged from 0.2 percent to 27 percent and spread of sexual harassment by teachers was from 2 percent to 14 percent. Forty-nine percent of the girls perceived sexual harassment as a problem in their school. In another study of Swedish female students by Witkowska and Gadin (2005), 13 percent of female students were sexually harassed, and 66 percent saw sexual harassment as a problem in their school, yet schools were blase to the behavior. Only 16 percent saw sexualized conversation, rating a student’s attractiveness or making sexual comments by teachers as sexual harassment, and they stipulated that those behaviors were common. Additionally, they dismissed teacher or staff behavior of pulling student’s clothing, grabbing inappropriately and touching private body parts as sexual harassment, which is quite dire. Republic of Ireland A large nationwide study on bullying was undertaken of over 20,000 students in over 500 primary, secondary, and vocational schools in Ireland. Despite the research studying bullying behavior, some students disclosed they had been subjected to behavior that would constitute sexual harassment. Irish lads and lasses experienced sexual abuse by peers and teachers, were kissed without permission, had their clothes ripped off, and sexual rumors spread about them, and 30 indicated they were sexually harassed. Colleges and Universities Italy Almost 50 percent of Italian women students reported being sexually harassed in research conducted by Lombardo, Pedrabissi, and Santinello (1996). Their experiences included sexual comments about their bodies (29.3 percent), and quid pro quo harassment by offering a
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reward for a sexual relationship (3.4 percent). Twenty-six percent of the women reported that they were sexually assaulted. Sweden Bernelo and Peterson (2001, cited in Witkowska, 2005) found that 50 percent of university students experienced gender harassment, and 30 percent indicated they were targets of sexual harassment. Roughly 12 percent of female students at four Swedish universities experienced sexual harassment at their university (www.allakvinnorshus.org/tjejjouren/statistik.htm, cited in Witkowska, 2005). Students interviewed by Hagg (2002) asserted that sexual harassment at the University of Umea was rare, though they had heard it does occur. The students indicated that if a student was victimized, the individual would not speak out for fear of being labeled a troublemaker. Hagg posited that perhaps because the ideology in Sweden is one of equal opportunity, that sexual harassment may not be as prevalent as in other countries; however, equal opportunity is not realized in Sweden because women and girls’ freedom is too threatening to male power, according to Hagg. Netherlands Twenty percent of female medical students at Nijmegen Medical School in the Netherlands experienced sexual harassment (Neveille et al., 2008). Spain Puigvert (2008) reported that a woman who is sexually harassed, raped, or abused in a Spanish university will be subjected to major roadblocks if she attempts to report her experience. Spanish universities do not have any policies to deal with sexual harassment on campus, and women who attempted to glean support from campus officials were met with silence. Puigvert indicated that several research programs about sexual harassment on Spanish university’s campuses are underway. SEXUAL HARASSMENT IN SCHOOLS IN ASIA PACIFIC Asia Pacific encompasses a wide range of countries with broad economic and cultural practices. Asia, particularly, uses an authoritarian model of teaching, and, according to Jones et al. (2008), ‘‘social relations that are both highly gendered and determined by differences of caste, ethnicity, and religion’’ (p. ix). There is antisexual violence
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legislation throughout Asia, except for Pakistan, however sexual violence within the school milieu is rarely addressed. Secondary Schools Japan and China Data from the Japanese government demonstrated that 115 public school teachers were disciplined for fondling or harassing students as well as molesting colleagues and graduates (The Bangkok Post, December 28, 2000, cited in Haspels, Kasim, Thomas, & McCann, 2001). The Chinese Ministry of Education requires that minor students are taught about sexual harassment (Xinhua News Agency, 2007). China passed the Law on the Protection of Minors in 1991 legislating sexual harassment to minors as a crime. Sexual harassment of Tibetan girls by Chinese teachers is rampant, however, with the teachers pulling the girls into rooms to touch them (Tibet Justice Center, 1998). Pakistan Parents of rural Pakistani elementary school children do not want their daughters walking long distances to get to school because they do not want them leered at by men (Warwick & Reimers, 1995). The authors asserted that parents removed their daughters from school, ‘‘when they feel that conditions there do not respect female students or protect their honor’’ (p. 28). Parents of daughters would prefer that their daughters are not in contact with boys during the school day, therefore, single-sexed schools are the preferred option by parents of female students. Secondary school female students are the more likely targets of sexual harassment to and from school and in school by older boys, school staff, and men who are passing by (Brohi & Ajaib, 2006). The sexual violence consists of singing sexually explicit songs, writing love letters, making sexually vulgar comments about anatomy, and touching or pressing up against female students. The behavior is pervasive and the boys find it fun. According to Brohi and Ajaib, ‘‘The onus of responsibility is on the woman or girl. At times, her mere existence is considered a provocation and any sexual act, with or without her consent, carries a suffocating stigma’’ (p. 81). Pakistan has no laws against sexual harassment. Girls do not report their sexual harassment because to do so means they have to choose between going to school and staying home because their parents would not approve of their daughters’ victimization (Brohi & Ajaib, 2006). In addition, Pakistan places great honor on girls’ sexual purity, and there is a presumption of guilt that the girl herself did not preserve her own sexual dignity if she is sexually harassed.
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Where female sexual victimization equals familial and communal dishonor, it also affects families and communities . . . As one father declared when referring to the benefits of schooling: ‘‘What is more important in society? My honour or her knowing where Yunaan (Greece) is?’’ (p. 87). South Asian Countries As in Pakistan, the distance that girls have to walk to get to school in both Malaysia and the Philippines is an impediment to girls’ enrollment (King & Hill, 1993). Schools in those countries have also been reported as hostile to girls. If there are no bathrooms in a Bangladesh school, parents will not send their daughters because they are more vulnerable to attack. In several South Asian countries, parents do not want to send their daughters to coeducational schools, even in the primary grades. Once the girls enter puberty, the concern is even higher, resulting in low female enrollment if the schools do not have boundary walls and bathrooms for girls (Khan, 1993). Afghanistan When school girls’ classes are held outside, which is usually the case and often under a tree, they are fodder for the verbal sexual harassment by older boys and men who walk or drive by (Fahmia Vorgetts, Afghan Women’s Fund and Women for Afghan Women, personal communication, March 14, 2009). After school, the girls gather in groups to walk home because they are confronted with as many as 100 boys at the gates of the school yelling obscenities, sexually offensive comments about their breasts or vaginas, and attempting to grope or fondle the girls. Rape is common. In addition, girls are threatened and assaulted by having acid thrown in their faces on their way to school. Sexually offensive comments about a woman’s breasts and her vagina are made by schoolboys as young as seven or eight to middle-aged adult women. India Secondary school girls in Karnataka in South India are sexually harassed at school by their male peers and on their way to and from school by men and older boys (Leach & Sitaram, 2007). Ragging is the word used to imply, ‘‘that boys derive a sadistic pleasure in teasing or tormenting girls’’ (p. 262). Behaviors found most offensive by the girls included, ‘‘look at us with bad eyes . . . tease girls, write love letters and notes . . . buy bangles . . . write the names of the girls whom they ‘fancy’ on their hands or on the school walls . . . compare a girl with a film star, sing film songs . . . suggesting a romantic liaison . . .
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spreading of rumours . . . deliberately bump into them’’ (pp. 265–266). The girls were most concerned with the ragging and harassment that occurred outside the school from older boys. Due to lack of space, classes were often held outside, sometimes under a tree, which made the girls afraid and vulnerable to the leers from the men and older boys who walked by and who harassed them to and from school. Girls’ gossip about their female classmates’ liaisons with boys was another concern carrying grim repercussions if her parents found out and removed her from school (Leach & Sitaram, 2007). The girls spoke of gender stereotypes by teachers, which were exemplified in the comments teachers made to the girls and to the boys. For example, a girl may hear, ‘‘Why do you behave like this, do you think you are a boy?’’ or conversely a boy is asked, ‘‘Why do you talk so much like a girl?’’ (p. 269). Discussions with teachers and other school officials indicated that rape of girl students by teachers had occurred but were relatively rare. Nepal According to the United Nations Secretary-General’s Study on Violence Against Children, 9 percent of children were abused by having their sensitive parts kissed, oral sex, and penetration, with 18 percent of the abusers being teachers (2005). In Nepal, teachers touch school girls buttocks, breasts, and will unhook the girls’ brassieres (Save the Children Fund, n.d., cited in Dunne, Humphreys, & Leach, 2006). Russia Girls in Russian primary grades were bullied two to three times more by boys than were boys bullied by boys (D’yachenko, 2002, cited in Zdravomyslova & Gorshkova, 2006). Though very little examination of gender violence has occurred in Russian schools, the small amount that has been examined indicates extensive integration of the behavior into the milieu of Russian schools. Adolescent boys humiliate their female peers to demonstrate masculine hegemony (Zdravomyslova & Gorshkova, 2006). Sexual jokes and innuendo, discussion about sexual topics, and sexual pressure are directed to female students by male faculty. Australia An Australian anti-bullying website includes resources and references about gender and sexual harassment (www.bullyingnoway. com.au). The site identifies examples of sexually offensive names, such as slut, whore, and bitch, when talking about girls; that the behavior most often is perpetrated by males who are abusing their power, and provides an avenue for redress for students.
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A majority of students from four schools in Australia indicated they would not report sexual harassment even though their schools had anti-bullying policies (Nolan, 2004; personal correspondence from Ken Rigby, 2004, cited in Stein, 2005). Approximately 37 percent of the students indicated that sexual harassment was a weekly occurrence.
Colleges and Universities Malaysia and Korea A Malaysia university study demonstrated that 80 percent of women were harassed (Badriya, 1988 in Zaitun, 2001, cited in Haspels et al., 2001). In Korea, a group of women’s lawyers and academics formed an ad hoc committee in response to a woman assistant who was fired for refusing her professor’s repeated sexual demands. The committee was successful in taking the assistant’s case to court resulting in legal reform. China When an incident of a male university student e-mailing pornography to women students was made public in Hong Kong, it compelled universities, corporations, and the government to designate a position of Equal Opportunity Officer to deal with harassment and discrimination issues within their organizations (Haspels et al., 2001). One of the first comprehensive sexual harassment studies completed in a Hong Kong university demonstrated that twice as many Chinese graduate and undergraduate college women experience sexual harassment than do their male counterparts, with peer harassment being twice as likely to happen as harassment by faculty (Tang et al., 1996). Approximately one of every four female students was victimized by the behavior with 1 percent experiencing coercive sexual harassment by either a peer or a teacher. Twelve percent of the women students experienced misogynist comments by their teachers as well as teachers infringing on their body space and touching their arms, shoulders and hands. Teachers were also reported to make comments about the women’s bodies, pressure them for dates, and direct sexually suggestive gestures towards 5 percent of women students. One student reported sexual assault and two other women indicated their teachers bribed them into sex. Peer harassment was more prevalent with 20 percent to 26 percent of women experiencing gender harassment and ‘‘physical seductive behaviors’’ (p. 205); several women were bribed or coerced into sexual activity and 10 percent of women were pressured for dates and were the targets of sexual stares and gestures. These behaviors were viewed as the norm by some women, and even fewer women believed that the victims were partly to blame for
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the harassment (Tang et al., 1996). Chinese students were less aware of sexual harassment on their campus than were U.S. students’ awareness of the behavior on their campuses. The authors posited that this may be due to less sexual harassment occurring on Chinese campuses than the United States, a difference in the sizes of the universities studied, a Chinese patriarchal culture so that Chinese students don’t view some of the sexist comments as harassing, embarrassment within the Chinese culture to discuss such issues, and the emphasis on harmony and mutual respect within their society. A second study by Tang (2001, cited in Equal Opportunities Commission of Hong Kong, 2006–2007) showed that students from eight institutions of higher learning believed that sexual harassment on their campus was due to women wearing sexy attire and therefore, appearing sexy. More men than women perceived sexual harassment as flirtation and admiration of women. Students also believed that sexual harassment was really about the victim overreacting. India Lewd songs, harassing phone calls, sexual verbal comments, and women’s breasts as the object of men’s glares, were experienced by 39 percent of female college students in Mumbai, India (Bajpai, 1999). The women’s bathrooms were surrounded by men making the location a threatening place for women to use, as were the canteen and the entrance to the university. Male faculty subjected the women students to sexual innuendo, touching, staring, and offering grades for sex. Fortyfive percent of women students at the University of Peradeniya in Sri Lanka discussed their sexual humiliation, called ragging (Finney, 2000). Roughly half the women who took part in a Delhi University study indicated that they were harassed by either a teacher or a non-teaching employee. In addition, 92 percent of women at the university’s hostel, experienced daily sexual harassment within the campus as well as on busses and streets (The Lawyers Collective, 2001, cited in Haspels et al., 2001). Almost 14 percent of female students were harassed by their male peers in libraries and the canteen, and 5 percent were harassed by university staff (Gender Study Group, 1996, cited in Mirsky, 2003). Verbal harassment in Indian higher educational institutions is known as eve-teasing, and is considered a less offensive form of harassment by women students at Delhi University (Anagol-McGinn, 1994, cited in Mirsky, 2003). Their male peers viewed eve-teasing as ‘‘light in nature, flattering, and fun’’ (Anagol-McGinn, 1994, cited in Mirsky, 2003, p. 18). Forty-five percent of the female students acknowledged that they shun the library and specific classes to avoid sexual harassment. Numerous universities in India have undertaken the task of reducing sexual harassment and assault on their university campuses, and
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creating and implementing sexual harassment polices (Bajpai, 1999). Her study showed that 39 percent of women acknowledged the existence of sexual harassment on campus, and 58 percent of women said there was no harassment or discrimination. Sexual harassment was defined as nasty and obscene behavior including comments about a woman’s anatomy, lewd songs, whistling, staring at a woman’s breasts, and phone calls. Classrooms, hallways, the library and canteen were common locations where harassment occurred, especially during special events and holidays. The women said that if a female student walked by a group of men, it was a 100 percent certainty that sexual comments would be spewed at her. Male faculty enjoyed their own kind of sexual harassment including ridiculing females, staring, coercion for grades, inviting the woman to his home, and sexual innuendo (Bajpai, 1999). Most of the time there was no action taken on any sexual harassment on campus. Thailand There were differences in perception about workplace sexual harassment between business school students in Thailand and the United States, according to a study by Limpaphayom, Williams, and Fadil (2006). Thai students perceived sexual jokes and sexually explicit language as very offensive and a form of sexual coercion. U.S. students acknowledged that exchanging sexual activity for a work advantage and sexual remarks create an offensive work environment. Australia Although 53 percent of female undergraduate students in Australia experienced sexual harassment from their professors, and 88 percent from their male classmates, only 32 percent of students perceived they were sexually harassed (Gardner & Felicity, 1996). Female students were more likely to identify sexist comments from their professors as sexual harassment than the same behavior from their male peers. Gender harassment was most common from the students’ professors, whereas unwelcome attempts for a sexual relationship and sexist and sexually offensive remarks came from their male classmates. SEXUAL HARASSMENT IN EDUCATION IN AFRICA Sexual violence in and around African schools has reached epidemic proportions. Female students are subjected to sexual harassment and sexual abuse by their teachers and their male classmates in bathrooms, classrooms, and the perimeter of the school (Amnesty International, 2008; Leach, 2006; Education For All Global Monitoring Report Team,
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2003: World Bank, n.d.) The results of six studies demonstrated that between 16 percent and 47 percent of girls in primary and secondary schools report experiencing sexual violence (World Bank, n.d.). Conflict, poverty and war were contributing factors to the sexual exploitation of girls walking to and from school and while at school (ActionAid International, n.d.).
Primary and Secondary Schools Zimbabwe An extensive qualitative study of four schools in Zimbabwe demonstrated widespread sexual harassment of girls in three co-educational and one all-girls secondary schools (Leach, Machakanja, & Mandoga, 2000). The authors explored the abuse to girls from the perspective of a culture that is gendered and misogynist. The study explored both sexual abuse and nonsexual abuse and found a nexus between the two in that both co-existed within the school environment, even though nonsexual abuse in the form of corporal punishment is illegal. For example, if a girl denies a teacher’s sexual advances, she risks his physical assault. By interviewing 13- to 15-year-old girls, their male classmates, teachers, head teachers, parents, and government officials, it was apparent that the sexual harassment the girls experienced on their way to and from school was from older men known as sugar daddies. Fifty percent of girls indicated they were sexually touched, and 92 percent were propositioned for sex in exchange for gifts or money (Amnesty International, 2008). The sexual harassment of school girls in Zimbabwe represents a microcosm of the amount of sexual abuse and nonsexual abuse that girls experience outside the school milieu (Amnesty International, 2008; Leach, 2006; Leach et al., 2000). This broader context merits a brief examination when viewing the problem of sexual harassment within and around the school environment. Girls and women are considered less valuable within much of African culture, and are vulnerable because of their low socioeconomic status resulting in their dependence on men. Additionally, males are socialized to view females as their property and someone to serve them, and that girls and women should obey what boys and men require of them. The girls’ socialization results in their lowered self-esteem and acceptance of male aggression as the norm, making them vulnerable to abuse. Men and boys’ offer of money and gifts, therefore, becomes an enticing element in the male power dynamic of manipulating the girls into sexual relationships. The abuse the girls experience in school mirrors the violence perpetrated against them in public places by male strangers, and at home in the form of sexual abuse, beatings, neglect, excessive work, and verbal abuse.
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Older boys and male teachers were the most likely perpetrators of the girls (Leach, 2006; Mirsky, 2003; Education For All Monitoring Report Team, 2008). Sexual violence included the following behaviors: invading the girls’ space in an intimidating manner, badgering them in the hallways and on school grounds, entering their classrooms uninvited, touching their breasts and buttocks often leading to sexual assault, and verbally abusing demeaning the female gender by shouting obscenities and calling them whores and prostitutes. The boys sent love letters as a way to propose, but if the girls refused the boys’ proposals, they were met with verbal insults, name calling, or physical assault. Male teachers abused their power to tantalize both younger and older girls into a sexual liaison, often using money and gifts like the sugar daddies in the public arena (Leach, 2006; Mirsky, 2003). This was standard accepted behavior and often perpetrated on a girl during class in front of other students. Teachers were not punished which increased the likelihood of the tantalizing becoming sexual abuse. Shumba (2001) discovered that 65.6 percent of sexual abuse by teachers included sexual intercourse, and 2 percent experienced rape or attempted rape. Because teachers behaved so openly and egregiously in front of their male students with no negative consequences to their behavior, they became role models for the same behavior for the young men in the classroom. Even the girls that attended the all-girls school did not escape sexual harassment (Mirsky, 2003; Leach, 2006). Like the coeducational girls, they were harassed on their way to and from school by sugar daddies. Once in the school, some male teachers were inappropriate towards them as well. Because the legal ban on corporal punishment was strictly enforced, unlike the coeducational schools, verbal abuse by both female and male teachers was rampant. The study demonstrated that differentiating between abuse and consent was sometimes a difficult distinction (Dunne et al., 2006). There were some girls that accepted money and gifts from the older boys or the sugar daddies, which from the male’s viewpoint meant a sexual relationship. That said, because of the power differential, whether consensual or not, it was abuse and harassment. The lack of school or government leadership in condemning and punishing the boys or male teachers for the sexual harassment, sexual abuse, and nonsexual abuse in the form of corporal punishment, gave tacit approval for the behavior to continue thereby creating an environment of gender-based violence towards girls (Dunne et al., 2006; Leach, 2006; Mirsky, 2003). As could be expected, sometimes the girls became pregnant by a teacher. If the teacher was reported, little consequence was observed. Sometimes the girl’s parents ignored the pregnancy if the teacher agreed to marry the pregnant teen and provide a home for
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her. The girls were assigned blame for their pregnancy by parents, their peers, and they blamed themselves as well. Female teachers were aware of the harassment by both the boys and the male teachers but ignored it. The message sent to boys and girls that the abuse was normalized and expected. The girls reported a myriad of responses to the boys’ harassment reflecting emotional, educational, and behavioral consequences (Dunne et al., 2003; UN World Report on Violence Against Children, 2006). Emotionally, they reported feeling anxious, embarrassed, confused, scared, and irritated. They had difficulty concentrating in class and reported crying. Some were too frightened to leave the classroom, while others ensured that their trip home was with other girls, and avoided walking near crowds of boys. If it was a teacher who was the harasser, the girls reported doing whatever they could to avoid the teacher’s attention; they worried if they denied the teacher’s sexual approach, they would be retaliated against by lowered grades, forced to do extra work, or be physically assaulted. Kenya Rape in Kenyan schools is commonplace (Ceneda, 2001). In 1991, 71 girls were brutally gang raped by boys from a neighboring school resulting in the death of 19 girls. The boys were not prosecuted. When the headmaster for the boys’ school expelled them, the boys’ parents sued forcing the headmaster to readmit them. When a probation officer was interviewed about the incident, he acknowledged that rape was a normal aspect of the school setting to the point that if the gang rapes hadn’t resulted in deaths, the tragedy would not have made the news. During this same time, a primary school teacher had raped nine girls; the teacher’s employment was not terminated and he continued as a teacher. South Africa The HRW study of sexual violence to girls in South African schools involved visiting eight predominantly urban public schools from a broad range of economic strata and interviewing their administrators and teachers (George & Thonden, 2001). Thirty six girls from different ethnic backgrounds between the ages of 7 to 17, parents, social workers, teachers, administrators, and government officials were also interviewed. Twenty-three incidents of rape at school were also investigated. Jackrolling defined the snatching and gang rape of girls and was reported in 25 schools. As in Zimbabwe, South African girls are regularly sexually harassed, including sexual assault and rape, by both their male classmates and male teachers. The harassment mirrors
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the experiences of their Zimbabwean counterparts—they are threatened, fondled, verbally humiliated, and raped in bathrooms, classrooms (in front of teachers) and hallways. More often than not, the girls’ sexual violence is committed by two or more boys (Mirsky, 2003). The abuse goes unchallenged by schools, educators, and the government. If girls do report the abuse, they are often retaliated against by school administrators and their peers. Teachers who are known abusers and were found to commit one third of the rapes to children (Jewkes, Levin, Mbananga, & Bradshaw, 2002), were not disciplined but rather were transferred to other schools to continue their egregious behavior. While most of the sexual harassment to the girls is perpetrated by their male classmates, harassment by male teachers is epidemic and severe. Teachers instigate a quid pro quo by promising the girls better grades in return for sexual favors or a dating relationship. They taunt the girls into a form of prostitution by offering money for sex. Conversely, teachers will threaten the girls with physical violence if they don’t comply with the teacher’s sexual demands. Teachers have raped, sexually assaulted, and verbally sexually abused the girls with degrading sexual comments. One primary teacher instructed the girls to draw a penis. A study done in 1998 by the Medical Research Council found that 37.7 percent of rape victims, who identified their rapist, identified one of their teachers or their principal as the perpetrator of their violence. Male teachers will ask the girls to run an errand for them to the male staff lounge, thereby colluding with their male peers who are waiting in the staff room where the girl would be sexually harassed or raped (World Bank, n.d.). Understandably, girls were fearful of going near the male teachers’ staff room, so they would pair up with one of their female classmates to run the errand. Girls were harassed and assaulted on their way to and from school by taxi drivers (George & Thoonden, 2001). Because poor and black girls are more likely to have to travel further to get to school, they are more vulnerable to violence. Little attention has been directed to the sexualized violence in South African primary schools (Bhana, 2006). The consequences to the girls are multifaceted. In addition to the girls dropping out of school and failing their higher education matriculation exams, their involvement in activities outside of school, such as sports, are diminished (George & Thonden 2001). They have difficulty concentrating causing their grades to drop. Absenteeism is a common response to the unchallenged harassment thereby disrupting their ability to learn. Sexual assaults lead to unwanted pregnancy and health risks associated with sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) and HIV/ AIDS. (George & Thonden, 2001; Leach, 2006). A study comparing the sexual harassment of students in Johannesburg and Chicago, Illinois in the United States found that the behavior
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is normalized in both schools. Eighty three percent of Chicago students and 79 percent of Johannesburg students reported sexual harassment by their peers. An almost equal number also disclosed that they sexually harassed their classmates—74 percent and 78 percent, respectively. Both genders from both countries had similar rates for both their victimization and their perpetration of the same behavior on their classmates. West Africa Very few female teachers work in refugee schools in West Africa where Liberian refugee girls study in Sierra Leone and Guinea (Kirk & Winthrop, 2008). Consequently, girls are likely to be sexually exploited by their male teachers. In 2002, the International Rescue Committee (IRC) instigated new imitative—female classroom assistants (CAs) to make the school environment safer and friendlier to girls. For example, the CAs monitor a log book in which the girls’ grades are recorded, which diminishes the likelihood of transactional sex (the exchange of money, gifts, or grades for money) between the male teacher and the girl. Sexual abuse to Liberian school girls by male teachers and school staff was evident in refugee camps, where teacher abuse often involved the demand for sex for grades (United Nations, 2002, cited in United States Agency for International Development, 2008). Botswana, Ghana A study by Rossetti (2001, cited in Davies, n.d.), found that 67 percent of students in Botswana schools (including some boys) had been subjected to sexual harassment by teachers. Twenty percent of these students were propositioned by their teacher for sex, and 42 percent of the students complied due to fear of retaliation if they did not. In Ghana, 13.5 percent of girls in both primary and secondary schools were victims of sexual abuse at school (Brown, 2002). Malawi, Cameroon, and Uganda Amnesty International (2008) reported that 50 percent of Malawi girls experienced unwanted sexual touching by their teachers or male classmates (Leach, Fiscian, Kadzamira, Lemani, & Machakanja, 2003). According to the World Bank (n.d.), eight percent of school girls from Cameroon were sexually abused by their teachers. A student in Uganda reported that one of her male teachers required that she wash his feet, take water to the bathroom, and when he appeared naked asked her to ‘‘help him as a man’’ (ActionAid, n.d., p. 4).
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Morocco, Benin, and Tunisia The farther the girls have to walk to get to school, the less likely parents in Morocco and Tunisia are willing to let their daughters attend school (King & Hill, 1993). While the authors do not specifically identify gendered violence or sexual harassment as the cause of parents’ trepidation, they recognized that the walk to school would make their daughters vulnerable to ‘‘moral and physical peril’’ (King & Hill, p. 33). Wible (2004) found that 43 percent of primary and 80 percent of secondary students in Benin, dropped out of school because of sexual abuse. Another survey discovered that 34 percent of children and 15 percent of teachers attested to sexual violence occurring in their schools (Plan, 2008). Rarely are any of the incidents reported to school officials.
Colleges and Universities Zimbabwe Research conducted on institutions of higher learning in Zimbabwe uncovered considerable sexual harassment of 2,756 female students by male lecturers (Zindi, 1998). Fear of further victimization was identified by 90 percent of the women as a reason sexual harassment is either underreported or not reported. Their fear was supported when 45 percent of female students told of lowered grades when they refused their lecturers sexual advances or if they terminated an ongoing dating relationship. A little over 1 percent of the women indicated that they would date a lecturer to improve their grades, and almost 9 percent asserted that any student over the age of 18 had a right to date a single lecturer. In contrast, 21 percent of females believed dating lecturers was unethical because the student may have an unfair grade advantage because exam papers may be provided to the lecturers’ student paramour prior to the exam. A full 64 percent of women students perceived their lecturers as corrupt. Every woman who completed the survey indicated that legislation should be enacted to protect students against lecturers, and all of them knew lecturers who had abused their power to take advantage of women students. Gaidzanwa (1994) posited that female students were said to be ‘‘asking for it’’ if they ventured outside the union buildings. Incidents called knifing, which include sexual harassment of women including rape, abuse of alcohol, and other forms of violence by male students, were chronicled in a report written by the university’s proctor. At one point, a student wearing a mini skirt was attacked by 100 male students. Sexual harassment by male faculty, including transactional sex, was reported.
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Kenya According to Ceneda (2001), sexual harassment and exploitation of female university students is rampant in Kenya, and is identified as one of the obstacles to women’s educational achievement. Women are pressured for sex, raped, groped, fondled, and subjected to cat calls, with rare action taken against the perpetrator. Ghana Trainee teachers from a university and a college are sexually harassed most frequently during ‘‘1) promotional exams, 2) continuous assessment, 3) admission practices, 4) exam practices by typists, 5) student allowances, 6) domestication of female students, and 7) study mates’’ (Teni-Atinga, 2006, pp. 199–200). The harassment sometimes includes persistent sexual coercion from lecturers with threats of a lowered grade or not passing the exam to move forward with a student’s education. The sexual harassment begins when women are seeking college admission and does not stop until they are through the program. They experience anger, frustration, helplessness, and a sense of powerlessness because of the inability to bring a complaint to the school for fear of ridicule and stigma. Nigeria The sexual harassment of female students by professors on Nigeria’s universities gained the attention of the country’s president, General Olusegun Obasanjo (Ladebo, 2001, cited in Ladebo, 2003). The president made a mockery out of university teachers for using female students for their own sexual hedonism. Ladebo’s (2003), study of three Nigerian universities found that none of the three had any sexual harassment policies, in all likelihood because the country has no antisexual harassment laws. Sexual harassment by male teachers to female students had escalated to the point that management went to the leaders of the union to implore the teachers to stop their abuse. One of the campuses is known to have high incidents of rape and sexual assaults, and women attending the other universities reported sexual coercion and transactional sex if they are financially indigent. Phallic attack is the term coined by male lecturers at two universities that refers to the coercion of students for sex in exchange for grades (Nwadigwe, 2007). The author asserted that the increase in sexual harassment could be partially attributed to the lack of sex education in African countries. Single women experienced higher rates of sexual harassment, and were more likely to succumb to their lecturer’s taunts. Only 2 percent of the victims reported the menacing lecturer. Students
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reported that they bought gifts for the lecturer and his family in an attempt to avoid intercourse with him. Women students at Lagos State University in Nigeria described their experiences on campus as a type of rape, including threats, intimidation and force from men that attempt to disguise their relationship as friendship (Adedokun, 2005). Male teachers are the most likely perpetrators but male students and university staff also sexually harass. SEXUAL HARASSMENT IN SCHOOLS IN THE MIDDLE EAST Sexual violence in schools in the Middle East is not likely to be recognized or studied because of war, political unrest, poverty, and entrenched cultural beliefs about the role of men and women in the region. Secondary Egypt Egyptian parents are reticent to allow their daughters to attend school if they have a long distance to walk for fear of their daughter’s ‘‘moral and physical peril’’ (King & Hill, 1993, p. 33). The Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights (ECWR), an NGO, conducted the first country study addressing the prevalence of sexual harassment to Egyptian and tourist women on the streets of several cities (Hassan, n.d.). The organization did not research sexual harassment to girls and women in education specifically, however, their research found 29 percent of harassment occurred in educational facilities and that schoolchildren and university students were the most likely to harass girls and women on Egypt’s streets, after taxi drivers. One can speculate, therefore, that girls and women in Egypt’s schools are victimized by sexual harassment. An ECWR seminar encouraged parents to discuss the sexual harassment in school with their children. Teachers informed ECWR that they were at a loss as to what to tell students about sexual harassment or what to do when they are subjected to it. ECWR is working with the Ministry of Education to design sexual harassment curriculum for schools to use in teaching students about the construct. Men blamed sexual harassment on the influence of the West, the media, inaction by the female victim, seductive clothing, and a woman’s presence in specific locations (Hassan, n.d.). They also asserted that sexual harassment should be expected because of the lust between men and women. The men reported feeling a level of satisfaction after harassing a woman: more masculine, and a way to show off. The ECWR (Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights, n.d.) told of a female student whose father no longer allows her to attend school
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because of the daily verbal harassment from men and boys as she and her girlfriends travel to and from school. The girl’s male classmates spread sexual rumors; her brother and father heard the rumors and beat her. Another father sought help from ECWR when his 14-year-old daughter refused to attend school because of the sexual harassment she experienced on the bus ride to and from school. Turkey The HRW reported that girls who attend government-sponsored medical high schools, and who are suspected of having sex or being prostitutes, will be subjected to virginity examinations (HRW, 2001a). The exams were banned in 1999 and reinstituted in 2001. Girls have attempted suicide rather than be forced to the invasive and painful exam. Israel A nationwide Israeli study of sexual harassment of over 10,000 public school students in seventh through eleventh grades demonstrated that Arab boys and eighth-grade students were the most likely to report sexual harassment (Zeira, Astor, & Benbenishty, 2002). Arab girls, followed by Jewish girls, reported the least amount of victimization—both Arab and Jewish boys were the most likely victims of harassment from their male classmates. Eleven percent to 36 percent of girls reported experiencing a minimum of one act of sexual harassment, with Arab girls least likely to be harassed. Unwanted sexual remarks and attempts to kiss the girls were the most disturbing experiences. Seven percent of the girls reported being kissed when they didn’t want to, and 11 percent indicated a classmate attempted to touch them sexually without their consent. Out of the seven survey items, boys experienced six of the seven considerably more often than did the girls; the girls’ reports of a student attempting to take off an item of their clothing was the only survey item in which they scored higher. The girls most frequent sexual harassment experiences, at 11 percent, was when another student made unwanted sexual remarks and tried to touch them sexually. IMPACT Hill and Silva (2005) found female students were fearful, angry, embarrassed, and worried about whether they would have a healthy relationship. The women reported having difficulty concentrating during class and problems sleeping. According to Dziech and Weiner (1990), denial is one of the effective coping mechanisms sexual
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harassment targets employ to deal with their victimization. When the behavior continues, targets will attempt to avoid the harasser hoping that if they avoid or ignore the harasser, he will eventually leave her alone (Backhouse, 1981; Hill & Silva, 2005). Students also report strategies to avoid being noticed, such as dressing down, dropping courses, not enrolling in courses taught by specific instructors, changing their major or career plans, and relinquishing research opportunities due to sexual harassment (Dziech & Weiner, 1990; Fineran & Bennett, 1998; Mirsky, 2003). Discussing boyfriends or husbands, indicating they are too busy studying, and other tactics are instigated to cope with the perpetrator (Benson & Thomson, 1982). Paludi and Barickman (1991) listed behaviors into five categories which they termed sexual harassment trauma syndrome; (a) emotional responses such as shame, guilt, and powerlessness; (b) physical reactions including substance abuse, lethargy, weight fluctuations, phobias, and genitourinary and gastrointestinal distress; (c) changes in selfperception, for example, feelings of hopelessness, lack of control, and negative self-esteem; (d) social, interpersonal relatedness, and sexual effects encompassing changes in dress or physical appearance, lack of trust, negative attitudes and behavior in sexual relationships, and potential sexual disorders; and (e) career effects such as changes in study and work habits, withdrawal from school, drop in academic performance, and lowered grades (pp. 29–39). Psychological sequelae include confusion and self-blame, fear and anxiety, depression and anger, and disillusionment (Salisbury, 1986). Girls who have been sexually abused feel ashamed and guilty causing them to stay quiet for fear of negative ramifications, such as being killed for bringing dishonor to their families (Blaya & Debarbieus, 2008). The immediate and long-term ramifications to victims of gendered violence are copious including anxiety about their personal safety, loss of self-esteem, anxious, and an increase in suicide risk (George, 2001; Mirsky, 2003; HRW, 2001a, 2001b). Students may resort to using alcohol or drugs, and participating in risky sexual behavior (HRW, 2001a, 2001b). Other responses included feeling upset, uncomfortable, and disappointed in their college experience (Hill & Silva, 2005), trouble concentrating and learning, and truancy (Blaya & Debarbieux, 2008). In addition to the psychological ramifications, there is an increased risk for pregnancy, STDs, cervical cancer, infertility, and the spread of HIV/ AIDS, particularly in countries in Africa where the virus is rampant. Long-term economic, psychological, social, and physical health consequences may result when females have been victimized (Amnesty International, 2008). Problems may arise in adulthood such as criminal behavior and difficulty in maintaining relationships (APSA Rapport, 1999, cited in Blaya & Debarbieux, 2008).
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When teachers sexually harass and abuse female students in front of the boys in the class, or when they collude with the boys who harass by not intervening, boys learn a violent form of masculinity that then perpetuates gendered violence in the home and in society. RECOMMENDATIONS According to ActionAid International (n.d.) ‘‘Violence against girls has its roots in patriarchy and unequal power relations that still exist worldwide. Therefore the problem must be seen within this broader framework. It is a symptom and a result of the larger problem of gender inequality that has to be tackled in all spheres’’ (p. 4). Addressing the complex phenomenon of sexual violence to girls in education requires a wide range of strategies because it is a worldwide pandemic (Leach, 2006; Mirsky, 2003). International researchers DeSouza and Solberg (2003) asserted that ‘‘In countries where women have been and are viewed as unequal to men, new laws or procedures designed to prevent harassment may conflict with hundreds of years of culture . . .’’ (p. 25). The nexus of human rights, public health, legislation, and education are at the heart of any potential movement for reversing this multifarious plague (Mirsky, 2003). The following recommendations are only a cursory list briefly summarizing the in-depth recommendations from Amnesty International, HRW, and the United Nations, among others. Each of these organizations’ recommendations are analogous and generally fall within six categories: research, national and international efforts, school initiatives, community and parent verve, public health programs, and active student participation. Research Sexual violence is an understudied construct in which more research is required to understand the scope and severity in individual countries and worldwide. With increased data, measurable goals and objectives can be strategically designed, implemented, monitored, and evaluated for both the prevention and intervention of the abuse in primary, secondary, and postsecondary institutions. Much of the research has been done qualitatively—additional quantitative data are also required to gain knowledge about the perpetrators and what variables are present to prevent school officials from intervening to both prevent and intervene on sexual violence (and other forms of violence) to girls and women (and boys and men). With more study of the efficacy of prevention and intervention treatments and services, an international best practices database could be created as a resource for stakeholders use worldwide.
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National and International Efforts Perhaps one of the simplest steps countries could take is to ratify the many international conventions and treaties dealing with human rights, women’s rights, and the rights of the child. The ratification is only as effective as government follow through within each country. Governments need to become accountable to international and national laws, where applicable. Each country’s ministry of education should partner with law enforcement, schools, communities, parents, NGOs, public health agencies, and students to form local and national coalitions with the goal of stopping sexual abuse. For countries that do not have anti-sexual harassment in school laws, legislation needs to be enacted to stop the behavior to female students of all ages. School Initiatives Teachers need to be trained in sexual harassment, gender equality, and discipline procedures that are respectful of the dignity of females (and males). Students must learn about sexual violence, female equality, good communication skills, boundaries, and respect of gender differences. Teachers should be required to take part in ongoing training throughout their tenure, and performance appraisals conducted by headmasters and principals, and students should be implemented in monitoring teacher effectiveness and behavior. More female teachers and teacher’s assistance should be hired for schools where most teachers are male. Curriculum development about gender equity, sexual harassment, and effective forms of discipline, among others, should be required in all college teacher education. Schools should develop, disseminate, and publicize effective sexual violence policies and procedures, as well as monitor their effectiveness. Teachers who sexually abuse a student of any age should be fired and referred to the police. Disciplinary measures need to be used on students who violate the school’s policy and sexually harass their classmates. Parents and Community Verve The school does not operate in a vacuum; it is a reflection of society’s mores and values. Therefore, to change those heinous values degrading to women and children, citizens can become members of NGOs or other grassroots organizations working towards anti-sexual violence programs and projects. Programs that develop men as partners in understanding and teaching other men and boys about gender inequality and its impact on girls and women should be implemented in communities. Each community should create their own solutions to the problem of gender violence specific to their locale. Use of mass
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media programs on radio, television, town posters, and the Internet could be capitalized in getting the anti-sexual violence, pro-equality message out to citizens within the community. Law enforcement’s involvement will serve to diminish the likelihood of girls being sexually propositioned and accosted on their way to and from school, as well as the abuse by their male teachers. Parents would benefit from parent education classes emphasizing gender equality, discipline, and the importance of girls attending school. Parents should be active partners with their children’s schools to ensure competent teachers are hired.
Public Health Public health programs and projects dealing with HIV/AIDS and other STDs need to be taught to all citizens within the community and schools. Pregnancy prevention is an essential educational program along with the use of condoms for the reduction of pregnancy, STDs, and HIV/AIDs. Public health agencies partnering with schools and the community would help ensure an integrated approach to dealing with the consequences of sexual violence in schools and in the community.
Student Participation Active student participation is essential for student buy-in in designing and implementing any process and program to stop incidents of sexual harassment at school. Students will have some of the best problem solving capabilities about the issue because they live it on a daily basis. Educating the boys to understand sexism, gender violence, and the impact on their female classmates is another effective tactic in reducing the sexual abuse. Using peer education involving older boys teaching the younger boys would be beneficial for both the boy teacher and the boy learner. Catalyzing the boys to be advocates for their female classmates if groups of boys are colonizing against the girls would demonstrate positive role modeling to their male peers. Providing safe opportunities for girls to teach boys how the boys’ sexual abuse impacts them emotionally, educationally, and physically may be another catalyst in stopping the abuse. A holistic approach, integrating strategies, agencies, organizations, governments, and individuals will be required to effectively change a complex epidemic that has, unfortunately, become the norm in schools around the world. Fortunately, champions of the needed transformation have begun chipping away at this overwhelming undertaking. This is a transformation that must be successful for girls and women, boys and men, and for society.
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CONCLUSION The pandemic of sexual violence in schools is not well recognized, analyzed, or researched (Dunne et al., 2006). School officials may deny, minimize, and hide sexual harassment leading to inaction as their preferential response to sexual violence in schools. In the worst case scenario, teachers, staff, and administrators may be the actual perpetrators of the abuse. This often is contradictory of national law, school policies, and international treaties and conventions. Stopping sexual violence in schools is an overwhelming task that will require changing long entrenched cultural belief systems about patriarchy, masculine hegemony, and girls and women’s value in society. This paradigm shift will require a long-term commitment from individuals; NGOs; governments; primary, secondary, and postsecondary schools and teachers; parents; and boys and girls (Plan, 2008).
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Galey, M. E. (1999). Women and education. In K. D. Askin & D. M. Koenig (Eds.), Women and international human rights law. (Vol. 1, pp. 403–439). Ardsley, NY: Transnational Publishers. Gardner, J., & Felicity, A. (1996). Sexual and gender harassment at university: Experiences and perceptions of Australian women. Australian Psychologist, 3, 210–216. George, E., & Thonden, Y. (2001). Scared at school: Sexual violence against girls in South African schools. New York: Human Rights Watch. Hagg, K. (2002). Aspects of sexual harassment from a Swedish perspective. In V. Sunnari, J. Kangasvuo, & M. Heikkinen (Eds), Gendered and sexualised violence in educational environments (pp. 125–137). Oulu, Finland: Oulu University Press. Haspels, N., Kasim, Z. M., Thomas, C, & McCann, D. (2001). Action against sexual harassment at work in Asia and the Pacific. Retrieved from http://www. ilo.org/asia/whatwedo/publications/lang–en/docName–WCMS_BK_PB_ 159_EN/index.htm. Hendrie, C. (1998). ‘‘Passing the trash’’ by school districts frees sexual predators to hunt again. Education Week, 18, 16–17. Hill, C., & Silva, E. (2005). Drawing the line: Sexual harassment on campus. Retrieved March 9, 2009, from http://www.aauw.org/research/upload/ DTLFinal.pdf. Human Rights Watch. (2001a). Hatred in the hallways: Violence and discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students in U.S. schools. Retrieved March 9, 2009, from www.hrw.org/legacy/reports/2001/uslgbt/toc.htm. Human Rights Watch. (2001b). Easy targets: Violence against children worldwide. Retrieved March 9, 2009, from http://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports/2001/ children/. Jewkes, R., Levin, J., Mbananga. N., & Bradshaw, D. (2002). Rape of girls in South Africa. The Lancet, 359, 319–320. Jones, N. (2008). Increasing visibility and promoting policy action to tackle sexual exploitation in and around schools in Africa (Briefing paper). Retrieved from http://learnwithoutfear.org/downloads/sex-exploit-west-africa-english.pdf. Jones, N., & Espey, J. (2008). Increasing visibility and promoting policy action to tackle sexual exploitation in and around schools in Africa. Retrieved from www. odi.org.uk/resources/external/2008/10/sexual-exploitation-policy-actionschools-africa.pdf. Jones, N., Moore, K., Villar-Marquez, E., & Broadbent, E. (2008). Painful lessons: The politics of preventing sexual violence and bullying at school. (Working paper 295). Retrieved from http://www.odi.org.uk/resources/odi-publications/ working-papers/295-painful-lessons-preventing-sexual-violence.pdf. Kazue, M. (2004). Sexual harassment and empowerment of women in Japan. NiASnytt: Asia Insights, 1, 12–13. Retrieved from http://www.nias.ku.dk/ nytt/2004_1/2004_11.pdf. Kelley, M. L., & Parsons, B. (2000). Sexual harassment in the 1990s: A university-wide survey of female faculty, administrators, staff, and students. The Journal of Higher Education, 71, 548–568. Khan, S. R. (1993). South Asia. In E. M. King, & M. A. Hill (Eds.), Women’s education in developing countries: Barriers, benefits, and policies (pp. 211–246). Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
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Appendix: Women’s Studies Programs in the United States Michele A. Paludi
Additional information regarding women’s studies/gender studies programs may be obtained directly from the college or university and from the Feminist Majority Foundation at http://feminist.org. The Feminist Majority Foundation identifies the degrees offered for each women’s studies/gender studies program within the United States. Some programs offer certificates, majors, and minors in women’s studies/gender studies. STATE Alabama Auburn University University of Alabama University of North Alabama Alaska University of Alaska, Fairbanks Arizona Arizona State University Northern Arizona University University of Arizona
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Arkansas University of Arkansas California California Institute of Integral Studies California Lutheran University California Polytechnic State University California State University, Chico California State University, Fresno California State University, Fullerton California State University, Long Beach California State University, Northridge California State University, Sacramento California State University, San Bernadino California State University, San Marcos California State University, Stanislaus Cerritos College Claremont Colleges Claremont Graduate University Foothill College Mills College Montclair State University Moorpark College New College of California Ohlone College Pomona College Saddleback College San Diego State University San Francisco State University Santa Clara University Santa Monica College Scripps College Sonoma State University Stanford University University of California, Berkeley University of California, Riverside University of California, Santa Barbara University of California, Santa Cruz
Appendix
University University University University University
of of of of of
California, California, California, California, San Diego
Los Angeles Davis Irvine San Diego
Colorado Colorado College Fort Lewis College Metropolitan State College of Denver University of Colorado, Boulder University of Colorado, Colorado Springs University of Colorado, Denver University of Denver University of Northern Colorado Connecticut Connecticut College Fairfield University Hartford College for Women Southern Connecticut State University Trinity College Delaware University of Delaware District of Columbia American University George Washington University Georgetown University Trinity College Florida Eckerd College Florida Atlantic University Florida International University
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Appendix
Florida State University Nova Southeastern Rollins College Stetson University University of Central Florida University of Florida University of Miami, Coral Gables University of North Florida University of South Florida University of Tampa University of West Florida Georgia Agnes Scott College Clark Atlanta University Emory University Georgia College and State University Georgia State University Georgia Tech University of Georgia Hawaii University of Hawaii, Manoa Idaho Albertson College Idaho State University University of Idaho Illinois Augustana College Bradley University DePaul University Eastern Illinois University Knox College Loyola University
Appendix
Northeastern Illinois University Northern Illinois University Northwestern University Principia College Roosevelt University Southern Illinois University, Carbondale Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville University of Chicago University of Illinois, Chicago University of Illinois, Springfield Indiana DePauw University Earlham College Indiana State University Indiana University of Pennsylvania Indiana University, South Bend Indiana University, Purdue University Fort Wayne St. Mary’s College University of Notre Dame Valparaiso University Iowa Coe College Cornell College Drake University Grinnell College Iowa State University Luther College Simpson College University of Iowa University of Northern Iowa Kansas Emporia State University Kansas State University University of Kansas
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Appendix
Kentucky Berea College Brescia University Eastern Kentucky University Lexington Community College Northern Kentucky University University of Kentucky University of Louisville Louisiana Louisiana State University McNeese State University Newcomb College University of New Orleans Maine Bates College Bowdoin College Colby College University of Maine, Farmington University of Maine, Orono University of Southern Maine Maryland Frostburg State University Montgomery College St. Mary’s College of Maryland The Johns Hopkins University University of Maryland, Baltimore County University of Maryland, College Park Massachusetts Amherst College Boston College Boston University Brandeis University
Appendix
Bridgewater State College Clark University College of the Holy Cross Emmanuel College Greenfield Community College Hampshire College Harvard University Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts Massachusetts Institute of Technology Radcliffe College Salem State College Simmons College Smith College Towson University Tufts University University of Massachusetts, Amherst University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth University of Massachusetts, Lowell University of Massachusetts, Boston
Michigan Albion College Alma College Central Michigan University Eastern Michigan University Grand Valley State University Greenfield Community College Hope College Kalamazoo College Michigan State University University of Detroit University of Michigan, Ann Arbor University of Michigan, Dearborn
Minnesota Carleton College Century College
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College of St. Benedict College of St. Catherine College of St. Scholastica Hamline University Macalester College Minnesota State University, Mankato St. Cloud State University St. Olaf College University of Minnesota, Twin Cities University of Minnesota, Duluth Mississippi Millsaps College Mississippi State University University of Mississippi Missouri Avila College Central Missouri State University Maryville University of St. Louis Saint Louis Missouri Southwest Missouri State University University of Missouri, Kansas University of Missouri, St. Louis Montana Montana State University, Bozeman University of Montana Nevada University of Nevada, Las Vegas University of Nevada, Reno New Hampshire Dartmouth College Franklin Pierce College
Appendix
Keene State College Plymouth State University Rivier College New Jersey College of New Jersey Drew University Georgia Court College Monmouth University Montclair State University New Jersey City University Princeton University Ramapo College Richard Stockton College Rider University Rowan University Rutgers University Rutgers University, Camden New Mexico Eastern New Mexico University New Mexico State University University of New Mexico New York Bard College Barnard College Brooklyn College Canisus College City University of New York Graduate Center Colgate University College of New Rochelle College of Staten Island Columbia University Cornell University Hamilton College Hartwick College
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Hobart and William Smith Colleges Iona College Jewish Theological Seminary Lehman College Marist College Marymount College New School for Social Research New York University Pace University Queens College Russell Sage College Sarah Lawrence College Simon’s Rock College Skidmore College St. Lawrence University State University of New York, Albany State University of New York, Buffalo State University of New York, Cortland State University of New York, Fredonia State University of New York, Geneseo State University of New York, New Paltz State University of New York, Oneonta State University of New York, Oswego State University of New York, Plattsburgh State University of New York, Potsdam State University of New York, Purchase State University of New York, Rochester State University of New York, Stony Brook Syracuse University Union College North Carolina Appalachian State University Bennett College Davidson College Duke University East Carolina University Elton College
Appendix
Guilford College North Carolina State University University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill University of North Carolina, Charlotte University of North Carolina, Greensboro University of North Carolina, Wilmington
North Dakota North Dakota State University University of North Dakota
Ohio Antioch College Bowling Green State University Case Western Reserve University College of Mount St. Joseph College of Wooster Denison University Kent State University Kenyon College Marietta College Miami University Notre Dame College of Ohio Oberlin College Ohio State University Ohio University Ohio Wesleyan University University of Akron University of Cincinnati University of Dayton University of Toledo
Oklahoma Oklahoma State University University of Central Oklahoma University of Oklahoma
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Oregon Lewis & Clark College Oregon State University Portland State University Southern Oregon University University of Oregon Pennsylvania Allegheny College Bryn Mawr College Bucknell University California University of Pennsylvania Chatham College Clarion University of Pennsylvania Dickinson College Franklin and Marshall College Gettysburg College Haverford College Lafayette College LaSalle University Lehigh University Lock Haven University Lycoming College Mansfield University Millersville University Pennsylvania State University Rosemont College Shippensburg University Slippery Rock University Rhode Island Brown University University of Rhode Island South Carolina Clemson University College of Charleston
Appendix
University of South Carolina, Columbia University of South Carolina, Spartanburg South Dakota Augustana College South Dakota State University Tennessee Austin Peay State University Middle Tennessee University Tennessee Technological University University of Tennessee, Knoxville University of the South Vanderbilt University Texas Austin College Rice University Southern Methodist University Southwest Texas State University Southwestern University Texas A & M University Texas Tech University University of Houston University of North Texas University of Texas, Arlington University of Texas, Austin University of Texas, Dallas University of Texas, El Paso Utah Brigham Young University University of Utah Vermont Middlebury College Saint Michael’s College University of Vermont
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Appendix
Virginia College of William and Mary George Mason University Hollins University James Madison University Old Dominion University Radford University Randolph Macon Women’s College University of Richmond University of Virginia Washington Clark College Eastern Washington University Edmonds Community College Evergreen State College Gonzaga University Pacific Lutheran University University of Puget Sound University of Redlands University of Washington
West Virginia Marshall University Mary Baldwin College West Virginia University
Wisconsin Beloit College Lawrence University Marquette University University of Wisconsin, University of Wisconsin, University of Wisconsin, University of Wisconsin, University of Wisconsin,
Eau Claire Green Bay La Crosse Madison Milwaukee
Appendix
University University University University University University University University
of of of of of of of of
Wisconsin, Wisconsin, Wisconsin, Wisconsin, Wisconsin, Wisconsin, Wisconsin, Wisconsin,
Oshkosh Parkside Platteville River Falls Stevens Point Stout Superior Whitewater
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About the Editor and Contributors
EDITOR Michele A. Paludi, PhD, is the series editor for Women’s Psychology for Praeger Publishers, an imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC. She is the author/editor of 33 college textbooks and more than 160 scholarly articles and conference presentations on sexual harassment, campus violence, psychology of women, gender, and sexual harassment and victimization. Her book, Ivory Power: Sexual Harassment on Campus (1990), received the 1992 Myers Center Award for Outstanding Book on Human Rights in the United States). Dr. Paludi served as Chair of the U.S. Department of Education’s Subpanel on the Prevention of Violence, Sexual Harassment, and Alcohol and Other Drug Problems in Higher Education. She was one of six scholars in the United States to be selected for this Subpanel. She also was a consultant to and a member of former New York State Governor Mario Cuomo’s Task Force on Sexual Harassment. Dr. Paludi serves as an expert witness for court proceedings and administrative hearings on sexual harassment. She has had extensive experience in conducting training programs and investigations of sexual harassment and other EEO issues for businesses and educational institutions. In addition, Dr. Paludi has held faculty positions at Franklin & Marshall College, Kent State University, Hunter College, Union College, and Union Graduate College, where she directs the human resource management certificate program. She teaches in the School of Management.
CONTRIBUTORS Kristin Anderson, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Houston–Downtown where she teaches social psychology, psychology of prejudice, psychology of women, and psychology and the
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About the Editor and Contributors
law. Her research interests are in the areas of prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination. Martha E. Banks, PhD, is a research neuropsychologist in the Research & Development Division of ABackans DCP, Inc., in Akron, Ohio and a former professor of Black Studies at The College of Wooster. She has been instrumental in the development and revision of the Ackerman-Banks Neuropsychological Rehabilitation Battery; a test that is distinguished by its inclusion of ethnic content and Women with Disabilities in the normative sample. Dr. Banks is president of the Society for the Psychology of Women. She is a fellow of American Psychological Association Divisions 35 (Society for the Psychology of Women), 22 (Rehabilitation Psychology), and 56 (Trauma Psychology) and has served on the APA Council of Representatives and Board for the Advancement of Psychology in the Public Interest. In 2008, she received a Presidential Citation from the American Psychological Association for her expertise and service. Dr. Banks has served on national advisory boards, including the Rosalynn Carter Institute for Human Development’s Expert Panel on Caregiving for People with Disabilities, and the National Advisory Board on Medical Rehabilitation Research. Dr. Banks is widely published; her articles include and emphasize issues, particularly seldom addressed issues, affecting women with disabilities and members of ethnic minority groups. Susan Basow, PhD, is Charles A. Dana Professor of Psychology at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, where she helped found the women’s studies program and chaired the psychology department for six years. Dr. Basow has taught courses on the psychology of gender since 1974 and is the author of the textbook, Gender: Stereotypes and Roles. A licensed psychologist, she also has published the results of many of her studies of gender issues in course evaluations and of women and their bodies. She has been a member of the executive committee of the Society for the Psychology of Women since 2000. Kristin P. Beals, PhD, earned her BA from Auburn University in 1995. She earned her doctorate degree in social psychology from UCLA in 2003. She has been an assistant professor at California State University, Fullerton for the past 4 years. Her research has focused on understanding how stigma impacts the well-being of lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals. Breena E. Coates, PhD, is Chair and Associate Professor in the Department of Management, College of Business and Public Administration at California State University, San Bernadino. She has been a professor of management for the department of command, leadership, and management at the United States Army War College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania. She has a BA in English from Calcutta University and an MPA and Ph.D. in
About the Editor and Contributors
251
public policy impacts on organizational behavior from the University of Pittsburgh. Her current research focuses on impacts of public policy on organizational behavior, strategic management, and leadership. A second area of interest is organizational behavior, strategy and cultural change in the United States military. She is also researching the role of Indian policewomen who were trained and sent to keep peace in Liberia. J. Harold Ellens is a retired university professor of philosophy and psychology, a retired U.S. Army Colonel, a retired Presbyterian pastor and theologian, Executive Director Emeritus of the Christian Association for Psychological Studies International, Founder and Editor in Chief Emeritus of the Journal of Psychology and Christianity, a clinical psychotherapist in private practice, and the author, co-author, or editor of 175 volumes and author of 166 professional journal articles. He continues in his role as Adjunct Professor of Philosophy and Biblical Studies at University of Detroit Mercy, in Classics at Wayne State University, and Research Scholar in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at the University of Michigan. Leanne Faraday-Brash is an organizational psychologist, executive coach, facilitator and mediator with two decades of experience in organizational capability and culture, workplace justice, and conflict resolution and leadership. While Leanne consults in a range of areas, the common thread is the emphasis on improving organizational effectiveness and workplace climate for all staff to drive performance and maximize organizational health and well-being. Leanne is also the founding principal of the Workplace Justice Consortium. Gordon B. Forbes, PhD, a licensed clinical psychologist, is a Professor of Psychology Emeritus at Millikin University in Decatur, Illinois, and the director and cofounder of the Millikin Project on Social Perceptions. His research interests include cross-cultural, ethnic, gender, and generational differences in body image; cross-cultural and gender differences in interpersonal aggression; and sexism. Emily A. Haddad, PhD, is the author of Orientalist Poetics: The Islamic Middle East in Nineteenth-Century English and French Poetry (2002) and has published mainly in the field of nineteenth-century British literary studies. She earned her PhD in Comparative Literature at Harvard University in 1997 and is now Professor and Chair of English at the University of South Dakota. Jaehee Jung, PhD, is an associate professor in the Department of Fashion and Apparel Studies at University of Delaware. Her research interests include effects of cognitive and sociocultural variables on body image, cross-cultural research in body image, cultures in transition and changing
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About the Editor and Contributors
roles of women, media influences on body image, muscular body ideals and male body image; and ethical issues in fashion advertising. Melinda Kanner is a Visiting Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Houston–Downtown in Houston, Texas, where she teaches courses in anthropology, mass media, and sociology. Her research explores the media expression of identity and has focused on tourism (Savannah), gay identity (Queer Eye For the Straight Guy), and masculinity (Mad Men). Jennifer L. Martin is the department head of English at a public alternative high school for at-risk students in Michigan and a lecturer at Oakland University where she teaches graduate research methods in the department of Educational Leadership, Feminist Methods, and Introduction to Women’s Gender Studies in the department of Women and Gender Studies. She is not only a feminist teacher, but a feminist activist. She has volunteered as an assault responder and engaged in political action for feminist causes. Currently, she is the Title IX Education Task Force Chair for the Michigan National Organization for Women in order to advocate for Title IX compliance in Michigan’s schools. She has conducted research and written articles on the topics of peer sexual harassment, teaching for social justice, service learning, and the at-risk student. Rhonda M. Schultz is a graduate student in the MA program in psychology at California State University at Fullerton. She received her BA in psychology from CSU Fullerton in 2006 and has plans to continue on for her PhD in psychology in 2010. She is currently working on research investigating the effects of the passage of anti-gay marriage legislation in California on gay, lesbian, and bisexual individuals residing there. William Schweinle received a PhD (2002) from the University of Texas at Arlington in Experimental (Social and Quantitative) Psychology. His research has focused on the social psychology of men’s wife directed aggression and men’s sexual harassment of women, among other areas. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the University of South Dakota Physician Assistant Program and Chair of the South Dakota Medical Institutional Review Board. Samantha Smith presently resides in Southern New England. She earned her Bachelor’s degree in psychology and is currently working on her Master’s in special education. Susan Strauss, RN, EdD, is a national and international speaker, trainer, and consultant. Her specialty areas include harassment and workplace bullying, organization development, and management/leadership
About the Editor and Contributors
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development. Her clients are from business, education, healthcare, law, and government organizations from both the public and private sector. Dr. Strauss has authored book chapters, articles in professional journals, written curriculum and training manuals, as well as authored the book, Sexual Harassment and Teens: A Program for Positive Change. Susan has been featured on The Donahue Show, CBS Evening News, and other television and radio programs as well as interviewed for newspaper and journal articles such as the Times of London, Lawyers Weekly, and Harvard Education Newsletter. Susan has presented at international conferences in Botswana, Egypt, Thailand, Israel, and the United States, and conducted sex discrimination research in Poland. She has consulted with professionals from other countries such as England, Australia, Canada, and St. Maartin.
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Index
Academic achievements, gender differences in, 20; culture as cause for, 33; mathematics and, 30–31, 32; media coverage and, 34; potential solutions for, 38–40; Title IX and, 35–36, 37 ActionAid International, 221 Afghanistan, sexual harassment in schools, 206 All-Volunteer Force, 116 Ambivalence toward Men Inventory (AMI), 7, 8–9; benevolence toward men, 7; hostility toward men, 7 Ambivalent sexism, 11; benevolent sexism, 12, 13; hostile sexism, 12, 13; studies on, 14; women chivalry and, 13–14 American Association of University Women (AAUW), 19, 34, 48, 49, 193–94, 195, 198 American Psychiatric Association, 135 American Psychological Association’s Guidelines on Multicultural Education, Training, Research, Practice, and Organizational Change for Psychologists, 149–51 Anorexia nervosa, 162 Anti-gay campaign, 142–44 Anxiety disorders and lesbian and bisexual women, 138–39 Arizona Star, 118–19
Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine, 117 The Army Times, 117 Arroyo, Gloria Macapagal, 107 Australia: colleges, sexual harassment in, 210; schools, sexual harassment in, 207–8 Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), 67 Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) National Perinatal Statistics Unit, 78 The Australian Newspaper, 69 Bachelet, Michelle, 97, 104–6 Beaton Consulting, 68 Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, 53 Belgium, sexual harassment in schools, 202 Benedict XVI (Pope), 90, 94 Benevolence toward men, 7–8, 9 Benevolent sexism: insidious effects of, 13; women’s view on, 12 Benin, sexual harassment in schools, 202 Blue-collar jobs, 68 Body dissatisfaction, 178; in Africa, 174–76; cross-cultural research on, 168–69; as culture-limited phenomena, 164–65; in East Asian
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countries, 172–73; ethnic differences and, 169–70; growth of, 165; history of, 163; in Indian peninsula, 176; in Latin American countries, 173–74; modernization and western media impact on, 165–66; reasons for using western culture as benchmark, 170; social change and, 167–68; in Southeast Asia, 176–77; theoretical models of, 166–67, feminist theory, 167, sociocultural theory, 166–67; among Western women, 163 Body image, 161–62 Botswana, sexual harassment in schools, 215 ‘‘Boy crisis,’’ 19–20, 34, 35 Brazil: body dissatisfaction in, 173–74; sexual harassment in schools, 198–99 British Broadcasting Company (BBC), 201 Brosnan, Audrey, 89 Buddhism, 85 Bulimia, 162 Bush, G. H. W., 112, 117 Bush, Laura, 34 Butera, Karina, 74 Buturo, James Nsaba, 130 Cameroon, sexual harassment in schools, 202 Canada: colleges, sexual harassment in, 196; schools, sexual harassment in, 193 Career Incentive Act of 1977, 47 Center-stealing, 20 Chamorro, Violetta, 107 China: colleges, sexual harassment in, 208–9; schools, sexual harassment in, 205 Cody, General Richard, 116 Colorado State Constitution, 142 Combat Action Ribbon, 117 Combat Exclusion Policy, 116 Combat-underlying premises, objections for women in 117; biological thesis, 117–18; privacy infringement hypothesis, 119;
psychological thesis, 118; sexual abuse and gender harassment theories, 118–19 Constantinian revolution, 86, 88 Contingent rewards system, 98 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), 191–92 Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), 192 Cyber-harassment/bullying, 189 Dati, Rachida, 66 Defense Authorization Acts (1992, 1993), 116 ‘‘Democracia de los acuerdos,’’ 105 Department of Defense (DoD), 111, 112; Manpower Research Statistics, 120 Department of Health and Human Services, 136 Depression and lesbian and bisexual women, 139 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), 135 Differential aptitude tests (DAT), 31 Direct combat rule policy, 112 Discrimination: definition, 128; expected, 132; against LGB, 131 Drug dependency of lesbian and bisexual women, 139–40 Dunwoody, General Ann E., 114 Eating disorders, 162, 178; in Africa, 174–76; cross-cultural research on, 168–69; as culture-limited phenomena, 164–65; diagnosing, 162–63; in East Asian countries, 171–172; history of, 164; in Indian peninsula, 176; in Latin America, 173–74; modernization and western media impact on, 165–66; reasons for using western culture as benchmark, 170; in Southeast Asia, 176–77 Ecuador, sexual harassment in schools, 199 Education, women in, 43; barriers to gender equity in, 45–51, gender
Index curriculum, 47–48, gender stereotyping, 46–47, gendered roles and expectations, 45–46, peer influence, 48–49, teacher behaviors, 49–51; educational attainment, 44–45; effects of differential school experiences, 51–53; gender bias in evaluating women professors, 56–57; women as students, 43–44; women as teachers and professors, 53, gendered teaching styles, 54–55, representation, 53–54 Education Amendments of 1972, 47 Egypt, sexual harassment in schools, 218–19 Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights (ECWR), 218–19 England, sexual harassment in schools, 200–201 Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO), 67, 70–71, 79 Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Agency (EOWA), 68, 71 Eve-teasing, 209 Failing at Fairness: How America’s Schools Cheat Girls, 19 Farrell, Warren, 19 ‘‘Fear of extinction,’’ 131 Feminine political persona, 97, 107; Bachelet, Michelle, 97, 104–6; Johnson Sirleaf, Ellen, 97, 103–4; leadership styles, transformational style, 98–99, transactional style, 98, 99; Queen Victoria, 97–98, 99–103 Feminism, 2; attitude towards men, 5; attitude towards women, 5; definition, 4; Smith, Samantha views on, 63–64 Feminist Majority Foundation, 39 Feminist movement, 63 Feminist theory of body dissatisfaction, 166–67 Finland, sexual harassment in schools, 202 Fourth World Conference on Women, 53 France, sexual harassment in schools, 202
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Gallup Poll (2003), 118 Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), 195 Gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered (GLBT), sexual harassment of, 195, 198 Gender-based discrimination, 10–11 Gender bias in evaluating women professors, 56–57 Gender differences, 27; in academic achievement, culture as cause for, 33, mathematics and, 30–31, 32, media coverage and, 34, potential solutions for, 38–40, Title IX and, 35–36, 37; negative stereotypes based on, 28; socialization of girls and, 29; sociocultural influences in, 28; in workplace, 29–30 Gendered teaching styles, 54–55 Gender equity in education, barriers to, 45–51; gender curriculum, 47–48; gender stereotyping, 46–47; gendered roles and expectations, 45–46; peer influence, 48–49; teacher behaviors, 49–51 Gender harassment, 191; in college of United States, 197; in military, 118–19 Gender schema theory, 30 Gender socialization theory, 28 Germany, sexual harassment in schools, 202 Ghana: colleges, sexual harassment in, 217; schools, sexual harassment in, 215 Gillard, Julia, 69 Gilligan, Carol, 19 Global war on terrorism (GWOT), 111 Ground combat policy (1994), 111 Gryson, Roger, 87 Haiti, sexual harassment in schools, 199 Healthy People 2010 initiative, 136 Hickie, Marea, 77 Hickie v Hunt & Hunt, 77 Homophobia, 16 Hostile sexism, 12 Hostility toward men, 7
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House Armed Services Committee (HASC), 116, 117–18 Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC), 70, 79 Human Rights Commission, 77 Hunter, Duncan, 116, 117–18 Iazzo study, 5–6 In a Different Voice and Mary Pipher’s (1994), 19 India: colleges, sexual harassment in, 209–10; schools, sexual harassment in, 206–7 Institute for Antiquity and Christianity, 88 Institute of Medicine, 135, 136 Internalized homonegativity of lesbians, 132–33 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), 192 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), 192 International human rights law, 191 International Labor Organization (ILO), 73 International Rescue Committee (IRC), 215 Ireland Republic, sexual harassment in school, 203 Islam, 85–86 Israel, sexual harassment in schools, 219 Italy, sexual harassment in colleges, 203–4 Ivy League schools, 34 Jackrolling, 213 Jamaica, sexual harassment in schools, 199 Japan, sexual harassment in schools, 205 Jesus Movement, 86 Johnson Sirleaf, Ellen, 97, 103–4, 106 Kaiser Family Foundation report, 131 Kenya: colleges, sexual harassment in, 217; schools, sexual harassment in, 213
Kirchner, Cristina Fernandez de, 107 Knifing, 216 Korea, sexual harassment in colleges, 208 Labeling and women with disabilities, 151 Laird, Melvin, 115 Lesbian, 17. See also sexual minority women; attitudes towards men, 6; internalized homonegativity, 132–33; lesbian-baiting, 16–18; triple minority status and, 130–31 Lesbian-baiting, 16–18 Lesbian internalized homonegativity (LIH), 132–33 The Life of Queen Victoria and the Story of Her Reign: A Beautiful Tribute to England’s Greatest Queen in Her Domestic and Official Life, 100 Lioness: There for the Action, Missing from History, 121 Little Rascals child comedy, 2 Los Angeles County Health Survey, 141 Ma Ellen. See Johnson Sirleaf, Ellen Malawi, sexual harassment in schools, 215 Malaysia, sexual harassment in colleges, 208 Male bashing, 21 Mama. See Bachelet, Michelle Man-hating feminist, 2, 3; reasons for existence of myth, 9; sources of, 4 Manliness, 18 Mansfield, Harvey, 18 McLagan, Meg, 121 McMaster University Residency Training Programs, 196 Meir, Golda, 106 Military Police Corps, 115 Military services, women in, 121; defensive positions for, 111–12; direct combat rule policy, 112; goal displacement, distortion and drift, 112–15; history and law, 115–17; objections: for women in combat premises, 117, biological thesis,
Index 117–18, privacy infringement hypothesis, 119, psychological thesis, 118, sexual abuse and gender harassment theories, 118–19; USWAC women in combat survey research, 119–20 Minority stress theory, 131 Montraynaud, Florence, 66 Morocco, sexual harassment in schools, 216 Mugabe, Robert Gabriel, 129 The Myth of Male Power, 19 Napolitano, Janet, 118 National Advisory Council on Women’s Educational Programs, 190–91 National Assessment of Educational Progress, 20 National Collective of the Rights of Women, 66 National College Women Sexual Victimization (NCWSV), 197–98 National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), 36 National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research, 150 National Women’s Law Center, 36 Nepal, sexual harassment in schools, 207 Netherland: colleges, sexual harassment in, 204; schools, sexual harassment in, 201 Nigeria, sexual harassment in colleges, 217–18 Nixon, Christine, 69 Non-feminists, attitudes toward women, 6 O’Beirne, Kate, 19 Pakistan, sexual harassment in schools, 205–6 Persian Gulf War, 117, 119 Phallic attack, 217 Pink jobs, 68 Prejudice, 127 Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the
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Armed Forces (PCAWAF), 112, 117, 118 Puerto Rico, sexual harassment in colleges, 199 Ragging, 206, 209 Rape crisis centers, 17 Rehabilitation psychologist, 154–56 Religion as stigma against same-sex sexual behavior, 128–29 Religious leaders, women as, 85, 93; in Christian missionaries, 86–91, 92; constantinian revolution and, 86, 88; in Muslim congregations, 91–92; in Roman Catholic church, 89, 90 Reviving Ophelia, 19 Revolutionary War, 115 ‘‘Risk Rule,’’ 116 Robinson, James M., 87 Rumsfeld, Donald, 116 Russia, sexual harassment in schools, 207 Schlaffy, Phyllis, 118 Schroeder, Pat, 116 September 11, 2001, 120–21 Sex Discrimination Act (SDA), 70, 71 Sexism, 11 Sexual bullying, 188–89 Sexual coercion, 191 Sexual harassment, 19, 187, 189; definition, 190; in education, 192, 224, in Africa, 210–18, in Asia Pacific, 204–10, in Europe, 200–4, impact, 219–21, in Latin America and Caribbean, 198–200, in Middle East, 218–19, in North America, 192–98; experiences of college women, 191; national laws prohibiting, 191; recommendations for prohibiting, 221–23, national and international efforts, 222, parents and community verve, 222–23, public health, 223, research, 221, school initiatives, 222, student participation, 223, terminology, 188–89
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Sexual harassment trauma syndrome, 220 Sexual minority women: behavioral risk factors and health practices, 140–41; consequences: barriers to health care, 136–38, depression and anxiety disorders, 138–39, drug dependency, 139–40, legal and economic impact for same-sex female couples, 134, lesbian health disparities, history of, 135–36, mental and physical health, 135, mental health disparities, 138, physical health disparities, 140, social costs for sexual minority women, 134–35; of stigma, 133 coping strategies, 142–44; discrimination, experience of, 131, expected discrimination, 132, internalized homonegativity, 132–33; minority stress theory, 131; outcomes, 141–42; sources of stigma, religion, 128–29, westernization, 129–30; triple minority status, 130–31; understanding stigma, 126, prejudice, 127, stereotyping, 127–28, stigma, 126–27 Sexual violence, 187; as reflection of gender inequality, 189–90; in schools, study on, 188 Sociocultural theory of body dissatisfaction, 166–67 Sommers, Christina Hoff, 19 Sommers, Daria, 121 South Africa, sexual harassment in schools, 213–15 South Asian countries, sexual harassment in schools, 206 Spain: college, sexual harassment in, 204; schools, sexual harassment in, 202 Stereotyping, 127–28 Stigma, 126–27 Stigma consciousness, 132 Sturduts, Maya, 66 Summers, Christiana Hoff, 34 Summers, Lawrence, 27, 37
Sweden: college, sexual harassment in, 204; schools, sexual harassment in, 202–3 Swedish National Agency for Education, 202 Texas Civil Right Project, 195 Thailand, sexual harassment in colleges, 210 Thatcher, Margaret, 106 Theresa, Mother, 91 Title IX, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39 Tunisia, sexual harassment in schools, 216 Turkey, sexual harassment in schools, 219 Uganda, sexual harassment in schools, 215 United Nations, 129–30, 187, 191 United Nations Millennium Summit, 192; Millennium Development Goals, 192 United Nations Secretary-General’s Study on Violence against Children, 192, 207 United Nations Study on Violence Against Children, 187 United States: Army War College in combat survey research, 119–20; colleges, sexual harassment in, 197–98; sexual harassment in secondary schools, 193–96 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 192 Unwanted sexual attention, 191 U.S. Military Academy, 115 U.S. Department of Education, Office of Civil Rights (OCR) (1993), 190, 194, 195 U.S. Department of Labor, 80 Victoria, Queen, 97–98, 103, 106; family life of, books on, 100–101; as female monarch, 100; Plunkett’s views on, 102; portrait description, 102; reign in England, 99–100 Vocational Educational Act of 1976, 47
Index The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism is Harming our Young Men, 19, 34 West Africa, sexual harassment in schools, 215 westernization, as stigma against same-sex sexual behavior, 129–30 Williams Institute, 134 The Woman Haters, 1–2 Women: attitude towards men, 10; barriers to ascendance of women in workplaces, 73–76; as consumers, 70; discrimination against women on pregnancy, 77; in education. See education, women in; EEO law and, 70–73; glass ceiling phenomenon and, 73–76; in leadership, 15. See also feminine political persona; maternal wall phenomenon and, 77–79; in military. See military services, women in; penalties for nontraditional, 14–16; with power, 69–70; sexual harassment impact on, 219–21; sticky floor phenomenon, 76–77; treating women badly, 75; views on benevolent sexism, 12; work/ family conflict and, 79–81; workforce participation and earning parity, 67–68; in workplace, 28–29
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Women in Combat Compendium, 119 Women’s Armed Forces Integration Act (1948), 115 Women’s Educational Equity Act of 1974, 47 Women with disabilities: abuse related to disability-related settings, 153; abuse related to helping relationships, 153–54; as cultural group, 151–52; emotional abuse, disability-related, 152; financial abuse, disability-related, 154; physical abuse, disability-related, 152–53; rehabilitation psychologist treating abused, 154–56; rehabilitation psychology, guidelines for, 149–51; safety concerns for, 152–54; sexual abuse, disability-related, 153 Women Who Make the World Worse and How Their Radical Feminist Assault Is Ruining Our Schools, Families, Military, and Sports, 19–20 World Christian Encyclopedia, 85 World Health Organization (WHO), 189, 192 Zimbabwe: colleges, sexual harassment in, 216; schools, sexual harassment in, 211–13
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Feminism and Women’s Rights Worldwide
Recent Titles in Women’s Psychology ‘‘Intimate’’ Violence against Women: When Spouses, Partners, or Lovers Attack Paula K. Lundberg-Love and Shelly L. Marmion, editors Daughters of Madness: Growing Up and Older with a Mentally Ill Mother Susan Nathiel Psychology of Women: Handbook of Issues and Theories, Second Edition Florence L. Denmark and Michele Paludi, editors WomanSoul: The Inner Life of Women’s Spirituality Carole A. Rayburn and Lillian Comas-Diaz, editors The Psychology of Women at Work: Challenges and Solutions for Our Female Workforce Michele A. Paludi, editor
Feminism and Women’s Rights Worldwide Volume 2 Mental and Physical Health
MICHELE A. PALUDI, EDITOR Praeger Perspectives Women’s Psychology Michele A. Paludi, Series Editor
PRAEGER An Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC
Copyright 2010 by Michele A. Paludi All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Feminism and women’s rights worldwide / Michele A. Paludi, editor. v. ; cm. — (Women’s psychology) Includes bibliographical references and index. Contents: The myth of the man-hating feminist / Melinda Kanner and Kristin J. Anderson — Gender differences : the arguments regarding abilities / Jennifer L. Martin — Women in education : students and professors worldwide / Susan Basow — In women’s voices / Samantha Smith — Working life as a house : a tale of floors, walls, and ceilings / Leanne Faraday-Brash — Women as religious leaders : advances and stalemates / J. Harold Ellens — The feminine political persona : Queen Victoria, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and Michelle Bachelet / Emily A. Haddad and William Schweinle — Women in the military : is it time to un-gender combat roles? / Breena E. Coates — Sexual minority women : sources and outcomes of stigmatization / Rhonda M. Schultz, and Kristin P. Beals — Special issues for women with disabilities / Martha E. Banks — Body dissatisfaction and disordered eating : the globalization of western appearance ideals / Jaehee Jung and Gordon B. Forbes — Sexual violence to girls and women in schools around the world / Susan Strauss. ISBN 978-0-313-37596-5 (set : hard copy : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-31337597-2 (set : ebook) — ISBN 978-0-313-37598-9 (v.1 : hard copy : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-313-37599-6 (v.1 : ebook) — ISBN 978-0-313-37600-9 (v.2 : hard copy : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-313-37601-6 (v.2 : ebook) — ISBN 978-0-31337602-3 (v.3 : hard copy : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-313-37603-0 (v.3 : ebook) 1. Feminism. 2. Women’s rights. 3. Sexual harassment of women. 4. Abused women—Psychology. 5. Women—Psychology. I. Paludi, Michele Antoinette HQ1180.F424 2010 305.42—dc22 2009035343 ISBN: 978-0-313-37596-5 EISBN: 978-0-313-37597-2 14 13 12
11 10
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2 3 4 5
This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an eBook. Visit www.abc-clio.com for details. Praeger An Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC ABC-CLIO, LLC 130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911 Santa Barbara, California 93116-1911 This book is printed on acid-free paper Manufactured in the United States of America
For Rosa and Lucia, my maternal and paternal grandmothers and for Antoinette, my mother: ‘‘Remember, our heritage is our power; we can know ourselves and our capacities by seeing that other women have been strong.’’ —Judy Chicago
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Contents
Series Introduction
ix
Acknowledgments
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Introduction Michele A. Paludi
xiii
Chapter 1. International Perspectives on Women and Mental Health Joy Rice and Nancy Felipe Russo
1
Chapter 2. Ethnocultural Psychotherapy: Women of Color’s Resilience and Liberation Lillian Comas-Diaz
25
Chapter 3. Women and Sexual Violence: Emotional, Physical, Behavioral, and Organizational Responses Paula Lundberg-Love and Bethany Waits
41
Chapter 4. Cross-Cultural Violence against Women and Girls: From Dating to Intimate Partner Violence Janet Sigal and Dorota Wnuk Novitskie
65
Chapter 5. Intimate Partner Violence as a Workplace Concern: Impact on Women’s Emotional and Physical Well-Being and Careers Michele A. Paludi, Jessica Wilmot and Lindsey Speach 103 Chapter 6. From Victim to Empowered Survivor: Feminist Therapy with Survivors of Rape and Sexual Assault Avigail Moor 139
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Chapter 7. Gender Microaggressions: Implications for Mental Health Kevin L. Nadal
155
Chapter 8. Prejudice and Discrimination against Sexual Minorities: A Brazilian Perspective Eros DeSouza and Elder Cerqueira-Santos 177 Chapter 9. Frequency Rates and Consequences of Peer Sexual Harassment: Comparing U.S. and International Students Eros DeSouza and Joy Chien
195
Chapter 10. In Women’s Voices Janet Boyce
209
Chapter 11. Bullying and Sexual Harassment of Adolescents James Gruber and Susan Fineran
211
Chapter 12. Great Is Our Sin: Pseudoscientific Justifications for Oppression in American Education Jennifer L. Martin
231
Chapter 13. Discrimination, Harassment, and Women’s Physical and Mental Health Krystle C. Woods and NiCole T. Buchanan
235
Appendix.
Feminist and Women’s Rights Organizations Worldwide Susan Strauss, Michelle Strand and Michele A. Paludi
253
About the Editor and Contributors
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Index
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Series Introduction
Because women’s work is never done and is underpaid or unpaid or boring or repetitious and we’re the first to get fired and what we look like is more important than what we do and if we get raped it’s our fault and if we get beaten we must have provoked it and if we raise our voices we’re nagging bitches and if we enjoy sex we’re nymphos and if we don’t we’re frigid and if we love women it’s because we can’t get a ‘‘real’’ man and if we ask our doctor too many questions we’re neurotic and/or pushy and if we expect childcare we’re selfish and if we stand up for our rights we’re aggressive and ‘‘unfeminine’’ and if we don’t we’re typical weak females and if we want to get married we’re out to trap a man and if we don’t we’re unnatural and because we still can’t get an adequate safe contraceptive but men can walk on the moon and if we can’t cope or don’t want a pregnancy we’re made to feel guilty about abortion and . . . for lots of other reasons we are part of the women’s liberation movement. —Author unknown, quoted in The Torch, September 14, 1987
These sentiments underlie the major goals of the Praeger Perspectives book series, Women’s Psychology. The goals are as follows: Value women: The books in this series value women by valuing children and working for affordable child care; value women by respecting all physiques, not just by placing value on slender women; value women by acknowledging older women’s wisdom, beauty, aging; value women who have been sexually victimized and view them as survivors; value women who work inside and outside of the home; and value women by respecting their choices of careers, of whom they mentor, of their reproductive rights, their spirituality, and their sexuality. Treat women as the norm. Thus the books in this series make up for women’s issues typically being omitted, trivialized, or dismissed from other books on psychology.
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Take a non-Eurocentric view of women’s experiences. The books in this series integrate the scholarship on race and ethnicity into women’s psychology, thus providing a psychology of all women. Women typically have been described collectively; but we are diverse. Facilitate connections between readers’ experiences and psychological theories and empirical research. The books in this series offer readers opportunities to challenge their views about women, feminism, sexual victimization, gender role socialization, education, and equal rights. These texts thus encourage women readers to value themselves and others. The accounts of women’s experiences as reflected through research and personal stories in the texts in this series have been included for readers to derive strength from the efforts of others who have worked for social change on the interpersonal, organizational, and societal levels. A student in one of my courses on the psychology of women once stated: I learned so much about women. Women face many issues: discrimination, sexism, prejudices . . . by society. Women need to work together to change how society views us. I learned so much and talked about much of the issues brought up in class to my friends and family. My attitudes have changed toward a lot of things. I got to look at myself, my life, and what I see for the future. (Paludi, 2002)
It is my hope that readers of the books in this series will also reflect on the topics and look at themselves, their own lives, and what they see for the future. This three-volume book set on Feminism and Women’s Rights Worldwide provides readers with the opportunity to accomplish this goal and offers suggestions for all of us working for gender justice within our friendships and romantic relationships, in guiding institutional and social policy change in workplace and educational institutions, and in lobbying state and federal legislators on issues related to reproductive rights, pay equity, education, sexual violence, and childcare. Michele A. Paludi Series Editor REFERENCE Paludi, M. (2002). The psychology of women. 2nd ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Acknowledgments
Teaching and writing are separate, but serve/feed one another in so many ways. Writing travels the road inward, teaching, the road out—helping OTHERS move inward—it is an honor to be with others in the spirit of writing and encouragement. —Naomi Shihab Nye
Nye’s sentiment is echoed throughout this three-volume set on feminism and women’s rights. Most of the contributors have taught courses in women’s studies and feminism as well as conducted research and written about feminist issues. Many contributors have been advocates on behalf of feminist principles through working with local, state and federal agencies, legislators, and the United Nations. And many of us have collaborated with students in our classes in writing chapters for this book set. These students have made us believe that all of them, in their individual ways, will continue to do what this book set intends: value feminism and work toward equality. It has been exhilarating for me to see a new generation of feminists collaborating with mentors and colleagues on the chapters for this book set. I have been honored to have collaborated with the contributors to these volumes. Several friendships with contributors have been rekindled and strengthened, and I have met many new colleagues from around the world who taught me about their disciplines through their writing. You have all shown me the great accomplishments of feminists as well as the work we have yet to do. Thank you. I wish to thank my sisters, Rosalie Paludi and Lucille Paludi, for their support during the preparation of this book set. I also thank Carmen Paludi, Jr. for his guidance and encouragement. Our discussions about feminism brought back wonderful memories of my mother,
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Antoinette, and my father, Michael, about whom I continue to learn and continue to cherish the time I had with them. I acknowledge several friends who encouraged me during the preparation of this set of books. Thank you to Paula Lundberg Love, Jennifer Martin, Billie Wright Dziech, Darlene C. DeFour, and Florence Denmark. I have been fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with students throughout my career, now at Union Graduate College. I have thoroughly enjoyed learning from them. Thank you to students in the Human Resource Management Certificate Program and Management and Leadership Certificate Program. I especially acknowledge Michelle Strand, Carrie Turco, Haimanot Kelbessa, Sarah Bennett, Sarah Boggess, Kristina Hicks, James Luciano, Sarah Henderson Maneely, Abbey Massoud-Tastor, Marie Fuda, Jessica Wilmot, Katie Kelly, and Nick Salvatoriello. I am honored you have called me your professor. I also thank Debbie Carvalko for supporting my visions for books and helping them become realities. I have enjoyed working with Debbie and her colleagues at Praeger. They are a wonderful team of caring people. They appreciate my love of writing and editing books. Debbie somehow knew that, after the publication of the three-volume set on the Psychology of Women and Work (2008, Praeger), which I edited, and the political climate of the 2008 presidential campaign, especially regarding women, I had to follow up those texts with books on feminism. She knows I share Sheila Bender’s sentiment: We write because something inside says we must and we can no longer ignore that voice.
Introduction Michele A. Paludi And how do you look backward? By looking forward. And what do you see? As they look forward, they see what they had to do before they could look backward. And there we have it all. —Gertrude Stein
Alyssa Zucker and Abigail Stewart (2007) reported in their study of 333 university alumnae that feminism is internalized quite differently depending on the developmental stage in our lives. This research led me to consider my own feminist socialization and feminist identity development as I began writing and editing these three volumes on feminism and women’s rights. I was introduced to feminism by my parents, Antoinette and Michael, at a very young age, even though the label feminism was not used by them. Yet, as I came to realize much later, their behavior was very much in keeping with feminist principles. They valued my sisters and me unconditionally; wanted to give us educational opportunities that were denied to them because of the generation into which they were born and because they were first generation Americans whose parents had other values to instill in them; they worked for equality in relationships, politics, and health care. I was 18 the year individuals became eligible to vote at age 18, and both my parents took me to cast my votes that year. They believed that, like them, I had a responsibility to make things better for the next generation. They valued voting; I was told what the Suffragists had endured in order to win this right for us and to remember this each year I vote. I took my first course in feminism as an undergraduate in the early 1970s: ‘‘Sex Roles in American Society’’ with Nancy Walbek. I would share the class discussions with my mother, telling her about the experiences of students in class that were different from my own—for example, being denied the use of certain
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toys considered ‘‘sex inappropriate’’ for them; being tracked into different high school and college programs because of being women or men; women being told by family and friends to hide their achievements from potential dates and mates. I was unable to relate to these experiences and realized for the first time that my parents were feminists, a term to which I was introduced formally in this class and then subsequently as a graduate student when I took courses with Dee Graham and Edna Rawlings. I also learned that I had been exposed to nonstereotyped role models, and because there were all girls in our family, we were not raised to conform to stereotyped behavior. It was in graduate school that I decided to pursue research in feminist psychology, especially in women’s career development. I was fortunate to have a mentor, William Dember, who encouraged me to pursue this research, even though it was not in his area of specialization (i.e., visual perception). Bill encouraged me to take courses with faculty in departments in addition to psychology: educational leadership and family development. He told me this would help put pieces together in understanding the research I was conducting. I thank Kathy Borman and Judy Frankel for their roles in my feminist identity development. A few years later when my father died, Charlie, who attended my father’s wake, came to my mother, my sisters, and me and told us how my father had impacted his life. Charlie, an African American man, told us my father was the only coworker (both were skilled workers at General Electric) who treated him fairly, didn’t talk with him in a derogatory manner, and stopped others from making racial slurs and epithets. I learned for another time what it meant to be a feminist. I dedicated the three-volume set on the Psychology of Women at Work to my parents: ‘‘For Antoinette and Michael Paludi, who encouraged me to define what women’s work is for myself.’’ They wanted all their daughters to be independent thinkers and doers and to help others. They gave us no templates to follow but encouraged us to navigate our own paths. And, especially in my case, encouraged me to leave home to attend graduate school in a city that seemed, to my parents, to be very far away—but they never said ‘‘no.’’ My parents thus taught me that not only did they believe in the economic, educational, social, and political equality of women and men, but they favored the social and legal changes necessary to achieve equality between the sexes and among races, and they were committed to implementing these principles. Perhaps they could not effect change at the national level, but they did do so in personal relationships with their family and friends and on the local level. This is the legacy they left my sisters and me. This book set is a tribute to Antoinette and Michael. I have been reminded of Antoinette and Michael throughout the writing and editing of these volumes on feminism and women’s rights.
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I am especially reminded of what my mother used to tell me: ‘‘You are there before you get there.’’ She knew I wanted equality to happen fast and that I grew concerned when feminists didn’t win political elections, when younger women didn’t know the heritage of how they came to be accepted in graduate programs and in certain jobs, how the glass ceiling for women and people of color is still strong, and that worldwide, women constitute 64 percent of all adults who are illiterate (see Susan Basow’s chapter in Volume 1). I have learned that she was right; that change takes time, and to measure change differently, i.e., in increments. As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stated as she suspended her campaign for president of the United States in 2008: ‘‘Although we weren’t able to shatter this highest, hardest glass ceiling this time, thanks to you, it’s got about 18 million cracks in it, and the light is shining through like never before.’’ The chapters in these volumes show us where the light is shining through on feminism. All three volumes represent what Judith Lorber (1998) and Snelling (1999) identified: several types of feminism and feminists. Lorber (1998) categorized feminism into three major areas: gender reform, gender resistance, and gender rebellion. Genderreform feminism emphasizes similarities between women and men rather than focusing on differences between them. Gender-resistance feminism holds that formal legal rights alone will not end gender inequality; male dominance is too ingrained into social relations. Gender-resistance feminism focuses on how men and women are different—cognitively, emotionally, and socially—and urges women to form women-centered organizations and communities. Genderrebellion feminism looks at the interrelationships among inequalities of sex, race, ethnicity, social class, and sexual orientation. A number of years ago my text on the psychology of women displayed a quilt on its cover (Paludi, 2002). I asked for this design to highlight Gentry’s (1989) image of quilt making for understanding feminism. These three volumes on feminism and women’s rights also represent quilt making in understanding feminism. Each contributor has made one piece of the quilt that has been joined with pieces by other contributors. Each of the contributors has used different stitching on their piece of the quilt. No one chapter is more important than the other. We need all pieces if we are to complete the quilt that is feminism. According to Gentry (1989): Feminist psychology and feminism in general seem to be at the point of trying to piece together the individual parts of a quilt. The overall pattern of the quilt that we want is still emerging. No one knows what equality in a post-patriarchal world will look like. We are beginning to piece the separate parts together—to explore the kinds of stitching to use in connecting the pieces and how to place the separate pieces into the
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In Volume 1, Heritage, Roles, and Issues, contributors have discussed efforts to integrate feminist scholarship into several disciplines, including education, work, science, military, religion, and politics. As Catherine Stimpson (1971) noted, there have been three kinds of problems in the disciplines and curriculum with respect to women: omission, distortions, and trivializations. Each of the contributors to Volume 1 notes where the sexism in the disciplines has existed and where feminist correctives have restructured the disciplines. Jennifer Martin, in her chapter concerning gender differences in abilities, noted: Women have made significant social, academic, and occupational gains in the past 50 years; for example, women are entering nontraditional fields with more frequency, participating in high school and college sports more than ever before, and carving out more egalitarian roles for themselves within the family. However, women have still not ultimately achieved true equity with their male counterparts. . . . The idea that women somehow possess different or inferior aptitudes when compared to their male counterparts can lead to diminished expectations for women—in terms of how they view themselves and how others view them.
In Volume 2, Mental and Physical Health, contributors deal with violence and discrimination against girls and women and the resulting impact on women’s emotional and physical well being, interpersonal relationships, career development, and self-concept. Types of discrimination and victimization addressed are sexual harassment, sexual violence, harassment of sexual minorities, and rape and violence in the context of women’s HIV risk. Contributors have addressed these issues globally. Bethany Waits and Paula Lundberg-Love offer new cutting edge evidence on neurological responses in women victims of sexual violence. Therapeutic support for women victims of violence is also addressed in this volume, including feminist therapy and ethnocultural psychotherapy. All contributors note that sexual victimization is prevalent in the United States and globally, as is sexual harassment and sexual orientation discrimination. As Waits and Lundberg-Love note: Female survivors of sexual violence are everywhere. They are in universities, religious institutions, court rooms, hospitals, and the military. They are daughters, mothers, spouses, sisters, friends, next-door neighbors, and co-workers. Many differ in age, education, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. . . . However, their lives are connected by the violence that they have experienced.
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The international focus on feminism and women’s rights is continued in Volume 3, Feminism as Human Rights. In this volume, contributors address laws on sexual harassment, pay equity, and rape. Furthermore, contributors speak to the injustices to women with disabilities. Human rights issues such as arranged and forced marriage for women, pornography, and the globalization of western appearance ideals are also presented in this volume. All contributors to this volume call for further advocacy on behalf of women. As Noorfarah Merali stated: It is only if arranged marriages are understood in light of their intentions, diverse forms, actual outcomes, and local or international contexts that laws, policies, and human rights advocacy can be appropriately channeled to protect and preserve women’s well-being.
In addition to the scholarly reviews of research on feminism and women’s rights, I have included women’s personal accounts of their own feminist identity development. They are at different stages in life, in their career, and in relationships and yet they are bound by shared stories. It is my hope that these volumes encourage individuals to self identify as feminists. Research has suggested for some time that most people reject the term ‘‘feminist’’ when describing themselves but support feminist principles—equal pay for equal work, for example (see Paludi et al., Volume 3). Goldner’s (1994) study noted that when women who hold feminist beliefs anticipate a negative reaction from their peers to the label ‘‘feminist,’’ they will avoid using the term to describe themselves. Goldner indicated that media is a primary source of negative images of feminists. It is common to see photos of women identified as feminists having clenched fists. These images are not representative of feminists. More recent research by Rudman and Fairchild (2007) found that the stereotype that feminists are unattractive still persists. However, these images are rejected by individuals, especially during adolescence and young adulthood, when maintaining gender role stereotypic behavior is reinforced and is central to their self-esteem and self-concept. Paludi, Paludi, and DeFour (2004) noted that individuals reject the label feminist because they view themselves as in control, as powerful rather than as victims of gender inequality. Thus, they perceive the term ‘‘feminist’’ to imply a powerless position, which they reject (Rhode, 1977). The contributors to each of the three volumes of Feminism and Women’s Rights Worldwide encourage us to think critically about feminism, to value cultural experiences and to integrate our knowledge of theories and research about feminism with our own life experiences. The chapters encouraged me to do this in remembering my own feminist
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socialization. I encourage you to do the same. It is my hope these three volumes serve as a ‘‘life raft’’ (Klonis, Endo, Crosby, and Worell, 1997) for feminists, especially those in the millennial generation. REFERENCES Gentry, M. (1989). Introduction: Feminist perspectives on gender and thought: Paradox and potential. In M. Crawford & M. Gentry (Eds.), Gender and thought. New York: Springer-Verlag. Goldner, M. (1994). Accounting for race and class variation in the disjuncture between feminist identity and feminist beliefs: The place of negative labels and social movements. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, Los Angeles. Klonis, S., Endo, J., Crosby, F., & Worell, J. (1997). Feminism as life raft. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 21, 333–345. Lorber, J. (1998). Gender inequality: Feminist theories and politics. Los Angeles: Roxbury. Paludi, M. (2002). The psychology of women. 2nd ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Paludi, M., ed. (2008). The psychology of women at work: Challenges and solutions for our female workforce. Westport, CT: Praeger. Paludi, M., Paludi, C., & DeFour, D. (2004). Introduction: The more things change, the more they stay the same. In M. Paludi (Ed.), Praeger guide to the psychology of gender. xi–xxxi. Westport, CT: Praeger. Rhode, D. (1997). Speaking of sex. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rudman, L., & Fairchild, K. (2007). The F word: Is feminism incompatible with beauty and romance? Psychology of Women Quarterly, 31, 125–136. Snelling, S. (1999). Women’s perspectives on feminism. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 23, 247–266. Stimpson, C. (1971). Thy neighbor’s wife, thy neighbor’s servants: Women’s liberation and black civil rights. In V. Gornick & B. Moran (Eds.), Woman in sexist society: Studies in power and powerlessness. New York: Basic Books. Zucker, A., & Stewart, A. (2007). Growing up and growing older: Feminism as a context for women’s lives. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 31, 137–145.
Chapter 1
International Perspectives on Women and Mental Health Joy Rice Nancy Felipe Russo
Women have the right to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health. The enjoyment of this right is vital to their life and well-being and their ability to participate in all areas of public and private life. Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and . . . is determined by the social, political and economic context of [women’s] lives, as well as by biology. (Platform for action: Fourth World Conference on Women, Beijing China, Chapter IV. C.89, United Nations)
These words, contained in the national platform for action of the United Nations’ Fourth World Conference on Women, provide a holistic vision of women’s health, one in which physical and mental health are inextricably intertwined and rooted in women’s social, political, and economic conditions. Understanding the links between women’s social roles and circumstances and negative mental health outcomes thus becomes a key element in any global health agenda for women (Koblinsky, Timyan, & Gay, 1992). Although this holistic view of women’s health has been resisted by the biomedical establishment that dominates health care in the United States, it is congruent with how health has been perceived globally. Indeed, for more than three decades, the World Health Organization (WHO) has emphasized a social model of health that has stressed the role of complex reciprocal relationships among psychological, behavioral, social, and
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economic factors in determining health and illness based on this holistic definition: Mental health is the capacity of the individual, the group, and the environment to interact with one another in ways that promote subjective well-being, the optimal development and use of mental abilities (cognitive, affective, and relational), the achievement of the individual and collective goals consistent with justice and the attainment and preservation of fundamental equality. (Cabral & Astbury, 2000, p. 12)
In sum, women’s mental health is not simply the absence of disease, and it is inseparable from a person’s health well-being. A woman’s mental health enables her to find meaning in her life, function effectively in her social context, adapt to change, respond to crises, establish rewarding relationships in her community, and modify her environments to meet her needs. One outcome of the worldwide feminist movement stimulated by the Beijing Conference was an International Consensus Statement on Women’s Mental Health that was passed by the World Psychiatric Association (WPA) and signed by 140 WPA member associations, the World Federation of Mental Health, and other mental health organizations, including the American Psychological Association (APA) and the American Psychiatric Association. That statement emphasized that prioritizing women’s mental health was essential for the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals of the United Nations (UN, 2000; http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/), which include the achievement of universal primary education, promotion of gender equality, reduction of child mortality, improving maternal health, and combating human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immune deficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS), among others. It also emphasized the importance of considering the contexts of women’s lives as determinants of their mental health (Stewart, 2006). A similar holistic biopsychosocial vision of mental health has been promulgated in feminist psychologists in the United States and around the world (Russo, in press; Safir & Hill, 2008; Wyche & Rice, 1997). International issues and perspectives were important dimensions in the feminist movement in psychology from its beginnings. Indeed, the Association for Women in Psychology, established in the United States in 1969 as the first explicitly feminist organization in the field, was designated an official nongovernmental organization (NGO) for the UN in 1976 (for a more detailed history of international issues in feminist psychology, see Safir & Hill, 2008). Today, feminist psychology in the United States is both informed by and is a contributor to the international women’s movement. The field has become explicitly multicultural, emphasizing the importance of
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viewing mental health in its social/political context and examining power inequities and inequalities that undermine mental health in the lives of diverse women (Enns & Byars-Winston, 2009; Goodwin & Fiske, 2001; Russo, in press). Consequently, feminist therapy is now conceptualized as having a multicultural biopsychosocial approach, one that encompasses meaningmaking and spiritual concerns, considers a woman in her social context, and has her empowerment as a therapeutic goal (Brown, 2008a; Enns & Byars-Winston, 2009; McKay, Hill, Freedman, & Enright, 2007; Worell & Johnson, 2001; Wyche & Rice, 1997). This perspective is reflected in the development of international practice guidelines for counseling and therapy with girls and women described later. WOMEN’S MENTAL HEALTH IN A CONTEXT OF INEQUALITY AND OPPRESSION The international women’s movement has emphasized that around the world, stigma, devaluation, and inequalities in power associated with women’s social roles and circumstances create conditions that undermine women’s mental health (Cabral & Astbury, 2000; Russo, in press; Stewart et al., 2001). These conditions include poverty—women are 70 percent of the poor around the world and earn significantly less than men (WHO, 2002). Related conditions include hunger, malnutrition, fatigue from overwork (with women’s low-paid work often under dangerous conditions), prejudice and discrimination, inadequate educational and economic resources, gender-based violence (including sexual abuse, partner violence, and sexual trafficking), and social disruption leading to displaced populations (including migration due to insufficient economic opportunity, social conflict and war, and natural disaster) (Cabral & Astbury, 2000; Demyttenaere et al., 2004; Desjarlais et al., 1995; WHO, 2000, 2002). The mental health dimensions of sexual and reproductive health have received increasing attention, partially because of the intersections of unintended pregnancies, sexually transmitted infections (STIs; including HIV), and gender-based violence, which are all known to have a negative impact on mental health (Hamilton & Russo, 2006). In addition, the high rates of pregnancy-associated depression among women in developing countries compared to women in industrialized countries (20–40 percent vs. 10–15 percent) are of concern (WHO, 2009). Mental health problems may be associated with lack of choice in sexual and reproductive decisions, STIs, infertility, unintended and unwanted pregnancy, unsafe abortion, miscarriage, and childbirth (including premature birth), among other things (WHO, 2009; see Chrisler, this volume, for more discussion of women’s reproductive rights).
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The critical role of lack of power and having a disadvantaged social status is manifested by the link between rates of depressive symptoms with indicators of gender inequality that has been around the world (Arrindell, Steptoe, & Wardle, 2003), and by regions (urban vs. rural) within nations, and between states within the United States (Chen, Subramanian, Acevedo-Garcia, & Kawachi, 2005). Women’s higher rates of depressive disorders compared to men, the consistency of this gender gap across diverse groups and cross-nationally, and research linking depression to hopelessness (a reflection of powerlessness) and low self-esteem (a reflection of devaluation) has made theorizing the relation of gender to depression of particular interest to feminist psychologists (Hamilton & Russo, 2006; Jackson & Williams, 2006). Consequently, we will consider women’s depression in more detail below. Women have unequal access to gender-sensitive basic health and mental health services around the world (WHO, 2002). Furthermore, service delivery may be affected by bias and stereotyping of providers such that when services are available, they are inadequate or inappropriate. Given that the development and expression of mental disorder differs for women and men, the need for gender-sensitive approaches to diagnosis, treatment, and prevention is severe. Developing such services will require understanding and investigating gender as a sociocultural construct (Russo & Tartaro, 2008). GENDER IN INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE A shift in focus from the individual’s characteristics and behaviors to a gendered sociocultural view of mental health requires a more complex understanding of gender as a cultural construct. This new understanding is a necessary foundation for developing a coherent theory of how inequality becomes translated into mental health disparities. Gender can be conceptualized as a cultural package of many interconnected factors, including gendered emotions, identities, values, expectations, norms, roles, scripts, discourse, environments, and institutions. These factors can influence mental health and well-being separately, as well as in combination (Russo, in press). Gender defines what is considered ‘‘normal’’ and appropriate behavioral, psychological, and social characteristics for males and females and shapes their personal and social identities. What is considered normal varies over the life cycle, over time, and across cultures. Violations of stereotypes and gender role expectations may lead to stigmatization, marginalization, and discrimination, with implications for mental health (Hamilton & Russo, 2006). When roles assigned by gender have lower power and status, structured inequalities are created that can translate into health disparities—in mental health status as well as service delivery (Russo, in press; Russo & Landrine, 2009; Russo & Tartaro, 2008).
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Gender operates at psychological, social, and situational levels. For example, the relations of gender and race to mental health are affected by perceived sexism and racism (Moradi & DeBlaere, 2009; Moradi & Subich, 2003; Thomas, Witherspoon, & Speight, 2008); the relationship of sexual orientation to mental health is affected by stigma and victimization associated with homosexuality (Balsam, Rothblum, & Beauchaine, 2005; Tjaden, Thoennes, & Allison, 1999; Herek & Garnets, 2007). Gender intersects with other social identities that may or may not be stigmatized or associated with disadvantage, including identities based on age, ethnicity, sexuality, physical disability, tribe, religion, nationality, immigrant status, occupational status, class, and caste status. There is an urgent need for work that theorizes and investigates how complex and interacting dimensions of social difference deemed important in a particular cultural context affect women’s lived experiences in ways that have implications for women’s mental health (Brown, Riepe, & Coffey, 2005; McCall, 2005; Russo & Vaz, 2001). More complexity in theorizing will require overcoming epistemological, methodological, and statistical challenges, however (Landrine & Corral, in press). In particular, measurement equivalence issues will need to be addressed, as the equivalence of measures may vary by gender and culture, and measures that are equivalent across cultures for men may not be equivalent for women (Chen & West, 2007). Such issues pose construct validity problems in measuring sexist beliefs and attitudes— beliefs that maintain or foster gender inequalities—cross-nationally (for a review of the literatures and measurement issues related to the endorsement, expression, and emergence of sexism cross-nationally, see Swim, Becker, & Lee, 2009). In summary, advancing understanding of gender’s relation to mental health internationally will require investigating a complex interplay among biological, psychological, social, cultural, and contextual factors, including multiple personal and social identities, social locations and conditions, and coping strategies and resources (Russo, in press; Russo & Tartaro, 2008; Szymanski & Kashubeck-West, 2008). In considering gender-related factors that can affect diverse women’s mental health internationally, we must also keep in mind that women will vary in their response to such factors, and that variance in women’s responses will both reflect their position in the social structure, as well as how they integrate or engage their multiple social identities, some of which may be specific to a particular context or culture. WOMEN’S MENTAL DISORDER: THE GLOBAL BURDEN The priority of mental health issues globally has risen as the enormous impact of mental disorders on what has been conceptualized as
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the ‘‘global burden of disease.’’ A recent WHO (2008) report provides a comprehensive picture of the global and regional state of the physical and mental health of the world’s peoples. Based on extensive country governmental data from 112 member states, it provides projections of deaths and the global burden of disease to the year 2030 and is an update of WHO research first conducted in 1990. The study finds that mental disorders are among the leading causes of disability in all regions of the word. They account for approximately one-third of years lost due to disability among people older than fourteen. Four out of 10 ‘‘diseases’’ with the highest burden are psychiatric disorders (Kastrup, 2007). Violence and self-inflicted injury, which are also among the leading contributors to the disease burden, have profound implications for women’s mental health as well (Cabral & Astbury, 2000). Analyses of data gathered from 15 sites in 10 countries participating in the WHO multi-country study on women’s health and domestic violence against women found a strong link between gender-based violence and negative health and mental health outcomes, including higher levels of emotional distress, risk of suicide ideation, and suicide attempts found across all sites (Ellsberg et al., 2008). Although males and females are generally similar in overall rates of mental disorder around the world, the patterns and symptoms of mental disorders differ for men and men over the life cycle (Kessler, 2006; Kessler, Chiu, Demler, & Walters, 2005; Piccinelli & Homen, 1997; Silverman & Carter, 2006). For example, in the United States, based on the National Co-morbidity Survey, Kessler et al. (2005) identified gender differences in six classes or patterns of disorder. Here presented by level of severity, they included the following: (1) unaffected respondents (more likely to be male); (2) pure internalizing disorders (more likely to be female); (3) pure externalizing disorders (more likely to be male); (4) comorbid internalizing disorders (more likely to be female); (5) comorbid internalizing and/or externalizing disorders dominated by comorbid social phobia and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (more likely to be male); and (6) highly comorbid major depressive episodes (more likely to be female). No gender difference was found in a seventh class, highly comorbid bipolar disorder. High comorbidity was associated with severity—classes with the highest comorbidity (4, 6, 7) included about 7 percent of the sample, but represented 43.6 percent of the serious cases. Comorbidity of mental disorders signals greater severity of illness and disability and higher utilization of services. Women have higher rates of lifetime and 12-month comorbidity of three or more disorders (WHO, 2002). It has long been known that anxiety is comorbid with depression, particularly for women (Breslau et al., 1995), and that women have higher rates of mood and anxiety disorders (Piccinelli &
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Homen, 1997; Silverman & Carter, 2006). Symptoms of anxiety disorders are correlated with other disorders, complicating diagnosis. In particular, research is needed that clarifies the origins and relationships among symptoms of anxiety and depressive disorders, which constitute the largest contributor to the gender gap in internalizing disorders. Countrywide studies may mask within-country variations in rates of mental disorder. Women are more likely to be poor, and surveys in Brazil, Chile, India, and Zimbabwe have found that rates of common mental disorders (anxiety and depression) are higher among the poor (Patel, Araya, Ludermir, & Todd, 1999). Furthermore, in poorer areas, treatment may be more likely to be inadequate or nonexistent. In the United States, rates and predictors of mental disorder vary substantially within subpopulations. For example, a national survey of Latinos and Asian Americans (Alegria et al., 2007), revealed that among the four Latina subethnic groups studied, Mexican heritage women were less likely than Puerto Rican women to have a depressive disorder, and Puerto Rican women had the highest overall lifetime and past-year prevalence rates compared to other women. It is important to go beyond a focus on rates and learn more about how elements of gender affect the development, course, and context of mental disorders among women internationally. In particular, more needs to be known about how gender affects comobidity of mental disorder over the life cycle. For example, depression and anxiety are more likely to be found together for women, whereas depression and substance abuse are more likely to be paired for men. The extent to which this difference reflects a gender difference in pathways to depression versus diagnostic bias requires investigation. Research on the patterns of being depressed found in women’s daily experiences suggests that women may be more likely to experience short-term depressive episodes than men, possibly reflecting their dayto-day experience with life stressors (Kessler, 2006). WOMEN AND DEPRESSION: A GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE Depression is identified in the WHO report as the leading global cause of years of health lost to disease for both men and women, with unipolar depression as the eighth leading cause of loss of health in low-income countries and the primary cause of loss of health in middleand high-income countries. Depression affects around 120 million people worldwide, and the number is projected to increase. Fewer than 25 percent of those affected have access to adequate treatment and health care. For purposes of this discussion, the outstanding fact is that compared with men, the worldwide rate of depression in women globally is 50 percent higher, and gender is perceived to be the critical
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determinant and strongest correlate of risk for different categorized types of depression (WHO, 2001). The biomedical evidence across nations, cultures, and ethnicities widely documents that women are one to three times more likely than men to develop depression and anxiety disorders (Ustun, 2000), but there is great variation in the estimated total population prevalence across studies (Kessler, 2006). Although there is marked variation in the rates of depression for women in different countries, much higher rates have been found in women attending primary health care centers in developing countries. In Indian clinics, for example, it is estimated that between 25 to 33 percent of women patients are suffering from depression (Worley, 2006). Despite three decades of research on gender identities and a wide range of identified risk factors, no particular cause or interrelated set of causes can fully explain the significant global phenomenon of gender differences in depression (Nolen-Hoeksema, 2001). Speculation continues in the literature about biological correlates for increased incidence of depression for women. Major depression clusters in families and depression in a first-degree relative is a risk factor for depression. While some studies find similar levels of heritability of depression for women and men, several others have found higher genetic loadings for females, suggesting that the impact of some genes for risk for major depression differs in women and men (Kendler, Gardner, Neale, & Prescott, 2001). The unique biology of women may in part explain their greater propensity to depression beginning in adolescence and early puberty, and sex hormones are likely to play a role (Ge, Conger, & Elder, 1996; Zahn-Waxler, Race, & Duggal, 2004). Depression associated with postpartum and menopausal periods is being studied in relation to hormonal factors and interactions between hormones, neurotransmitters, and other biological systems (Mazure, Kieta, & Blehar, 2002). Women are also more likely than men to be prescribed mood-altering psychotropic medication and electro-convulsive therapy for depression, even where the evidence suggests that the main conditions surrounding their diagnosis have strong social origins (Busfield, 1996). Several psychological and environmental risk factors and social causes of depression for women have been identified (Bertram, 2003; Paltiel, 1993; Zahn-Waxler et al., 2004). They include the inequitable gendered division of labor and family responsibility, women’s lesser social status and gender socialization, and the effects of poverty, abuse, and violence. Hamilton and Russo (2006) also review research that links unwanted pregnancy, sexualized objectification, and stigma as contributors to the gender gap in depression. Add to these etiological factors the astounding fact that women and children represent an estimated 80 percent of 50 million people affected by violent conflicts, civil wards, disasters, and displacement (WHO, 2006).
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Paltiel concludes that the key depression risk factors for women globally are simply that ‘‘everywhere women are overworked, overlooked and undervalued, and that poverty, discrimination, violence and powerlessness are pervasive features of women’s lives’’ (p. 197). In many developed countries, women are often poorly paid for dangerous, labor-intensive jobs, and are undernourished as well (Lopez & Guarnaccia, 2005). The so-called ‘‘feminization of poverty’’ is also a worldwide phenomenon as our family structures and models change, with an increasingly preponderance of single-parent mother families worldwide (Rice, 2001). Clearly, it is essential to recognize how genetic, biological, social, and psychological factors all contribute to the high incidence of depression women worldwide, and guidelines for treatment need to be based on a biopsychosocial model of assessment, research, practice, and policy. Screening and access to treatment for depression is also a very significant concern. Even in a developed, wealthy country like the United States, only 24 percent of women who suffer from depression receive treatment, with even lower rates for African American women (16 percent) and Hispanic women (20 percent) (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2000). Health care providers in developing countries identify less than one-half of women with depression in those countries (WHO, 2002). A number of overwhelming challenges occur in countries with low-resource settings including the lack of facilities, trained mental health personnel, effective population-based screening, and the prevalence of high cultural stigma (Worley, 2006). Communication between health workers and women patients can be extremely authoritarian in many countries where women are still primarily viewed as inferior with low social and economic status and often stigmatized for showing negative or depressed emotion. Furthermore, when women dare to reveal mental health concerns, health workers may reflect these stereotyped gender biases, which leads them to either overtreat or undertreat women (WHO, 1996).
PSYCHOLOGICAL PRACTICE GUIDELINES FOR WOMEN AND GIRLS International Implications and Issues As noted in the previous section, across the world women are challenged by significant mental health risks. These risks are associated with a multitude of pernicious outcomes and implications, including depression and suicide risk, anxiety disorders, and reproductive health issues, as well as physiological and psychosomatic problems. In light of these facts, psychotherapy and other forms of psychological intervention such as early screening and risk assessment are very important
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treatment strategies for prevention and treatment of women’s mental health problems. The development of guidelines for psychological practice for women and girls that addresses their special mental health needs and issues and is founded on a feminist perspective of gender equity and cultural sensitivity is an area of burgeoning concern not only in the Western world, but globally (Ballou, Hill, & West, 2008; Ballou & West, 2000; Comas-Diaz & Greene, 1994: Enns, 2008, 2009; Hays, 2001). This section will address three areas related to guidelines for practice. First, some background will be presented on the APA’s Resolution on Cultural and Gender Implications in International Psychology. This resolution passed in 2004 (Rice & Ballou, 2002) formed the theoretical foundation for the actual gender practice guidelines adopted in 2006 (APA, 2007). Then, the key elements in both the American and Canadian Psychological Association guidelines (CPA, 2007) will be examined with a view to how they could apply to more international and diverse cultural perspectives cross-nationally. Finally, a summary of some key issues that seem important in the development of feminist guidelines for psychological practice with women and girls in any country of the world will be presented. Cultural and Gender Awareness in the Practice of International Psychology The second author of this chapter became more actively involved in international psychology leadership by founding and serving as the first chair of the International Committee for Women, a very active standing committee of the APA Division of International Psychology. One of the first successful projects launched by the committee took several years to complete and involved the participation of women from many countries and organizations in drafting and passing an APA Resolution on Cultural and Gender Awareness in International Psychology. This activity embraced the collaboration and help from many women psychologists from other countries who were interested in feminist issues from an international perspective, and it also led to advocacy work about these issues in the association. The goal of the resolution was to encourage and facilitate awareness and reflective consideration for psychology and psychologists engaged in international projects, research, teaching, and practice. Underpinning the core concepts of the resolution was the understanding that feminist, multicultural, and critical theory, among other postmodern perspectives, had raised fundamental concerns about the values and assumptions long held in the dominant paradigm of conventional psychology (Fox & Prilleltensky, 1997; Kitzinger, 1991; Martin-Baro, 1994; Unger, 1995). The mutual and collaborative model called for in the resolution is important to world psychology because it offers guidance in
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postmodern perspectives in theory, research, and practice and strong models of psychological practice grounded in social justice. It also assumes that psychology based on Western values could benefit significantly from the expansion of its knowledge base through an international lens that includes diverse multicultural and cross-national perspectives. The resolution encourages psychologists to commit to five principles that help us understand and overcome oppressive attitudes and practices in dominant psychology transported internationally: 1. Understanding the experiences of individuals in diverse cultures and contexts. This first principle is grounded in ‘‘the other’s’’ experience. It urges us to understanding the experience of the other, which is embedded in multiple contexts and diverse social structures. Understanding and sincerely appreciating the experience of the other person also implies that we validate the other’s worldview, their ways of knowing and their authority for valid information and meaning (Ballou; 1996; Flowers & Richardson, 1996). One example for psychological practice with women, among the many, might be in the realm of values. In North America, productivity and autonomy are held as strong virtues, and many of our theoretical constructs and normative standards are based on the value of independent thinking and action. The principle of valuing others’ experiences is both obvious and subtle in its many applications. At its most basic application, how we define the psychological problem, diagnose the problem, and select the intervention must be based squarely in the experience of the other. 2. Respect for pluralism based on differences. The second and closely related principle is respect for pluralism. Respect for pluralism takes one beyond recognizing diversity to valuing diversity. As one example, feminist research on women in other disciplines and countries often employs ethnographic and narrative methodology as a legitimate and important way to document and validate the actual voices and direct experiences of women and minorities (Alcoff & Potter, 1993; Lazarus and Lykes, 2005; Naidoo, 2005). However, in psychology these efforts may still not be seen as valid or meeting the scientific test of traditional empirical investigation of best practices (Riger, 1992, 2000). 3. Awareness and analysis of power. This principle points out how critical it is to understand and become aware of power differentials and to analyze power asymmetries and hierarchies of power as they operate in relationships, institutions, and systems (Ballou & West, 2000; Enriquez, 1992). As an example in psychotherapy, interpersonal relationships between therapist and client are guided by this principle of reducing power asymmetries between practitioner and client. While each has different levels of power and status, both members are involved in a reciprocal learning process in which each can make valuable contributions to the other. This is particularly true when the each person in the therapeutic dyad comes from a different cultural perspective (Wyche & Rice, 1997). 4. Critical analysis of Western perspectives. The normative values and definitions employed in traditional Western psychology have been critiqued
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Mental and Physical Health extensively. These analyses are revealing of the cultural, historical, economic, and political agendas and perspectives embedded within the theory and practice of psychotherapy, particularly in relation to the treatment of women and minorities (Brown, 1994; Fox & Prilleltensky, 1997; Kitzinger, 1991; Rosenblum & Travis, 1996; Radway, 1998). 5. Interdisciplinary social–cultural perspective. This principle calls for an awareness of the significant impact of external and structural forces on individuals. Such factors, for example, as poverty, violence, and war, and the effects of the law, church, family, education, and the workplace, result in multiple and complex forms of privilege and/or oppression (Rice, 2001, 2007). A feminist perspective calls for an analysis of ‘‘social location’’ and an interdisciplinary view that recognizes how anthropological, historical, and religious factors influence and interact with one’s ethnicity, class, gender, and culture (Landrine, 1995). In psychological practice, the psychologist sometimes encounters contradictions of valuing culture and actual cultural practices, for sometimes the cultural practices are oppressive to women as in inequitable marital, divorce, and reproductive rights, violence, abuse, and economic dominance (Rice, 2005).
APA and CPA Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Women and Girls The previous five principles formed a foundation for the succeeding work of 35 feminist psychologists who over several years of collaboration drafted guidelines for psychological practice with girls and women. The chairs of the task force, Roberta Nutt, Joy Rice, and Carolyn Enns, took the guidelines through the long and extensive process of revisions and updates required by the various APA governance bodies, council, and membership. Adopted in 2006, these 11 guidelines were based on the need to articulate a model for psychotherapeutic practice that was both gender- and culturally sensitive and that employed concepts of empowerment and an understanding and appreciation of the standpoints, world views and culture specific practices of women and men as well (APA, 2007). The 11 guidelines are organized into three sections: (1) diversity, social context, and power; (2) professional responsibility; and (3) practice applications.
DIVERSITY, SOCIAL CONTEXT, AND POWER Guideline 1: Psychologists strive to be aware of the effects of socialization, stereotyping, and unique life events on the development of girls and women across diverse cultural groups. Guideline 2: Psychologists are encouraged to recognize and utilize information about oppression, privilege, and identity development as they may affect girls and women.
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Guideline 3: Psychologists strive to understand the impact of bias and discrimination upon the physical and mental health of those with whom they work.
Professional Responsibility Guideline 4: Psychologists strive to use gender and culturally sensitive, affirming practices in providing services to girls and women. Guideline 5: Psychologists are encouraged to recognize how their socialization, attitudes, and knowledge about gender may affect their practice with girls and women.
Practice Applications Guideline 6: Psychologists are encouraged to employ interventions and approaches that have been found to be effective in the treatment of issues of concern to girls and women. Guideline 7: Psychologists strive to foster therapeutic relationships and practices that promote initiative, empowerment, and expanded alternatives and choices for girls and women. Guideline 8: Psychologists strive to provide appropriate, unbiased assessments and diagnoses in their work with women and girls Guideline 9: Psychologists strive to consider the problems of girls and women in their sociopolitical context. Guideline 10: Psychologists strive to acquaint themselves with and utilize relevant mental health, education, and community resources for girls and women. Guideline 11: Psychologists are encouraged to understand and work to change institutional and systemic bias that may impact girls and women.
Almost concurrently, in 2007, the CPA passed ‘‘Guidelines for Ethical Psychological Practice with Women’’ that articulates four guiding principles: 1. Respect for the dignity of persons. This principle urges that psychologist ensure that they do not engage in or support any gender-based discrimination and/or oppression, recognizing that there may be situations where women clients face multiple discriminations and oppressions. 2. Responsible caring. The main point of this principle is that psychologists strive to understand how women’s lives are shaped by the interaction of gender with other modalities like culture, ethnicity, and sexual orientation, and that is important for the practitioner to understand how the multiple social contexts of their own life might influence or interfere with their attempts to help and not harm women clients. 3. Integrity in relationships. Psychologists are open, honest, and accurate in their communications and recognize, monitor, and manage potential biases, multiples relationships, or other conflicts of interest that could
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Mental and Physical Health lead to the exploitation of the client and the diminishment of trust. Psychologists honestly acknowledge differences in beliefs and values with their women clients and work collaboratively to resolve those differences in the best interest of the woman. 4. Responsibility to society. Psychologists acknowledge that they have responsibilities to the societies in which they live and work and their concern for the welfare of all human beings includes concern for the welfare of women in society. They accept responsibility to do what they can to change societal laws and structures that discriminate or lead to oppressions of women.
The underlying concepts and principles in the APA and CPA guidelines are similar, but the CPA principles are more general in their articulation and do not, for example, discuss specific practices of promoting empowerment and expanded alternatives for women; using unbiased assessments, diagnoses, and materials; and employing specific interventions that have been found to be helpful and effective with women clients. Their thrust is closer to the underlying ethical principles for the APA Resolution on Gender and Cultural Awareness in International Psychology. The CPA guidelines, unlike those of the APA, do not provide a developmental perspective applying to younger girls.
FEMINIST PSYCHOTHERAPY IN A GLOBAL CONTEXT Upon the completion of these guidelines, it was quickly realized that there was a need to address and consider the potential implications, applications, and modifications of such feminist practice guidelines for use internationally and cross-nationally. As a starting point, Enns and her colleagues began a working group at the 2008 International Counseling Psychology Conference in Chicago, and their discussion provides some potential implications and modifications of the APA guidelines for use in international contexts. The major aim of the task force was to generate a critical analysis of Western feminist psychotherapeutic practice and to consider some of the features of such practice globally (Enns, 2008). APA Guideline 5 and CPA Principle 2 which state how understanding how one’s own socialization shapes one’s therapeutic perspectives and practices formed a basis for the dialogue. Certainly, developing practice guidelines that would be applicable internationally is a daunting endeavor. There are enormous challenges to developing a holistic and inclusive focus to women’s diverse realities across the world and their complex multiple interacting social identities and oppressions. Nonetheless, an important beginning has been made in articulating some of the ways in which Western models of psychotherapy, including feminist models of treatment for women, are ethnocentric or otherwise narrow in their geo-political-social focus.
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Three important themes can be seen to have emerged from the work of this beginning task force. The first concerns our concepts of empowerment and the language of empowerment. Such concepts are often framed in individualist terms from a Western point of view. By way of contrast, for example, many Japanese women, both feminist and nonfeminists, define meaningful constructs of interdependence and fulfillment that are consistent with the values of a more collective society. It is suggested that terms such as ‘‘resourcefulness’’ are likely to be less ethnocentric and more useful and meaningful in the treatment of mental health problems for women in other cross-national contexts (Enns, 2008). Second, the goals and strategies of psychotherapy for women need to be framed in culturally sensitive terms. For example, although we as Western therapists and feminists tend to see and promote gender role differentiation as negative and as a barrier to achieving equity and a positive sense of self, many Muslim and Asian women have worked toward preserving and honoring difference, especially in the realm of family and personal relations (Enns, 2008; Pharaon, 2001). Another guiding theme identified in modifying the Western guidelines for psychological practice for women and girls was the consideration that Western society is extremely goal directed. This is also reflected in the way in which we practice psychotherapy with the goal of being assertive or achieving a certain job or status. For women from other cultures, the goal orientation of such a therapeutic approach may not resonate; for example, a Japanese woman whose personality values a role-oriented approach to life and who experiences a sense of satisfaction from fulfilling and honoring that lifetime role, such as nurturing family and children to the subordination of self (Enns, 2003). Thus, the alleviation of depression associated with that role may be not to attempt to separate the women from the role or to divorce or to separate, but to help her feel and integrate the honor her culture assigns to that role. Several of the Western guidelines are broad enough to apply to many various contexts and to diverse mental health problems of women across the world, but they would need culture-specific language, applications, interventions, and examples. In terms of language and translation of the guidelines, the particular meanings of words and connotations of concepts embedded in individualistic perspectives may vary from country to country and culture to culture, necessitating consideration of cultural relevance (Enns, 2008). Every therapeutic encounter is embedded in a multi-lingual context, and both therapist and client must be aware of the many leveled effects. There are many opportunities for misunderstandings, as well as for mutual shared learning (Espin, 2001). Nonetheless, the overall relevance and importance of concepts like empowerment, awareness of difference, sensitivity to and avoidance of
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discrimination, best practices, self-examination, and education can be seen as applicable to all women clients in various geographical settings. By way of example, applying the guidelines to women from other countries reveals both direct relevance and the need for cultural modification (Enns & Kasai, 2007). A few examples will suffice. APA Guidelines 1, 2, and 3 speak directly to the direct effects of socialization, oppression, and bias on women and girls, outlining decades of research on these issues. Japanese women, like women in many other cultures around the world, live in worlds of highly differentiated gender roles; however, this is seen in a more positive light where difference is preserved and honored and the counseling reflects that different perspective (Kawano, 1990). As Ueno (1997) writes, ‘‘Our primary goal is not to be like men, but to value what it means to be a woman.’’ Some Asian women believe that gender role differentiation does not automatically produce greater subordination and dependency for women on men, but in contrast independence; for example, when women do not expect men to meet their emotional needs and turn to other women for nurturing relationships. ‘‘Amae’’ is a widespread indigenous psychological concept in Japan. It represents a healthy othercenteredness that emphasizes attunement to the needs of others and correspondingly positive reliance on others for emotional acceptance and self-esteem. However, Japanese women are often expected to shoulder the responsibility for giving amae, with limited opportunities to receive amae (Enns & Kasai, 2001; Matsuyuki, 1998). APA Guideline 6 states that psychologists are encouraged to use interventions and practices that have been found to be most effective in the psychological treatment of girls and women. The effectiveness of particular interventions may directly vary as a function of the sociopolitical-economic context of the particular woman client. Ciftci (2008) and Winter (2001) have worked extensively with immigrant ArabMuslim women. Women who are dislocated from their native support systems are at special risk for depression, but our Western mental health systems and structures that emphasize individual therapy and psychopharmacological interventions do not necessarily meet their special needs. Speedy symptom alleviation, family therapy, cultural education, and social advocacy have been found to be effective avenues for intervention and change, as well as working with local community resources and support systems. Cognitive enhancement group therapy programs have also been found to be particularly efficacious in helping Saudi Arabian women to improve self-confidence, communication skills, and self-awareness (Pharaon, 2001). APA Guideline 9 and CPA Principle 2 state the importance of considering the psychological problems of women and girls in their sociopolitical and socioeconomic context. The effects of socioeconomic status have an enormous impact on the clinical issues which Mexican women
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face (Hinkelman, 2001). Mexican women often suffer stresses that are due to inadequate food and shelter, domestic violence, unemployment, and oppressive political policies and structures. Religion plays a large part in their family life, and some life events are attributed to luck, supernatural forces, or acts of God, a fatalism that has been linked to a high prevalence of depression and other clinical issues such as anxiety and psychosomatic symptoms. Furthermore, Mexican women, especially in rural areas, tend to have limited information and access to medical and mental health care resources and institutions and centers specializing in assisting victims of violence and abuse (Pick, Contreras, & Barker-Aguilar, 2006). All these considerations of the social context of the depressed Mexican woman need to be considered in evaluation of the intrapsychic and external sources of her distress and the appropriate interventions. Finally, APA Guideline 11 and CPA Principle 4 speak to the need for psychologists everywhere to help better their societies by engaging and advocating for positive social change that alleviates institutional and systemic injustice and discrimination. The question that is relevant here is whether or not there can be healing without justice. The abuse of women worldwide and their resulting trauma makes explicit the link between treatment and advocacy and calls forth a model of global practice for women and girls that incorporates advocacy. If justice is indeed therapeutic, then psychologists are urged to go beyond their relatively comfortable roles and office work to publicly work for their women clients in nontherapeutic settings and venues. From this perspective, we help to forge a world in which women can live, work, and be healed from the pernicious effects of discrimination, abuse, and violence and the multiple mental health consequences of those conditions. BEYOND CURRENT MODELS OF RESEARCH AND PRACTICE As Aida Hurtado (2009) has articulated, feminist theorists have challenged traditional forms of knowledge production, staked out claims in knowledge production, and emphasized the roots of multicultural feminist theory in the ‘‘every day experiences of human beings who love, live, laugh, cry, and think.’’ Part of that challenge has been the development of new methodologies, qualitative and quantitative, to produce new knowledge about women’s lives and circumstances. In particular, the development of participatory and action research techniques hold promise for the development of an action-reflection dialectic or praxis to create an activist scholarship in international psychology (Earth, 1998; Khanna, 1996; Lykes, 1994, 2001; Lykes, Coquillon, & Rabenstein, in press). Stigma, cultural beliefs, and cultural norms with regard to expressing psychological distress and help-seeking, diagnostic practices, treatment
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accessibility, and preference for alternative forms of treatment vary cross-nationally. In countries such as Uganda, where mental illness may be seen as a punishment for bad deeds or as possession by an evil spirit, the associated stigma may lead to social isolation, exclusion, and disadvantage (Ssebunnya, Kigozi, Lund, Kizza, & Okello, 2009). Barriers to help-seeking may also be found in countries where the cultural taboo of consulting in a psychiatric setting may carry the risk of marriage ineligibility or divorce. These barriers may be particularly important to women in societies where the roles of wife and mother are central to women’s status. For example, a study of outpatients in the United Arab Emirates (Ouali et al., 2004) found that women were less likely to seek mental health care than men, and that when they did seek care, 70 percent were accompanied by someone else; 60 percent of the women said they could not have sought care if they had not been accompanied, and this dependence on being accompanied led to irregular attendance in followup appointments. They were also more likely to report feeling stigmatized than men (37.7 percent vs. 24.4 percent). In Arab Islamic societies, the fact that women represent a family’s honor may make them reluctant to disclose personal issues to outsiders for fear of damaging the family’s status in addition to their own. Such conditions underscore the importance of understanding the relationship of social and cultural factors to diagnosis, treatment, and delivery of mental health services to women and of developing culturally appropriate approaches to service provision. While U.S. studies have much to contribute to international mental health efforts, the reverse is true as well. The lack of a psychiatric establishment tied to biomedical models and an infrastructure that influences mental health practices from the ‘‘top down’’ may provide opportunities for ‘‘bottom’’ up approaches reflective of the voices of consumers and tailored to their contexts. A model for such an approach is found in Where There Is No Psychiatrist: A mental health care manual (Patel, 2003), which states ‘‘the promotion of gender equality, by empowering women to make decisions that influence their lives and educating men about the need for equal rights, is the most important way of promoting women’s mental health’’ (p. 220). The manual provides practical, context-based advice for community workers and primary care doctors, nurses, social workers, and doctors, particularly in developing countries. For example, it provides guidance on how to ask about stress in a domestic context, ensure regular follow-up, ask permission to speak to family members, and deal with advocacy issues such as establishing psychoeducational or support groups for women in the community. In cultures where Western diagnostic constructs are unknown and there are no words for mental disorders, the manual’s ‘‘bottom up’’ approach, which focuses on symptoms and avoids usage of stigmatizing labels, is particularly appropriate. The idea that it is important to
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recognize that people seek help from diverse sources and there is little to gain by challenging beliefs in evil spirits and witchcraft is likely to meet with substantial resistance from a Western biomedical perspective. However, the point is made that counseling approaches based on Western psychological theories may indeed be applicable across cultures—but to be effective, a counselor must find what will be acceptable. A similar ‘‘bottoms up’’ effort, informed by feminist principles and guidelines for therapy with women, would provide an interesting approach for ‘‘giving multicultural feminist psychology away’’ to community workers and service providers who seek alternatives to traditional approaches in the United States. CONCLUSION International perspectives on mental health offer a holistic vision of health that is congruent with the biopsychosocial perspective advocated by feminist psychologists. This perspective views understanding the relation of women’s social roles and circumstances to mental health in its social/political and cultural context as necessary for the development of effective treatment and prevention. That gender has a profound impact on the development of and response to mental distress and disorder is indisputable. The goal now is to understand the factors and mechanisms that produce that impact, including the power inequalities, stigma, and devaluation associated with women’s social roles and circumstances. New theories and methods, informed by multicultural and international feminist perspectives, as reflected in the guidelines for psychological practice with women and girls, hold promise as tools for achieving that goal. However, doing so will require viewing gender as a multidimensional cultural construct with elements that may interact with elements of the cultural context at multiple levels—biological, psychological, social, environmental, cultural, and contextual—and developing policies and programs aimed at eliminating the power inequities, stigma, discrimination, and gender-based violence that continue to undermine the mental health and well being of women over their life cycle. REFERENCES Alcoff, L., & Potter, E. (Eds.). (1993). Feminist epistemologies. New York: Routledge. Alegria, A., Mulvaney-Day, N., Torres, M., Polo, A., Cao, Z., & Canino, G. (2007). Prevalence of psychiatric disorders across Latino subgroups in the United States. American Journal of Public Health, 97, 68–85 American Psychological Association. (2007). Guidelines for psychological practice with girls and women. American Psychologist, 62, 949–979.
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Rice, J. K. (2001). Global divorce and the feminization of poverty. International Psychology Bulletin, 4, 21–24. Rice, J. K. (2005). Social and economic support for divorce internationally. In A. D. Thomas, N. Dayan, A. B. Bernardo, & R. Roth (Eds.), Helping others grow ( pp. 107–112). Aachen, Austria: Shaker Verlag. Rice, J. K. (2007). Global warfare, violence and the welfare of women. In S. McCarthy, S. Newstead, K. Karandashev, C. Prandini, C. Hutz, & W. Gomes. Teaching psychology around the world (pp. 338–345). Newcastle, United Kingdom: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Rice, J. K. & Ballou, M. (2003). Cultural and gender awareness in international psychology. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, Division 52, International Psychology, International Committee for Women. Riger, S. (1992). Epistemological debates, feminist voices: Science, social values, and the study of women. American Psychologist, 47, 730–740. Riger, S. (2000). Transforming psychology. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press. Rosenblum, K., & Travis, T. M. (1996). A theory of multicultural counseling and therapy. Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole. Russo, N. F. (in press). Diversity and mental health. In H. Landrine & N. F. Russo (Eds.), Handbook of diversity in feminist psychology. New York: Springer. Russo, N. F., & Tartaro, J. (2008). Women and mental health. In F. L. Denmark & M. A. Paludi (Eds.), Psychology of women: A handbook of issues and theories (2nd ed., pp. 440–481). Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Russo, N. F., & Vaz, K. (2001). Addressing diversity in the decade of behavior: Focus on women of color. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 25, 280–294. Safir, M. P., & Hill, K. (2008). International aspects of the development of the psychology of women and gender. In F. L. Denmark & M. A. Paludi (Eds.), Psychology of women: A handbook of issues and theories (pp. 70–90). Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Silverman, W. K., & Carter, R. (2006). Anxiety disturbance in girls and women. In J. Worell & C. Goodheart (Eds.), Handbook of girls’ and women’s psychological health: Gender and well-being across the lifespan (pp. 60–87). New York: Oxford University Press. Ssebunnya, J., Kigozi, F., Lund, C., Kizza, D., & Okello, E. (2009). Stakeholder perceptions of mental health stigma and poverty in Uganda. BMC International Health and Human Rights, 9(5). Retrieved June 15, 2009, from http:// www.biomedcentral.com/1472-698X/9/5 Stewart, D. E. (2006). The international consensus statement on women’s mental health and the WPA consensus statement on interpersonal violence against women. World Psychiatry, 5, 61–64. Stewart, D. E., Rondon, M., Damiani, G., & Honikman, J. (2001). International psychosocial and systemic issues in women’s mental health. Archives of Women’s Mental Health, 4, 3–7. Swim, J. K., Becker, J., & Lee, E. (in press). Sexism reloaded: Worldwide evidence for its endorsement, expression, and emergence in multiple contexts. In H. Landrine & N. F. Russo (Eds.), Handbook of diversity in feminist psychology. New York: Springer. Ueno, C. (1997). Interview/Are the Japanese feminine? Some problems of Japanese Feminism in its cultural context. In S. Buckley (Ed.), Broken
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silence: Voices of Japanese feminism (pp. 272–301), Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Unger, R. (1995). Cultural diversity and the future of feminist psychology. In H. Landrine (Ed.), Bringing cultural diversity to feminist psychology (pp. 413, 432). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. United Nations. (2000). The millennium declaration. New York: United Nations. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (USDHHS). (2002). Women of color health data book. Rockville, MD: USDHHS, National Institute of Health, Office of the Director, Office of Research on Women’s Health. Ustun, T. B. (2000). Cross-national epidemiology of depression and gender. Journal of Gender-specific Medicine, 3, 54–58. Winter, A. (2001). Women in the Arab/Muslim world: Therapeutic strategies. San Francisco: American Psychological Association. World Health Organization (WHO). (2001). Violence against women information pack. (pp. 1–25). Geneva: Department of Injuries and Violence Prevention, WHO. Retrieved romhttp://www.who.int/violence_injury_prevention. World Health Organization (WHO). (2002). Gender disparities in mental health. Geneva: Author. World Health Organization (WHO). (2004). Prevention of mental disorders: Effective interventions and policy options. Geneva, Switzerland: World Health Organization, Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse. World Health Organization (WHO). (2006). Gender and women’s mental health. Geneva, Switzerland: Author. World Health Organization (WHO). (2008). The global burden of disease: 2004 update. Geneva, Switzerland: World Health Organization. World Health Organization (WHO). (2009). Mental health aspects of women’s reproductive health: A global review of the literature. Geneva, Switzerland, Author. Worley, H. (2006). Depression: A leading contributor to global burden of disease. Washington, DC: Population Reference Bureau. Retrieved from http:// www.coa.gov.ph/gat/ articles/depression_062006.htm Wyche, K., & Rice, J. K. (1997). Feminist therapy: From dialogue to tenets. In J. Worell & N. G. Johnson (Eds.), Shaping the future of feminist psychology: Education, research, and practice (pp. 57–71). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Zahn-Waxler, C., Race, E., & Duggal, S. (2004). Mood disorders, syndromes and symptoms: The development of depression in girls. In D. J. Bell, S. L. Forster, & E. J. Mash (Eds.), Behavioral and emotional problems in girls (pp. 25–76). New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishing.
Chapter 2
Ethnocultural Psychotherapy: Women of Color’s Resilience and Liberation Lillian Comas-Diaz
Women’s lives are embedded in multiple contexts. Their intersecting identities inhabit complex realities. Consider Ana, a 30-year-old Colombian American woman, who consulted a therapist upon her physician’s recommendation. Ana’s presenting complaint: ‘‘I’m targeted at work because I’m a black Latina immigration lawyer,’’ highlights the intersection of her multiple identities—a combination of ethnicity, race, gender, and profession. Enmeshed in a collective matrix, female identity and well-being tend to be relational, that is, connected to others and to contexts. To heal, nurture, and sustain women’s well-being, clinicians need to address female interconnecting identities. Psychotherapy with women—in particular, women of color—offers opportunities and challenges. Indeed, the rewards of working with culturally diverse women enrich therapists’ lives. Multicultural therapeutic encounters can be replete of gratification, excitement, and deeper connection. Let’s examine Ana’s first session. Her body language (sweating palms, fearful facial expression) suggested that she was anxious and scared. Dr. Brown, a Jewish American therapist, addressed Ana’s feelings and recommended breathing exercises. Ana agreed and while engaged in the exercise, she suddenly remembered her grandmother’s breathing exercises. She shared the breathing technique with Dr. Brown, who was pleasantly surprised to learn the source of Ana’s grandmother’s exercise—shamanism. Interested in indigenous healing, Dr. Brown added a new strategy to her clinical repertoire. Conversely, working with culturally diverse clients can be challenging. Partly due to cultural misunderstanding, the multicultural
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encounter can exert a strain in therapists. Consider Judy, a Chinese American woman who presented to therapy after a romantic breakup. She saw Dr. Smith, a European American woman who explored the circumstances around the breakup. When the therapist commented on the unfulfilled quality of the relationship, Judy described the friendship between her parents and her ex-fiancee’s family. Dr. Smith’s reply— ‘‘You need to take care of yourself,’’—reflected an individualistic worldview where separation and individuation from family are signs of adulthood. Judy’s answer, ‘‘Taking care of myself means taking care of my parents,’’ denoted a collectivistic worldview where interdependence among family members prevails. A cultural impasse resulted out of these conflictive worldviews. This situation generated difficulties with empathy. Dr. Smith persisted in encouraging Judy to individuate from her parents. After a few sessions, Judy informed Dr. Smith that she did not need therapy anymore. What seems to be the major difference between Dr. Brown and Dr. Smith? Research has shown that culturally diverse clients identified their therapists’ cultural competence as the major source of satisfaction with their treatment (Knipscheer & Kleber, 2004). Most experts agree that cultural competence involves a set of knowledge, attitudes, and skills that enables clinicians to be effective in multicultural practice (Betancourt, Green, Carrillo, & Ananch-Firempong, 2003). Moreover, the development of cultural competence requires empathy and a lifelong commitment. Working within a culturally relevant therapeutic framework helps to develop cultural competence. In this chapter, I present ethnocultural psychotherapy as a gender-affirmative, culturally relevant healing approach for women of color. ETHNOCULTURAL PSYCHOTHERAPY: CONCEPTS AND GOALS Ethnocultural psychotherapy incorporates ethnic, cultural, and gender parameters into mental health assessment and treatment (Comas-Dıaz & Jacobsen, 2004). It is a contextual healing approach that recognizes, reclaims, and recovers gender and cultural strengths. As such, ethnocultural psychotherapists examine the role of gendered ethnicity in the lives of women of color. Gendered ethnicity refers to the interactive effects of gender, culture, ethnicity, and race. Unfortunately, dominant mental health practitioners seldom understand the profound influence of gendered ethnicity in women of color. When in treatment, women of color often find these services irrelevant and unresponsive to their life experiences. What is more, some fear psychotherapy to be an acculturation tool (Ramirez, 1991), as well as a form of cultural imperialism. To illustrate, women of color fear that psychotherapy’s androcentric and
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ethnocentric perspective will label them as deviant and pathological. Judy’s cultural impasse with Dr. Smith exemplifies this concern. Women of color experience cultural imperialism through a systematic indoctrination that the dominant cultural values are superior to their own (Said, 1994). Consequently, healing requires empowering women of color to be themselves. When in therapy, women of color frequently talk about cultural identity, emotional expression, community expectations of gender roles, mother–daughter dyad, spirituality, sexuality, relationship with other women of color, and class differences (Slater, Daniel, & Banks, 2003). A significant number of women of color need mental health treatment. Many struggle with loss, grief, and trauma, in addition to experiencing a nefarious form of racism and sexism. Indeed, women in general, and women of color in particular, are exposed to multiple oppressions. Beyond gendered ethnicity, women of color’s social class, sexual orientation, skin color, immigration status, health status, age, language, and other variables predispose them to oppression. Exposure to continuing oppression results in a psychological adaptation to domination. For instance, oppressed individuals internalize powerlessness and develop a fractured identity (Freire, 1973). To promote empowerment and reformulate identity, ethnocultural psychotherapists help women to take control of their lives, overcome their oppressed mentality, and achieve a critical knowledge of themselves. These objectives are necessary in the delivery of effective and ethical psychotherapeutic services to women of color.
EMPOWERMENT Ethnocultural psychotherapists aim to increase women of color’s sense of agency. In other words, ethnocultural psychotherapy empowers women to increase their access to resources, examine options, enhance their ability to make choices, improve self- and collective esteem, learn culturally relevant assertiveness, rescue ethnogender strengths, overcome internalized oppression, and engage in transformative actions. Ethnocultural psychotherapy promotes critical consciousness. Coined by Paulo Freire (1970), critical consciousness refers to the process of engaging in a dialectical dialogue with one’s world, becoming aware of one’s circumstances, and initiating transformative actions. The critical consciousness dialogue involves asking questions such as ‘‘What? Why? How? For whom? Against whom? By whom? In favor of whom? In favor of what? To what end?’’ (Freire & Macedo, 2000). Exploring these critical questions raises consciousness and helps to examine existential issues. In particular, a critical dialogue facilitates women’s examination of ‘‘what matters’’ regarding power differentials.
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Ethnocultural psychotherapy addresses power differentials within a liberation perspective. Unfortunately, many mainstream psychotherapists ignore the effect of power in women’s realities. Consider the following vignette. Karen, a mixed race (black and white) single mother, was in therapy with a white male clinician. Dr. Cooper treated Karen with mainstream psychotherapy. After six months in treatment, Karen did not get relief from her anxiety. When she shared her experiences with her friend Carol, Karen realized that she did not feel comfortable discussing race with her therapist. ‘‘I get this unspoken message that Dr. Cooper does not want to hear about racist sexism.’’ To resolve her dilemma, Karen terminated therapy and entered treatment with Carol’s therapist—an African American woman. IDENTITY REFORMULATION Besides empowerment, ethnocultural psychotherapy promotes identity reformulation. In other words, therapists encourage women to reclaim their voices. This process affirms women’s ethnogender values. Such affirmation is necessary because women of color tend to reconnect with their ethnic traditions during crises. Lamentably, many women of color ‘‘forget’’ their ethnocultural roots to accommodate to the dominant society. Through cultural amnesia, they neglect adaptive functions of their gendered ethnicity. Along these lines, ethnocultural psychotherapists examine women’s psychocultural needs. For example, lesbians of color struggle with a combined sexism, racism, and heterosexism that require attention during therapy. Likewise, working-class women of color are exposed to a mixture of sexism, racism, and classism. They may find themselves in a dilemma as their personal striving threatens their ethnoclass ties (Kuppersmith, 1987). Regardless of social class membership, class realities are pervasive in communities of color and thus affect many women of color. Therapists who recognize ethnoclass loyalty dilemmas promote female empowerment. Healing the historical, personal, and collective wounds of women of color necessitates a gender-affirmative, culturally relevant contextual approach. ETHNOCULTURAL PSYCHOTHERAPY APPLICATIONS Ethnocultural psychotherapy is gender affirmative because it acknowledges the concept of self as an internal gendered-ethnocultural representation. To elaborate, female identity is embedded and constructed within diverse contexts. For instance, Catherine Batson (1990) empirically found that females frequently compose their lives by adapting to life milestones, such as coupling, motherhood, and other gender-specific events. As a
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result, conducting psychotherapy with women of color entails examining their adaptation to their total environment. An ethnocultural assessment facilitates such examination. ETHNOCULTURAL ASSESSMENT Ethnocultural assessment helps to place female realities in contexts. This assessment explores intellectual and emotional understanding of several historical stages of cultural identity development (Jacobsen, 1988). It acknowledges the influences of external and internal factors during different stages in women’s lives. As both a diagnostic and treatment tool, the ethnocultural assessment helps to unfold material relevant to women’s functioning. Additionally, it aids in the development of a therapeutic alliance. Certainly, when conducting ethnocultural assessments, therapists aim to convey genuine interest in their client. This approach fosters a ‘‘safe’’ atmosphere for treatment. The ethnocultural assessment examines the women’s heritage, saga, niche, adjustment, and relationships. Heritage relates to women’s ancestry, history, genetics, biology, and sociopolitical inheritance. In this stage, therapists examine maternal and paternal cultures of origin to delineate ethnic heritage. The examination of biological factors includes illnesses, physiological, gender, and ethnic differences in drug metabolism. Of particular interest is the exploration of cultural trauma in the form of soul wounds. A legacy of pain and suffering among many minority group members, soul wounds result from socio–historical oppression, ungrieved losses, internalized oppression, and learned helplessness (Duran & Ivey, 2006). Examples of soul wounds are a history of slavery, colonization, Holocaust, genocide, and wars. In addition, therapists explore the legacy of survivors’ syndromes. Examining women’s cultural legacy provides a foundation for the unearthing of the family saga. Ethnocultural assessment second stage, saga, entails the family, clan, tribe, and group story. As an illustration, the family saga reveals the circumstances that led a woman and or her multigenerational family to journey through cultural transitions. Transition could be any kind of translocation—a geographical move, migration, immigration, sojourn, or major transitions in life such as change of job, marital status, in addition to milestones like pregnancy, abortion, miscarriage, and others. It is important to discern the voluntary versus the involuntary reasons for the transition or translocation. The translocation post analysis provides a context for client’s’ ethnocultural transition. Relevant questions characteristic of this stage include: ‘‘How long ago was the translocation? Was it recent or generations ago? What are the thoughts and feelings regarding the events leading to the translocation?’’
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The next assessment stage, niche, refers to the outcome of the post transition analysis. Niche is based on the client’s intellectual and emotional perception of her family’s ethnocultural identity in the host society since the translocation. Succinctly put, niche is the place carved by the family after the transition. During this stage, therapists assess what happened to the family after the translocation. Moreover, therapists examine women’s cognitive and emotional perception of their family ethnocultural saga. They review women’s interactions with members of their own ethnocultural group. In particular, therapists explore the family status before and after the translocation. Women’s internalization of their family saga provides a blueprint of their entry into the world. Exploring this stage facilitates the development of a contextual framework within which to place women’s subjective experiences. Therapists ask the following questions when examining women’s niche: ‘‘Have family members stayed together? Is there a sense of family unity? What is the relationship of family with the original ethnocultural group? How have they fared financially, emotionally?’’ The self-adjustment stage relates to women’s own perceived adaptation to the host culture (or situation) as individuals distinct from their family. Self-adjustment explores the contrasts between the woman’s ethnocultural identity and that of her family, work, and social environment. This stage involves an analysis of women’s coping skills. Here, therapists help women to analyze the functionality of their behaviors within diverse contexts. Women’s strengths are examined, paying attention to cultural resilience. For example, among many women of color, personal survival is connected to their collective survival. Fostering cultural resilience, ethnocultural psychotherapy helps women to reconnect with their ethnic beliefs. Cultural resilience is a host of strengths, values and practices that promote coping mechanisms and adaptive reactions to traumatic oppression (Elsass, 1992). Cultural resilience promotes resourceful responses to oppression and adversity. Therefore, it fosters creativity, reconstruction, and evolution. The last ethnocultural assessment stage examines women’s relations. Therapists examine women’s self and other relationship. Besides examining women’s significant connections, clinicians focus on the therapeutic relationship, including transference and countertransference. They explore their own ethnocultural background to determine specific areas of real or potential overlap with their client’s. In other words, therapists complete their own ethnocultural assessment to determine areas of similarity and difference with their clients’. Above and beyond obtaining a wealth of information crucial for therapeutic interventions, performance of an ethnocultural assessment frequently opens new channels for the recognition of self in the culturally different other. A crucial component of the ethnocultural assessment is the inclusion of gender specific issues in all stages of the evaluation. For example,
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during the heritage stage, historical female roles, female biological markers, female victimization, and other history of gender issues are examined. The saga stage helps to reveal the ‘‘herstory’’ of significant female family members. Similarly, during the niche stage clinicians examine female gender collective scripts such as family roles of women and men, wantedness of children (including the client), and gender specific family trauma. Furthermore, therapists explore the symbolic meaning of the client’s name, age cohort effect on women, acculturation, personal development, and other adjustment issues as part of women’s self-adjustment. Finally, therapists explore the gender aspects of intimate relations, (with men and women), physical and sexual abuse, domestic violence, incest, battered spouse syndrome, forced prostitution, sexual abduction, and other forms of gender trauma within relationships. In conclusion, the ethnocultural assessment is especially effective when treatment issues are unclear, gender and ethnocultural concerns are presenting complaints, and when women are in a multicultural situation.
ETHNOCULTURAL THERAPEUTIC PROCESS Therapeutic Relationship Ethnocultural psychotherapy acknowledges the confluence of both the therapist’s and the client’s realities. Such convergence is accentuated within the dyadic encounter. Consequently, ethnocultural psychotherapists recognize the therapeutic relationship as an essential agent of change. They use it as a vehicle to promote critical awareness and transformation. In fact, successful psychotherapy with women of color depends on the therapist’s skill in establishing and managing the therapeutic relationship (Jenkins, 1985). In addition to cultural competence, ethnocultural psychotherapists aim to develop cultural empathy. Indeed, the development of empathy in a multicultural context facilitates an understanding of the client’s experience. Empathy is an interpersonal construct referring to a clinician’s intrinsic capacity to attend to the emotional experience of others. Within mainstream psychotherapy, empathy is composed of kinesthetic, affective and cognitive elements (Jordan & Surrey, 1986). The kinesthetic component relates to the nonverbal communication and body language. Empathy’s affective component involves an emotional connectedness—the experience of being like the other. The cognitive element refers to an intellectual understanding of the other. Therapists engaged solely in cognitive empathy tend to maintain their identity differentiated from their clients’ (Kaplan, 1991), and thus, do not experience being like the other.
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As a result, therapists need to go beyond being an empathic witness when working with women of color. They need to develop cultural empathy. Cultural empathy is a learned ability that helps therapists to culturally understand the experience of women of color. Cultural empathy entails a process of perspective taking by using a cultural framework as a guide for understanding women and recognizing cultural differences between self and other (Ridley & Lingle, 1996). Indeed, therapists able to take the perspective of the other person significantly reduce their stereotypic and ethnocentric attitudes (Galinsky & Moskowitz, 2000). Therefore, cultural empathy promotes therapists’ cultural responsiveness through a combination of perceptual, cognitive, affective, and communication skills. In short, cultural empathy involves therapists’ attunement to women of color’s life experiences. Within this context, attunement refers to the process whereby the therapist focuses on the internal world of the woman of color and in turn, she feels understood and connected (Stern, 1985). Such a state of connection facilitates the management of identification and projection during therapy. ETHNOCULTURAL TRANSFERENCE AND COUNTERTRANSFERENCE The multicultural therapeutic encounter can provide opportunities for projections based on ethnicity, gender, and race. These projections infuse the therapeutic relationship with complex ethnocultural and gender influences. Therapists working with women of color need to understand transference and countertransference, including their ethnocultural determinants (Varghese, 1983). Racial, gender, and ethnic factors are available targets for projection in therapy (Jones, 1984), which may be manifested in transference. Comas-Dıaz and Jacobsen (1991) identified several types of ethnocultural transference and countertransference within the inter-ethnic and the intra-ethnic psychotherapeutic dyads. In brief, the inter-ethnic transferential reactions include the following: (1) overcompliance and friendliness (observed when there is a societal power differential in the client/therapist dyad); (2) denial (when the client avoids disclosing issues pertinent to gendered ethnicity and/or culture); (3) mistrust and suspiciousness (How can this therapist understand me?) and (4) ambivalence (a common reaction when working with socially marginalized individuals). Women of color in an interethnic psychotherapy may struggle with negative feelings toward their therapists, while simultaneously developing an attachment to them. Issues of identification and internalization within the inter-ethnic dyad may also foster ambivalence in the client. The intra-ethnic transference may include the following: (1) omniscient/omnipotent therapist (idealization of the therapist frequently with the fantasy of the reunion with the perfect parent, promoted by
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the ethnic similarity); (2) traitor (client exhibits resentment and envy at therapist’s successes—equated with betrayal and the selling out of his/ her culture and race); (3) auto-racist (client does not want to work with a therapist of her own ethnicity, due to projection of the strong negative feelings about herself onto the therapist); and (4) ambivalent (women may feel comfortable with their shared ethnocultural background, but at the same time, they may fear too much psychological closeness). Some countertransferential reactions within the inter-ethnic dyad include the following: (1) denial of cultural differences; (2) the clinical anthropologist’s syndrome (excessive curiosity about women of color’s ethnocultural backgrounds at the expense of their emotional needs); (3) guilt (emerges when societal and political realities dictate a lower status for women of color); (4) pity (a derivative of guilt or an expression of political impotence within the therapeutic hour) (5) aggression; and (6) ambivalence (it may originate from ambivalence toward therapist’s own ethnoculture). Within the intra-ethnic dyad some of the countertransferential reactions are the following: (1) overidentification; (2) us and them mentality (shared victimization due to gendered ethnocultural discrimination may contribute to therapist’s ascribing the woman’s problems as being solely due to being a person of color); (3) distancing; (4) survivor’s guilt (therapists of color may have the personal experience of escaping the harsh socioeconomic circumstances of low income ethnic minorities, leaving family and friends in the process, and generating conflict and guilt); (5) cultural myopia (inability to see clearly due to ethnocultural factors that obscure therapy); (6) ambivalence (working through the therapist’s own ethnic ambivalence); and (7) anger (being too ethnoculturally close to a woman of color may uncover painful, unresolved emotional issues). The examination of ethnocultural transference and countertransference advances the psychotherapeutic process. PHASES IN THE PSYCHOTHERAPEUTIC PROCESS The ethnocultural psychotherapeutic process unfolds the phases of intuition, affect, cognition, and coalescence. Although these stages seem to follow a developmental path, in reality, they are fluid and permeable. During the intuitive stage, women of color are reading the therapist’s nonverbal communication. In other words, they are literally checking the therapist out. Thus, nonverbal communication such as body language, hunches, and vibes acquires central importance. Although both therapist and client follow their gut feelings, women of color tend to rely more on their intuition, while therapists are cognitively engaged in collecting data, making a diagnosis, and developing a treatment plan.
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Ethnocultural therapists pay special attention to gut feelings. Partly due to being oppressed, women of color rely on nonverbal signs to decipher meanings within power differentials. At times, they communicate indirectly—a style prevalent among sociocentric individuals. When therapists overlook such communication, then empathic difficulties occur. In particular, women of color check out their therapist for the presence of racism and sexism. In other words, women of color follow their intuition. Consequently, ethnocultural psychotherapists attend to all kinds of communication—what is said and not said—throughout all phases of the therapeutic process. The affective phase refers to feelings and emotions. It includes women’s subjective experiences of being a woman, a person of color, and a woman of color. To facilitate understanding women’s feelings, therapists ask: ‘‘How do you feel being a person of color?’’ ‘‘What does it mean to you to be a woman of color?’’ The affective phase unfolds women’s subjective experience of being a person of color. More importantly, the woman ascertains how she feels about the therapist, and conversely, the therapist examines how he or she feels about the client. Indeed, the affective phase sets the stage for the emergence of ethnocultural transference and countertransference. The cognitive phase involves the intellectual understanding of the therapeutic alliance. Pre-therapy expectations are expressed and discussed during this phase. The cognitive stage entails a reality testing of cultural differences and/or similarities. It signals the recognition of the presence of transference and countertransference. Ethnogender factors influencing the psychotherapeutic process begin to come together during coalescence. For example, women’s feelings regarding treatment and their clinician are articulated and negotiated during this stage. Women begin to accept their therapist as a helping person. Cultural differences are worked through, including power differentials. These processes provide a model for the reconciliation of differences. Women examine their fractured identities and begin to integrate disparate aspects of the self. For these reasons, the therapeutic restoration takes place during coalescence and the potential for growth is enhanced.
ETHNOCULTURAL PSYCHOTHERAPY TOOLS In addition to mainstream therapeutic strategies, clinicians use ethnocultural tools. Some of these instruments include the explanatory model of distress, cultural genograms, cultural transitional maps, and ethnocultural occupational inventory. Other ethnocultural tools include narratives/storytelling, testimonies, and indigenous healing techniques. In this chapter I briefly present the explanatory model of distress, cultural genogram, and the ethnocultural occupational inventory.
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The explanatory model of distress is an ethnographical clinical tool used to elicit clients’ expectations and perspectives on their illness (Kleinman, 1980). Clinicians ask the following questions (Callan & Littlewood, 1998; Kleinman, 1980): What do you call your problem (distress or illness)? What do you think your problem (illness) does? What do you think the natural course of your illness is? What do you fear? Why do you think this illness or problem has occurred? How do you think the distress should be treated? How do want me to help you? Who do you turn to for help? Who should be involved in decision-making?
Therapists who ask these questions convey respect and interest in their clients. As they earn clients’ trust, clinicians foster the emergence of a healing alliance. Another ethnocultural tool is the cultural genogram. This instrument emphasizes the role of culture in the lives of individuals and their families (Hardy & Laszloffy, 1995). Like regular genograms (McGoldrick, Gerson, & Shellenberger, 1999), cultural genograms diagram the genealogical, developmental, historical, political, economical, and sociological influences on individuals’ lives. Moreover, cultural genograms place women within their collective circumstances and identify their ethnogender, spiritual, and racial contexts. Furthermore, cultural genograms emphasize the effects of skin color, hair texture, body type, phenotype, and appearance in women of color. Similarly, the cultural transitional map clarifies the information regarding family transitions. The cultural transitional map elucidates women’s individual and collective history of translocation. In addition, this tool assesses personal, familial, ethnocultural, and community mappings in families undergoing sociocultural change and transition (Ho, 1987). Finally, the ethnocultural occupational inventory assesses women’s experiences within work settings. For example, Dr. Brown explored Ana’s experiences as a lawyer. She used the ethnocultural occupational inventory to explore Ana’s experiences as a woman, a woman of color, a mixed race woman, and a professional of color working in a predominantly white law firm. Among other areas, the ethnocultural occupational inventory explored the following: 1. Meaning of work for Ana, her family and her ethnic group 2. Family history of higher education and occupational attainment 3. Previous and current work (paid and pro bono)
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The completion of Ana’s occupational inventory signaled Ana’s resolve to engage in a transformative action. All of the ethnocultural psychotherapy processes, stages, and tools affirm women’s empowerment and identity reformulation. The therapeutic work lays the foundation for the development of women’s ethnogender consciousness. ETHNOGENDER CONSCIOUSNESS Ethnocultural psychotherapy aims to provide a safe forum for women’s identity reformulation. It offers acceptance of the client’s gendered ethnicity by conveying the relevance of identity affirmation and reformulation in healing. Ethnocultural consciousness is a pivotal factor in recovery and liberation. Due to cultural imperialism, sexist racism, and multiple forms of oppression, many women of color develop cultural amnesia. To awaken their cultural legacy and reconnect with their roots, women of color need to become ethnoculturally conscious. The process of reconnecting with ethnic, cultural and spiritual roots, ethnocultural consciousness enhances women’s ability to resist oppression. In other words, ethnocultural consciousness helps women of color to rescue their gendered cultural strengths and acknowledge their multiple intersecting identities. Simply put, ethnocultural consciousness promotes women of color’s ability to assert and celebrate who they are. Therapists initiate women’s consciousness during the completion of the ethnocultural assessment. However, the development of ethnocultural and feminist consciousness requires more than the delineation of heritage, legacy, and herstory. Consciousness needs to embrace women’s cultural resilience, strengths, and gifts.
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An important aspect in women of color’s resilience is spirituality. Indeed, feminism of color is embedded in spiritual contexts. To illustrate, womanism—African American women’s feminism—affirms female strengths, fights oppression, and promotes collective social justice (Walker, 1983). A womanist goal is the infusion of spirituality into women’s lives (Phillips, 2006). Likewise, Latina feminism—mujerismo— is anchored in spirit. Based on liberation theology, mujeristas commit to the decolonization of all people (Isasi-Diaz, 1994). Womanism and mujerismo aim to empower women and their communities. Both movements are revolutionary, communal, and generative. As collective efforts, womanism and mujerismo foment global solidarity (ComasDıaz, 2008). Their multidisciplinary foundation nurtures women’s ethnogender and cultural consciousness. Feminism of color spiritually based awareness enhances women of color’s cultural resilience. It leads women to resist the pressure to revise or to repress experience, to embrace conflict rather than conformity, and endure anger and pain rather than submitting to repression and oppression (Tal, 1996). When women of color become conscious, they alchemize oppression into liberation (Comas-Dıaz, 2008). As women reconnect with their ethnogender strengths, they rescue their gifts of power. The experience of multiple intersecting oppressions facilitates the development of gifts of power. These gifts—ethnogender intuition, prophetic abilities, and healing capacities—are spiritually based. In other words, many women of color use their spirituality to rescue their gifts of power to empower themselves and others. Since these gifts constitute a resistance against oppression, colonization, and cultural imperialism, they instill women with transformation and liberation (Comas-Dıaz, 2008). The flexibility inherent in ethnocultural consciousness helps women to reformulate their identity. Ethnocultural consciousness travels a developmental journey. As such, it is similar to Maria Harris’s (1991) depiction of female spiritual evolution. She identified women’s spiritual development as a rhythmic dance of awakening, discovering, creating, dwelling, nourishing, traditioning, and transforming. All of these stages are interconnected in the lives of women of color. For instance, within their traditioning process, many women of color resort to creativity. Indeed, a significant part of cultural resilience is the nurturing of creativity. Of interest, research has shown positive relationship between people’s multiculturalism and their creativity (Leung, Maddux, Galinsky, & Chiu, 2008). In other words, being exposed to multicultural experiences enhances creativity. Certainly, many women of color engage in creative healing and liberation. CONCLUSION Ethnocultural psychotherapy acknowledges the concept of self as an internal gendered ethnocultural representation. It addresses female
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intersecting identities and contextual realities through the integration of diversity variables into mental health assessment and treatment. Ethnocultural psychotherapists view the therapeutic relationship as the recognition of the self in the other. Consequently, they use ethnocultural tools to empower and affirm ethnogender identity. Indeed, ethnocultural psychotherapy helps women to go back home. They are empowered to reconstruct and inhabit their place in the world. Ana, the lawyer who was discriminated against for being a black Latina, remained in therapy with Dr. Brown for a year. The completion of her ethnocultural assessment facilitated Ana’s reconnection with herself and with her community. Therapy helped her to reconcile and integrate diverse aspects of her identity. Based on her responses to the occupational inventory, Ana left the law firm where she was employed. Later on, she established her own company specializing in immigration services. Six months after completing therapy, Ana sent Dr. Brown a local newspaper article announcing Ana’s selection as woman of the year. REFERENCES Betancourt, J. R., Green, A. R., Carrillo, J. E., & Ananch-Firempong, O. (2003, July–August). Defining cultural competence: A practical framework for addressing racial/ethnic disparities in health and health care. Public Health Reports, 118, 293–302. Callan, A. & Littlewood, R. (1998). Patient satisfaction: Ethnic origin or explanatory model? International Journal of Social Psychiatry, 44, 1–11. Comas-Dıaz, L. (2008). Spirita: Reclaiming womanist sacredness in feminism. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 32, 13–21. Comas-Dıaz, L., & Jacobsen, F. M. (1991). Ethnocultural transference and countertransference in the therapeutic dyad. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 61, 392–402. Comas-Dıaz, L., & Jacobsen, F. M. (2004). Ethnocultural psychotherapy. In E. Crighead & C. Nemeroff (Eds.), The concise encyclopedia of psychology and behavioral science (pp. 338–339). New York: Wiley. Duran, E., & Ivey, A. E. (2006). Healing the soul wound: counseling with American Indians and other Native People. New York: Teachers College Press. Elsass, P. (1992). Strategies for survival: The psychology of cultural resilience in ethnic minorities. New York: New York University Press. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Seabury Press. Freire, P. (1973). Education for critical consciousness. New York: Seabury. Freire, P., & Macedo, D. (2000). The Paulo Freire reader. New York: Continuum. Galinsky, A. D., & Moskowitz, G. B. (2000). Perspective-taking: Decreasing stereotype expression, stereotype accessibility, and in-group favoritism. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 78, 708–724. Hardy, K. V., & Laszloffy, T. (1995). The cultural genogram: Key to training culturally competent family therapists. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 21, 227–237.
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Harris, M. (1991). Dance of spirit. The seven steps of women’s spirituality. New York: Bantam Books. Ho, M. H. (1987). Family therapy with ethnic minorities. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Isasi-Diaz, A. M. (1994). Mujeristas: A name of our own: Sisters struggling in the spirit. In N. B. Lewis (Ed.), A women of color theological anthology (pp. 126– 138). Louisville, KY: Women’s Ministries Program, Presbyterian Church. Jacobsen, F. M. (1988). Ethnocultural assessment. In L. Comas-Dıaz & E. H. Griffith (Eds.), Clinical guidelines in cross-cultural mental health. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Jenkins, A. (1985, August 25). Dialogue and dialectic: Psychotherapy in cross cultural contexts. Paper presented at the American Psychological Association annual convention, Los Angeles. Jones, E. (1984). Some reflections of the black patient in psychotherapy. The Clinical Psychologist, 37, 62–65. Jordan, J. V., & Surrey, J. L. (1986). The self-in-relation: Empathy and the mother–daughter relationship. In T. Bernay & D. W. Cantor (Eds.), The psychology of today’s woman: New psychoanalytic visions. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press. Kaplan, A. (1991). The self in relation: implications for depression in women. In J. V. Jordan, A. G. Kaplan, J. B. Miller, I. P. Stiver, & J. I. Surrey (Eds.), Women’s growth in connection: Writings from the Stone Center (pp. 206–222). New York: Guilford. Kleinman, A. (1980). Patients and healers in the context of culture: An exploration of the borderland between anthropology, medicine, and psychiatry. Berkeley: University of California Press. Knipscheer, J. W., & Kleber, R. J. (2004). A need for ethnic similarity in the therapist-patient interaction? Mediterranean Migrants in Dutch mental health care. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 60, 543–554. Kuppersmith, J. (1987). The double bind of personal striving: Ethnic working class women in psychotherapy. Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy, 17, 203–216. Leung, A. K.-Y., Maddux, W., Galinsky, A., & Chiu, C.-Y. (2008). Multicultural experience enhances creativity: The when and how. American Psychologist, 63, 169–181. McGoldrick, M., Gerson, R., & Shellenberger, S. (1999). Genograms: Assessment and intervention. New York: Norton W.W. Company. Phillips, L. (Ed.). (2006). The womanist reader. New York: Routledge. Ramirez, M. (1991). Psychotherapy and counseling with minorities: A cognitive approach to individual and cultural differences. New York: Pergamon. Ridley, C., & Lingle, D. W. (1996). Cultural empathy in multicultural counseling: A multidimensional process model. In P. B. Pedersen, J. G. Draguns, W. J. Lonner, & J. E. Trimble (Eds.), Counseling across cultures (4th ed., pp. 21– 46). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Said, E. W. (1994). Culture and imperialism. New York: Vintage Books. Slater, L., Daniel, J. H., & Banks, A. (2003). The complete guide for mental health for women. Boston: Beacon Press. Stern, D. N. (1985). The interpersonal world of the infant: A view from psychoanalysis and developmental psychology. New York: Basic Books.
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Tal, K. (1996). Words of hurt. Reading the literatures of trauma. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press. Varghese, F. T. N. (1983). The racially-different psychiatrist: Implications for psychotherapy. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 17, 329–333. Walker, A. (1983). In search of our mothers’ garden: Womanist prose. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Chapter 3
Women and Sexual Violence: Emotional, Physical, Behavioral, and Organizational Responses Paula Lundberg-Love Bethany Waits
Female survivors of sexual violence are everywhere. They are in universities, religious institutions, court rooms, hospitals, and the military. They are daughters, mothers, spouses, sisters, friends, next-door neighbors, and coworkers. Many differ in age, education, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status (Klump, 2006; Koss, Bailey, & Yuan, 2003). However, their lives are connected by the violence that they have experienced. Sexual violence is a pervasive social problem, and as Koss et al. (1994) aptly noted, there is ‘‘no safe haven’’ for women from victimization. National epidemiological data indicates that between 17 and 25 percent of women in the United States report some form of sexual assault in their lifetime (Campbell, 2008). Results of a national telephone survey conducted in 2001 to 2003 found that approximately 2.7 million women experienced sexual violence during the last 12 months prior to the survey. The same study also reported that approximately 11.7 million women had been victimized at some point during their lives (Basile, Chen, Black, & Saltzman, 2007). Globally, at least one woman in three is beaten, coerced into sex, or otherwise abused at some point in her life (Koss et al., 2003). Sexual violence is a comprehensive term that describes all acts of unwanted sexual activity including rape, sexual assault, and intimate partner violence (IPV). According to Hedtke et al. (2008), rape typically
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includes forced vaginal, oral, or anal penetration with a penis or other objects without a person’s consent. For many years, the term ‘‘rape’’ was used to describe all acts of sexual violence. Recently, it has been abandoned in favor of the gender-neutral term ‘‘sexual assault,’’ which is defined as nonconsensual sexual contact obtained by physical force, by threat of physical harm, or in situations where the victim is unable to give consent (Golding, 1999; Lee & Kleiner, 2003). This definition can include unwanted sexual kissing to situations involving oral, anal, or vaginal intercourse (Golding, 1999). Furthermore, IPV is defined as ‘‘threatened, attempted, or completed physical or sexual violence or emotional abuse by a current or former intimate partner’’ (Black & Breiding, 2008, p. 646). IPV can be committed by a spouse, an exspouse, a boyfriend, or a dating partner. Since the majority of sexual assaults are committed by individuals known to the victim, it is not surprising that many victims of sexual violence also experience IPV. Prior to the early 1970s, research concerning sexual violence focused almost exclusively on characteristics of the perpetrator, and little attention was given to the distress of survivors. The women’s movement was instrumental in shifting the direction of sexual assault research from the rapist to the psychological sequelae that victims experience (Neville & Heppner, 1999). Rape crisis centers established in the late 1970s and early 1980s provided immediate intervention and long-term therapy to individuals, as well as early research documenting women’s psychological reactions to sexual violence, which included fear, anxiety, and depression. These studies were critical in heightening awareness concerning the severity of the trauma that survivors encountered (1999). For instance, an initial survey interviewed victims four to six years after their rape experience and found that approximately 26 percent still did not feel recovered from the crime, suggesting that the effects of sexual violence reached far beyond the initial attack (Koss et al., 1994). Since the 1980s, literature concerning the impact of victimization has extended past psychological sequelae to other reactions that victims encounter. These include various physical, neurological, behavioral, and organizational responses, which will be discussed in the following sections (Kaltman, Krupnick, Stockton, Hooper, & Green, 2005). PSYCHOLOGICAL RESPONSES The psychological impact of sexual violence has been extensively studied. Research has consistently documented that victims experience intense psychological distress immediately following the attack. This distress typically peaks in severity approximately three weeks post assault and continues to remain at an elevated level for several months. While initial distress may dissipate over time, longitudinal studies suggest that a significant number of victims continue to experience chronic
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mental health problems for many years subsequent to victimization (Neville & Heppner, 1999). Indeed, Koss et al. (2003) found that several years after their rape, approximately one-fourth of women continued to experience negative psychological effects. These typically include posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), major depression, sexual dysfunction, and generalized anxiety (Koss & Kilpatrick, 2001). Even when evaluated many years later, one study found that between 31 and 65 percent of victims met the diagnostic criteria for PTSD, and 43 percent met the criteria for major depression (Campbell, 2008). These studies provided evidence that psychological distress following victimization is prevalent among survivors and can cause long-term devastation to the individual’s well-being and mental health (Hedtke et al., 2008). Several researchers have documented that the most common immediate reactions following sexual violence are fear and anxiety (Bohn & Holz, 1996; Goodman, Koss, & Russo, 1993; Koss et al., 1994; Neville & Heppner, 1999; Resick, 1993). Within 72 hours of the assault, 86 percent of victims report having intense fear of their assailant and anxiety about their personal safety. By the third week, rape-induced anxiety typically reaches maximum levels, and studies suggest that it may not begin to lessen for up to three years (Koss et al., 1994). For instance, when compared to survivors of other crimes such as robbery, rape victims describe greater anxiety and fear at six months and at one year following the assault. The most frequent fears reported by victims included talking to the police, tough-looking people, being alone, blind dates, going out with new people, and making mistakes (Neville & Heppner, 1999). As with anxiety, depressive symptomatology is typically observed within a few hours to a few days following victimization (Koss et al., 1994). These symptoms consist of sad feelings about the assault, loss of interest in normal activities, suicidal thoughts, sleep disturbances, fatigue, frequent crying spells, and an inability to concentrate (Bohn & Holz, 1996; Goodman et al., 1993; Koss et al., 1994). Many victims meet diagnostic criteria for major depressive disorder only a few weeks subsequent to the attack (Koss et al., 1994). In one study, 56 percent of rape survivors reported depressive symptoms and 43 percent met the diagnostic criteria for major depression one month after the attack (Koss et al., 2003). Furthermore, women who have been raped are three times more likely to meet criteria for lifetime major depression, are two times as likely to qualify for a diagnosis of dysthymia, and are 2.5 times more likely to report recent depression when compared to nonvictims (Koss, Figueredo, & Prince, 2002). Overall, 13 percent of victims of sexual violence suffer from a major depressive disorder sometime in their lives as compared with 5 percent who never experience such abuse (Koss & Kilpatrick, 2001). As major depressive disorders become more prevalent among victims, suicidal thoughts also may increase. According to Koss and Kilpatrick (2001), victims of
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sexual violence are at an elevated risk for suicidal ideation when compared with nonvictims. Within the first month, suicidal ideation was reported by 33 to 50 percent of survivors, and in one study 22 percent of sexually abused women reported suicidal ideation in the previous 12-month period as compared to 7 percent of nonabused women (Koss et al., 1994). Since the frequency of suicidal thoughts is elevated, it should not be surprising that approximately 19 percent of victims report at least one suicide attempt at some point in their lifetime (Koss et al., 2003). Victims of sexual violence are considered the largest single group that suffers from PTSD (Koss & Kilpatrick, 2001). According to Bohn and Holz (1996), a wide range of symptoms such as flashbacks, intrusive recollections about the abuse, repetitive dreams and nightmares, psychological numbing, anxiety, irritability, insomnia, hypersensitivity, and hypervigilance are frequently reported. Approximately one-third of female survivors are diagnosed with PTSD immediately following the attack (Ullman, Filipas, Townsend, & Starzynski, 2007). After three weeks, 79 percent of victims met the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, fourth edition (DSM-IV) criteria for PTSD (Gilboa-Schechtman & Foa, 2001). In addition, prospective studies have demonstrated that within two weeks of the assault, 90 percent of victims met symptom criteria for PTSD while 50 percent continued to meet the criteria three months later (Koss et al., 2003). Research from community-based samples found that between 44 and 49 percent of women who experienced sexual violence were diagnosed with PTSD (Littleton & Breitkopf, 2006). According to Resnick, Acierno, Holmes, Dammeyer, and Kilpatrick (2000), the lifetime prevalence of PTSD among survivors is approximately 30 percent; however, estimates as high as 50 percent also have been reported. Finally, another study found that individuals who experienced sexual violence were 6.2 times more likely to suffer from PTSD than women who had never been victimized (Koss et al., 2003). Typically, survivors reported feeling ‘‘dirty’’ and ‘‘unclean’’ following sexual victimization. While many of these feelings are related to visible dirt and contamination from the attack, they also may result from a sense of internal, non-visible contamination. Researchers define this phenomenon as ‘‘mental pollution,’’ and for many, mental pollution continues despite being visibly clean (Fairbrother & Rachman, 2004). As a result, survivors may engage in excessive washing behaviors in an attempt to remove the ‘‘unclean’’ feelings sustained from the assault. One study conducted by Fairbrother and Rachman (2004) assessed mental pollution among a sample of sexual assault survivors and found that 70 percent of participants reported an urge to wash or clean themselves subsequent to the attack. Furthermore, 49 percent of the sample reported washing more than one time and 24 percent continued washing for several weeks. More than 25 percent of women in
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the sample who washed in response to mental pollution reported that they continued to wash excessively for several months and 11.8 percent persisted in this behavior for at least one year post-assault (Fairbrother & Rachman, 2004). Few studies have determined the long-term consequences of mental pollution on victims’ psychological well-being. However, several case studies suggest that continued washing as a result of mental pollution might result in the onset of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). While this finding has been documented in several cases, further research is needed to understand fully the relationship between mental pollution and OCD (Fairbrother & Rachman, 2004). As mentioned previously, victims of sexual violence are at an increased risk to experience fear, anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation, PTSD, and mental pollution when compared to nonvictims. Several other psychological sequelae including sexual dysfunction and eating disorders frequently also are reported by survivors. According to Koss et al. (1994), victims experience less sexual satisfaction and more sexual problems than nonvictimized women. In one study of adult survivors, 61 percent reported sexual dysfunction, especially avoidance of sex, immediately after the crime. Other frequent problems included a lack of desire, fear of sex, and difficulty becoming aroused. Even four to six years after the incident, 30 percent of women did not feel that their sexual functioning had returned to normal pre-rape levels (1994). In addition, victims of sexual violence are more likely to report eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia nervosa than nonvictims (H. Resnick, Acierno, & Kilpatrick, 1997). In a group of bulimic patients, 23 percent had been raped, 29 percent had been sexually abused as children, and 23 percent had experienced IPV (Koss et al., 1994). Since eating disorders may have life-threatening consequences, it is important for clinicians to assess for previous trauma history in order to provide more appropriate treatments for these individuals. According to Koss and colleagues (2003), the psychological impact associated with sexual victimization has been well established for several decades. As a result, investigators are now turning their attention from symptomatology to the moderators and mediators that translate abuse into psychological distress. A moderator is a variable that affects the relationship between two other variables (i.e., sexual violence and poor mental health), changing the direction or magnitude of the effects. A mediator, or intervening variable, acts as a link in a causal chain which mitigates the effect from the independent (i.e., sexual assault) to the dependent (i.e., mental health) variable. In cases of sexual victimization, moderators and mediators typically enhance the damaging impact of the abuse experience on victims, thereby prolonging recovery. For example, potential moderators that may exacerbate psychological distress include previous trauma history, maladaptive coping strategies, negative social reactions, and various characteristics
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associated with the assault. The most powerful mediators include social cognitions involving self-blame and perceived control. Evidence suggests that women who have been sexually victimized in childhood or adolescence are more likely to be revictimized in adulthood (Koss et al., 2003). A recent meta-analysis estimated that 15 to 79 percent of female child sexual abuse (CSA) survivors experience rape as adults (Kaltman et al., 2005). According to Campbell et al. (2008), women with a history of previous sexual violence who are revictimized in adulthood have poorer mental health outcomes than victims of a single instance of sexual assault. Indeed, these individuals have significantly elevated levels of PTSD and depression as compared to those without a history of previous trauma (Campbell, Greeson, Bybee, & Raja, 2008). Kaltman and colleagues (2005) demonstrated that college sophomores who experienced CSA and were then revictimized as adults, reported more Axis I diagnoses, more comorbid diagnoses, including PTSD, depression, and general distress than other victims without a history of prior abuse. A history of CSA also has been found to prolong recovery among victims (Krause, Kaltman, Goodman, & Dutton, 2008). For instance, longitudinal studies regarding the course of depression and PTSD suggest that CSA contributes to chronic symptomatology and persistent, unremitting distress among individuals who were revictimized at some point in adulthood (Koss et al., 2003). The coping strategies utilized by women following sexual violence are highly influential in recovery. Research suggests that there are two primary strategies an individual can employ when faced with a stressful event, approach coping and avoidance coping. Approach coping is chosen when the individual decides that she has sufficient resources to cope with her emotional reaction to the stressor (Littleton & Breitkopf, 2006). Several of these strategies involve keeping busy, thinking positively, obtaining support, and making life changes (Draucker, 2001). In contrast, avoidance coping occurs when an individual lacks the coping resources necessary to handle the stressful situation (Littleton & Breitkopf, 2006). In such cases, the victim is likely to implement strategies such as denying the existence of the stressor, avoiding thoughts about the stressor, staying home, and withdrawing from friends (Draucker, 2001; Littleton & Breitkopf, 2006). A growing body of literature suggests that avoidance coping is correlated with more severe psychological distress following sexual victimization (Krause et al., 2008). For example, trying to forget about or ‘‘block out’’ the assault is correlated with the prolonged recovery of survivors (Ullman et al., 2007). Avoidance coping also has been associated with increased PTSD symptom severity when compared to victims who implemented other strategies (Krause et al., 2008; Ullman et al., 2007). Although many victims employ avoidance coping, other victims who
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cope by keeping busy, thinking positively, and making life changes (i.e., approach coping) actually report less psychological distress and more favorable recoveries. Thus, the manner in which a victim copes (i.e., avoidance or approach) with sexual assault may substantially determine the severity of her symptoms and duration of her recovery. Social reactions from friends and family members can mitigate or magnify the psychological effects of sexual violence (Koss et al., 2003). Several studies have documented that negative social reactions such as blaming the victim, treating the victim differently, and trying to distract the victim result in prolonged recovery and increased psychological distress. Specifically, when victims are blamed or treated differently post-assault, PTSD symptoms are significantly worse than when other reactions are present. Attempting to distract victims from their pain by telling them to ‘‘move on with their lives’’ or to ‘‘stop talking about the assault’’ is also related to PTSD severity and long-lasting distress (Ullman & Filipas, 2001). Although many people’s initial reaction to rape and sexual assault is negative, research suggests that positive social responses to victimization may result in a significantly reduced risk of anxiety, depression, PTSD, and suicidal ideation among sexual assault survivors (Coker et al., 2002). Even if the victim merely perceives more positive social support from those around her, she is more likely to report fewer psychological symptoms (Klump, 2006). Therefore, interventions targeting social support and appropriate reactions toward victims are needed in order to promote more positive outcomes in survivors (Campbell et al., 2008). Certain characteristics associated with the attack also have been linked to more negative psychological outcomes among victims (Hedtke et al., 2008). These include the use of physical force or weapons, high perceived fear of death, physical injuries sustained during the attack, and the victim’s relationship to the perpetrator (Koss et al., 2003). In one study, rape victims with PTSD were more likely to have been attacked by strangers, subjected to force or weapons, and sustained physical injuries than were victims without PTSD. Among a national sample of sexual violence survivors, researchers discovered that high perceived life threat and physical injury were related to more PTSD symptoms as compared to controls (Ullman & Filipas, 2001). Finally, Abbey, BeShears, Clinton-Sherrod, and McAuslan (2004) found that women whose perpetrators used physical force as their primary modality of victimization experienced the most extreme negative psychological consequences when compared with other victims. According to Koss and colleagues (2002), unexpected acts such as rape stimulate causal attributions, or attempts to answer the question, ‘‘Why did this happen to me?’’ In response to this question, victims may blame external forces, controllable features related to their own behavior, or uncontrollable and enduring aspects of their
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personalities. Research suggests that individuals automatically develop specific ways of processing certain events in their lives. These processes, or social cognitions, include ‘‘just world’’ assumptions (i.e., bad things happen to bad people) and beliefs about personal control, invulnerability, trust, self-esteem, and intimacy (Koss et al., 2002). When incongruity exists between lived experience and social cognitions, individuals become distressed and attempt to resolve the conflict by altering beliefs and modifying how the incident is interpreted. Typically, victims of sexual assault rectify this incongruence by engaging in either behavioral self-blame or characterological self-blame (2002). In order to assess the effects of both characterological and behavioral self-blame on psychological well-being, Koss et al. (2002) assessed victims’ attributions of responsibility (e.g., self-blame) and maladaptive beliefs (e.g., beliefs that result in maladaptive conclusions about the self and others following a traumatic event) after sexual assault. Their findings demonstrated that blaming one’s own character for rape led to maladaptive beliefs, which increased PTSD severity. Therefore, women who felt responsible for their rape developed beliefs such as ‘‘the world is not a safe place,’’ and were in turn less likely to recover and more likely to report long-term psychological distress (Koss et al., 2002). Other studies also have documented this finding (Fraizer, 2003; Ullman et al., 2007). In addition to self-blame and maladaptive beliefs, perceived control concerning the past, the present, and the future may be a potential mediator between sexual assault and psychological sequelae. Perceived past control refers to an individual’s belief that one had control over the occurrence of a traumatic event (Frazier, 2003). While researchers have hypothesized that perceived past control may aid in recovery, several studies suggest that past control is either unassociated with distress or associated with more distress among victims. According to Frazier, past control is rarely helpful in recovery, primarily because it is generally unrelated to measures of future control. Even if victims believe that they had control over a negative event in the past, they do not necessarily believe that they will have control over the same event in the future. However, research does suggest that recovery from rape is better among victims who do believe that they can prevent or avoid a future occurrence of trauma (Koss et al., 2002). Other studies also have documented that perceived future control is associated with lower psychological distress among victims. Although future control can be beneficial, present control, which involves control over the recovery process, has been found to be the most adaptive type of perceived control. Present control allows the victim to regain a sense of control in an otherwise uncontrollable situation. Thus, focusing on control over the recovery process may yield the most positive outcomes among victims of sexual assault (Frazier, 2003).
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PHYSICAL RESPONSES The tendency to report physical health symptoms following victimization has led to an increased rate of medical service seeking among those who experience sexual violence (Ullman & Brecklin, 2003). Koss and Kilpatrick (2001) reported that medical utilization among victims increased by 31 to 56 percent approximately five years after the attack, compared to a 2 percent increase among nonvictims during the corresponding time period. Furthermore, among all female primary care patients, 25 to 28 percent have a history of sexual violence, suggesting that poor physical health is common among these individuals (Koss et al., 1994). On standardized self-report measures of health perception and functioning, victims report significantly poorer health habits and increased symptoms in all body systems except for the skin and eyes (Resnick et al., 1997). Indeed, a number of complaints are diagnosed disproportionately among survivors including physical injuries, gynecological disorders, gastrointestinal disorders, and chronic pain (Koss & Kilpatrick, 2001). Approximately 40 percent of victims receive nongenital, physical injuries following an incident of victimization, and among those who are injured, 54 percent seek medical treatment (Koss et al., 1994). The most common injuries consist of abrasions to the head, neck, face, thorax, breasts, and abdomen (Campbell, 2002; Goodman et al., 1993). Other injuries such as bruising, contusions, bone fractures, and lacerations also have been reported (Cook, Dickens, & Thapa, 2005; Resnick et al., 1997). Data from the National Women’s Study documented that only 4 percent of victims sustained serious injuries, suggesting that the majority of injuries may be minor (Resnick et al., 1997). At least 50 percent of all victims treated in emergency departments report vaginal and perineal trauma (Groer, Thomas, Evans, Helton, & Weldon, 2006). According to Resnick et al. (2000), approximately 15 percent of women who have been sexually victimized have significant vaginal tears, with 1 percent requiring surgery to repair the damage. The incidence of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) among victims of sexual violence is between 3.6 and 30 percent (Koss & Kilpatrick, 2001). The most prevalent STDs include gonorrhea, chlamydia, trichomonal infections, and syphilis. However, research also indicates that victims may have an increased risk for hepatitis B and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) (Resnick et al., 2000). Although the rate of HIV transmission due to rape is unknown, it is a great concern for a majority of victims (Koss & Kilpatrick, 2001). One study found that 89 percent of women interviewed one month after their assaults mentioned fear of contracting HIV (Resnick et al., 2000). When assessed several months following the attack, between 26 and 40 percent of victims spontaneously mentioned AIDS and HIV as a concern, and for
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more than half of these individuals, it was their primary concern (Koss et al., 1994). Finally, studies have consistently documented that approximately 5 percent of sexual assault cases result in pregnancy (Koss & Kilpatrick, 2001; Resnick et al., 2000). Gynecological disorders are the most frequently reported physical health problem among victims of sexual violence. At one-year postassault, women continue to experience severe gynecological dysfunction (Campbell, Lichty, Sturza, & Raja, 2006). For instance, approximately 26 to 82 percent of victims report chronic pelvic pain subsequent to the attack (Golding, 1999). In a study by Koss et al. (1994), women who had undergone laparoscopy for chronic pelvic pain were more likely to be victims of sexual assault than women who had the procedure for other reasons. Chronic pelvic pain results in approximately 10 to 19 percent of all hysterectomies performed in the United States, which could suggest that survivors may be more likely to have this procedure than nonvictimized women (Koss et al., 1994). While chronic pelvic pain is frequently reported among victims, other gynecological disorders and symptoms also have been mentioned. These include dysmenorrhea, menorrhagia, dyspareunia, vaginal pain, premenstrual syndrome, urinary tract infections, vaginal bleeding, excessive vaginal discharge, painful intercourse, rectal bleeding, fibroids, and multiple yeast infections (Bohn & Holz, 1996; Campbell, 2002; Campbell et al., 2006; Chrisler & Ferguson, 2006; Koss et al., 1994). While physical injuries, STDs, and gynecological disorders are commonly reported, other physical health disturbances also have been documented. For instance, in eight studies, including one general population survey, the incidence of gastrointestinal disorders among victims ranged from 30 to 64 percent (Golding, 1999). Another study found that approximately 44 percent of women evaluated at a gastroenterology clinic reported some type of sexual victimization in adulthood (Koss et al., 1994). Research suggests that nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, constipation, spastic colon, irritable bowl syndrome, abdominal pain, and indigestion are among the most common gastrointestinal problems reported by victims (Campbell 2002; Chrisler & Ferguson, 2006; Goodman et al., 1993). In addition, chronic pain disorders including headaches, back pain, facial pain, neck pain, temporal mandibular joint discomfort, and bruxism are associated with sexual violence (Campbell, 2002; Koss et al., 1994). Among women referred to a multidisciplinary pain center, 53 percent had a history of sexual abuse (Koss et al., 1994). Golding (1999) reported that approximately 45 percent of patients with chronic headaches, 69 percent of patients with facial pain, and 46 percent of patients with chronic back pain had been sexually victimized at some point in their lives. It is estimated that between 50 to 67 percent of women with fibromyalgia and other musculoskeletal disorders have a history of sexual assault (Golding, 1999). Sleep
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disturbances such as nightmares and insomnia, as well as cardiovascular disorders including hypertension, rapid heart rate, and chest pain are also prevalent among victims (Chrisler & Ferguson, 2006). Finally, additional research suggests that victims may be at an elevated risk for infections including influenza and colds (Campbell, 2002). Since many of the physical symptoms associated with sexual violence have been established, researchers are now attempting to identify factors that may explain this relationship. Classical conditioning, assault characteristics, and psychological distress all have been proposed as causal links between abuse and negative health outcomes (Bohn & Holz, 1996; Resnick et al., 1997). When an extremely distressing event (i.e., victimization) occurs, it becomes an unconditioned stimulus that elicits an unconditioned, or automatic, response (Resnick et al., 1997). This automatic response is characterized by cognitive (e.g., perception that one’s life is threatened or that one’s body is defiled), behavioral (e.g., screaming, kicking, running, fighting, or freezing), and physiological (e.g., alterations in respiration, heart rate, gastrointestinal functioning, digestion, and muscle tension) components. Unfortunately, a powerful form of conditioned responding occurs when automatic responses are paired with other cues associated with the attack, such as the time of day the victimization occurred, the sounds and smells present during the attack, the physical appearance of the perpetrator, and dark shadows if the assault occurred at night (Resnick et al., 1997). When this takes place, environmental cues become learned or conditioned stimuli that have the capacity to elicit the cognitive, behavioral, and physiological responses that automatically occurred during the initial trauma. Thus, physical reactions to sexual assault such as abdominal distress, pain, nausea, increased heart rate, shortness of breath, and shaking may become learned conditioned responses to environmental fear triggers (i.e., dark shadows) and cause victims to experience an increase in problematic symptoms (Resnick et al., 1997). According to Resnick and colleagues (1997), as victims continue to experience these health problems, they may be more likely to develop chronic disorders such as fibromyalgia and irritable bowel syndrome. A dose-response relationship may exist between sexual violence and chronic health problems whereby numerous assault experiences result in exacerbated symptoms (Ullman & Brecklin 2003). In one study conducted by Ullman and Brecklin (2003), correlates of past-year chronic medical conditions were examined among women with different sexual victimization histories identified from the National Comorbidity Survey. Findings suggested that for adult victims, more lifetime traumatic sexual encounters were related to increased chronic medical conditions compared to those who experienced a single act of sexual violence (2003). Another study conducted by Campbell et al. (2006) reported
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that the number of vaginal assaults alone was significantly and positively associated with a higher frequency of pelvic pain, vaginal bleeding, discharge, painful intercourse, and painful urination. Those who experienced multiple oral or anal assaults were more likely to report chronic pain and gynecological disorders than those who did not repeatedly experience these types of trauma (2006). Furthermore, research has documented that victims who believed that their lives were in danger during the assault were more likely to experience severe health problems when compared to others devoid of such a history (Ullman & Brecklin, 2003). Recent evidence suggests that psychological distress and mental health sequelae may mediate the physical health conditions associated with sexual violence. Among women recruited from a primary care clinic, sexual assault victims had higher rates of medical complaints only if they also reported psychological distress (Ullman & Brecklin, 2003). Specifically, research suggests that PTSD symptoms are positively correlated with more severe physical symptoms following victimization (Groer et al., 2006). A study conducted by Zoellner, Goodwin, and Foa (2000) assessed survivors with chronic PTSD in order to determine if PTSD symptoms were related to negative health outcomes. Results indicated that negative life events, anger, depression, and PTSD severity all were related to an increase in self-reported health symptoms. However, PTSD symptom severity predicted physical symptoms to a greater degree than the other variables. Thus, although research has repeatedly demonstrated impairment of physical health after sexual assault, it may not be the assault per se, but rather the associated psychological sequelae, such as PTSD, that are responsible for the decline in victims’ well-being (Zoellner et al., 2000). Other studies also have reported a relationship between PTSD severity and physical health symptomatology (Campbell et al., 2008). For instance, Rebecca Campbell et al. (2008) found that PTSD symptom severity was more likely to be associated with persistent health conditions, especially those related to chronic pain, as compared to other factors. As studies continue to document the role of PTSD as a mediator of physical health outcomes, the need for effective treatments and interventions for PTSD becomes more apparent (Campbell et al., 2008). NEUROLOGICAL RESPONSES Initially, literature concerning the neurological sequelae associated with sexual violence was limited to psychogenic seizures, fainting, and convulsions (Campbell, 2002; Koss et al., 1994). In the last twenty years however, research has documented that cognitive functioning, brain structures, hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis activity, cortisol levels, and recovery from traumatic brain injury (TBI) are different
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among victims of sexual violence when compared to nonvictims (Campbell, 2002). Evidence suggests that victims of sexual trauma, especially those with a diagnosis of PTSD, may experience cognitive deficits in attention, learning, memory, and executive functioning (Jenkins, Langlais, Delis, & Cohen, 2000; Stein, Kennedy, & Twamley, 2002). For instance, several studies have documented that survivors exhibit impairments on neurological measures of attention including the Trail Making Test (Part B), the Digit Span and Digit Symbol subtests of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-III (WAIS-III), the Continuous Performance Test (CPT), and the Paced Auditory Serial Addition Task (PASAT) (Jenkins et al., 2000). Jenkins and colleagues (2000) found that victims who were diagnosed with rape-related PTSD were more likely to demonstrate deficits on measures of sustained and focused attention relative to non-PTSD and nontraumatized controls. One theory explaining these results suggests that factors associated with PTSD such as trying to avoid intrusive recollections, sleeping poorly, and being easily startled might result in impaired performance on tests of sustained attention. Furthermore, dissociation, which can range from daydreaming to a complete trance state, is often observed among victims with PTSD and may interfere with an individual’s ability to concentrate and remain focused on a specific task (Jenkins et al., 2000). According to Stein et al. (2002), survivors who report PTSD symptoms are also likely to experience problems with learning, memory, and executive functioning. In one study, visuoconstruction, visual memory, and executive function all were impaired significantly in sexual assault victims (Stein et al., 2002). In addition, findings from three large samples using standardized memory assessments have demonstrated that rape memories are more affectively intense and negative than other memories when compared to non-rape traumatic events (Koss & Kilpatrick, 2001). As with cognitive impairments, research investigating differences in brain structures has largely focused on the role of PTSD in mediating these effects. Studies utilizing structural magnetic resonance imaging among individuals with rape-related PTSD have consistently found smaller hippocampal volumes compared to those without histories of trauma. Among victims with recent-onset PTSD, right hippocampal volume was significantly smaller than controls (Wignall et al., 2004). Furthermore, Wignall and colleagues (2004) found that whole brain volume was significantly smaller in traumatized individuals with PTSD compared to nonvictims. Other studies have documented significantly smaller intracranial volumes, slightly larger ventricular volumes, and smaller cerebral volumes in victims who have experienced sexual violence and subsequent PTSD symptomatology (Fennema-Notestine, Stein, Kennedy, Archibald, & Jernigan, 2002). In an effort to determine the effects of PTSD on the whole brain, Fennema-Notestine and colleagues (2002) examined volumes of specific brain regions in adult
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women with a history of IPV, including sexual assault, compared to women without serious trauma histories. Among the IPV women, half had a current diagnosis of PTSD, and half had never reported PTSD symptoms. Their results suggest that regardless of PTSD classification, women who experienced IPV had significantly smaller supratentorial cranial vault volumes compared with controls. Additionally, frontal and occipital gray matter volumes were significantly smaller in all IPV women, which was associated to increased Trails B time performance, especially in women diagnosed with PTSD. Thus, findings from this study reveal that aspects of neuropsychological impairment in victims of sexual violence may be rooted in frontal and mesial temporal abnormalities following victimization (Fennema-Notestine et al., 2002). The HPA axis controls the body’s natural reaction to stress and has been extensively studied in relation to traumatic events including sexual victimization (Girdler et al., 2007). When an individual is exposed to a stressful situation, the hypothalamus becomes activated and begins to release corticotropin-releasing factor, or CRF. This chemical acts at the anterior pituitary gland to induce the release of adrenocorticotropic hormone, ACTH, which in turn activates the adrenal cortex. Once the adrenal cortex is activated, it stimulates the release of cortisol and other glucocorticoids into the general circulation, which enhances energy production to help the body deal with the stressful event. As the body detects higher levels of glucocorticoids in the blood, a dual negativefeedback loop is initiated that directly reduces the release of CRF in the hypothalamus while simultaneously acting on the hippocampus, which also inhibits HPA functioning (Meyer & Quenzer, 2005). Consequently, it should not be surprising that research on the neurobiology of sexual victimization has documented that abuse can result in longterm changes in the HPA axis, which may increase a victim’s risk for negative psychological and physical health sequelae (Hedtke et al., 2008). Although the results of these studies have been mixed, the majority suggest that sexual violence results in lower cortisol concentrations, leading to an overall hyporesponsiveness of the HPA system (Girdler et al., 2007; Seedat, Stein, Kennedy, & Hauger, 2003). Rebecca Campbell and colleagues (2008) have proposed that stress associated with sexual violence triggers an acute response, which increases the sensitivity of the negative-feedback loop in the HPA axis. When this feedback system becomes overly sensitive to the presence of glucocorticoids in the blood, it suppresses both the hypothalamus and the hippocampus, which results in lowered cortisol levels (Campbell et al., 2008). The long-term implications for lowered cortisol levels and HPA dysfunction are alarming. For instance, researchers hypothesize that reduced activity of the HPA axis is associated with stress-related disorders such as chronic fatigue syndrome, chronic headaches, fibromyalgia, rheumatoid arthritis, and abdominal pain. Since many of these
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disorders are reported as common sequelae among victims, dysfunction of the HPA axis and lowered cortisol levels may be another mediator between violence and health-related outcomes (Campbell et al., 2008). Finally, research suggests that there may be an association between sexual victimization and recovery following traumatic brain injury (TBI). According to Reeves, Beltzman, and Killu (2000), patients with a history of sexual violence who have subsequently sustained a TBI frequently report reemergence of sequelae related to the abuse. These typically include intense flashbacks, behavioral disturbances, nightmares, and hypervigilance. Indeed, such individuals who have not reported PTSD symptomatology for many years may spontaneously re-experience vivid, intrusive, and disruptive episodes of past sexual trauma following TBI. Even more disturbing, evidence suggests that victims who have made the most adaptive recoveries from the violence, experience the most disruptive PTSD-symptoms after TBI occurs (Reeves et al., 2000). One possible explanation for this effect is that traumatized individuals develop a hyperaroused limbic system that over time may be inhibited by prefrontal neural structures, especially those in the right prefrontal area. However, in many cases of TBI, particularly those involving a motor vehicle accident, bony protrusions on the interior of the skull result in neurological insult to prefrontal brain tissue. Consequently, when the prefrontal area is damaged, it is unable to govern the effects of hyperarousal in the limbic system, resulting in the reoccurrence of PTSD symptomatology. Since recovery is typically prolonged in these individuals, future research is needed to better understand the relationship of victimization on subsequent TBI (Reeves et al., 2000). BEHAVIORAL RESPONSES The literature reviewed thus far provides ample evidence that sexual violence against women results in long-lasting and pervasive psychological, physical, and neurological sequelae. In addition to these negative effects, research also suggests that victims experience behavioral disturbances following victimization (Koss & Kilpatrick, 2001). For example, survivors are more likely to smoke cigarettes, engage in risky sexual activities, abuse substances, and exhibit negative social behaviors than other women (Resnick et al., 1997). Victims are even less likely to wear seat belts while driving than those without a history of sexual assault (Koss & Kilpatrick, 2001). According to Resnick et al. (1997), the most significant change in behavior subsequent to victimization is cigarette smoking. One study found that nearly 40 percent of women with a history of sexual violence were current smokers, compared to 25 percent of nonvictimized women. Even when controlling
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for the effects of race, education, and psychopathology, the prevalence of current smoking among victims was significantly higher than controls. In addition, studies also have documented that individuals who experience sexual violence are more likely to engage in risky sexual behaviors such as having sex without using contraceptives (Neville & Heppner, 1999). In a sample of adults selected on the basis of engaging in risk behaviors for acquiring or transmitting HIV infection, approximately 54 percent of the women surveyed reported a history of sexual assault (Koss et al., 1994). Several other studies also have found that rape victims are more likely to engage in HIV risk behaviors including prostitution, intravenous drug use, and sex with other drug users compared to nonvictims (Resnick et al., 1997). Research suggests that survivors of sexual violence are more likely to abuse substances than nonvictimized individuals (Sturza & Campbell, 2005), although the direction of this relationship remains unclear. Substance abuse has been identified as both a precursor and a consequence of victimization, and several alternatives have been proposed to explain this relationship (Champion et al., 2004). One theory suggests that substance abuse heightens an individual’s risk for subsequent sexual violence. For instance, women who abuse alcohol and drugs may have an impaired ability to detect potential assailants compared to women who do not abuse these substances. These women may be targeted by perpetrators because they are viewed as more vulnerable to attack than other people (Champion et al., 2004). Other data support these assumptions, documenting a higher prevalence of sexual victimization among substance abusers. In studies among individuals presenting to hospital emergency departments, higher rates of alcohol or drug involvement have been related to injuries associated with sexual assault and rape. Furthermore, longitudinal research has reported that women who had used drugs in the previous year were significantly more likely to experience sexual assault before the next assessment period than women who were not drug users (H. Resnick et al., 2000). A second theory indicates that victims abuse substances as a means of coping with the negative consequences of violence (i.e., selfmedication) (Sturza & Campbell, 2005). After an assault, women may increase their use of alcohol and drugs in order to reduce symptoms of fear, anxiety, and depression (Resnick et al., 1997). Prospective data from the National Women’s Study has confirmed this theory, suggesting that sexual assault leads to substance abuse in previously nonusing individuals. Several studies conducted in accident and emergency departments also found that severe sexual violence preceded both alcohol and drug abuse in most cases (Campbell, 2002). According to Jacquelyn Campbell (2002), women with severe PTSD also may abuse substances to cope with specific groups of symptoms that are
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particularly distressing such as intrusive recollections, nightmares, and hyperarousal. Indeed, high comorbidity between assault-related PTSD and substance use disorders has been consistently documented in several studies. For example, approximately 45 percent of individuals diagnosed with PTSD subsequent to victimization also met criteria for substance use or abuse disorders, with 31 percent meeting criteria for alcohol abuse or dependence (Resnick et al., 2000). A final theory suggests that there is a reciprocal relationship between sexual violence and substance abuse, whereby victimization leads to substance abuse, which in turn leads to subsequent victimization. As mentioned, sexual assault may lead women to engage in increased consumption of alcohol and drugs in order to alleviate negative sequelae. In turn, women who abuse substances may have an impaired ability to detect potential assailants making them more vulnerable to attack. Therefore, those who abuse substances as a coping behavior may be more likely to experience revictimization later in life than other individuals (Champion et al., 2004). According to Neville and Heppner (1999), sexual violence has a profound effect on a woman’s ability to continue to function in her various life roles including partner, friend, mother, and worker. The impact of violence on work performance persists for up to eight months. In some cases, women lose their jobs or are unable to continue working because factors associated with the victimization make it too difficult for them to function at pre-assault levels. Changing phone numbers, moving, staying home, and feeling suspicious of all male strangers are other frequent behaviors exhibited by assault victims (Neville & Heppner, 1999). Moreover, surveys have demonstrated that survivors of sexual assault are less likely than other individuals to marry or to report at least weekly contact with friends and relatives (Sarkar & R. Sarkar, 2005). A study conducted by Abdulrehman and De Luca (2001) found significant differences on the Social Dysfunction Rating Scale between women with a history of sexual abuse and nonvictimized individuals. For instance, women who were sexually abused as children had significantly higher levels of social dysfunction and had a tendency to report fewer satisfying relationships, friendships, and social interactions than nonabused controls. Also, these individuals were more likely to report higher levels of disinterest and lower levels of participation in community activities and affairs (Abdulrehman & De Luca, 2001). Clearly, sexual violence can have a significant effect on victims’ social functioning and behavior. ORGANIZATIONAL RESPONSES Despite significant organizational encouragement, formal policies and procedures to aid victims in recovery remain slow to appear in
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primary-care settings, especially in the legal, medical, and mental health systems (Koss et al., 2003). This is reflected in research documenting that among all victims of sexual violence only 26 to 40 percent report their assault to the police, 27 to 40 percent seek medical care and forensic examinations, and 16 to 60 percent obtain mental health services (Campbell, 2008). Furthermore, the reactions of these organizations to a victim’s traumatic experience can have profound implications for recovery and healing. If women do not receive needed services and/or are treated insensitively, post-assault help-seeking may become a ‘‘second victimization’’ to the initial traumatic experience (Campbell, 2008). A comprehensive article by Rebecca Campbell (2008) discusses organizational reactions to sexual violence, including the legal, medical, and mental health systems, and negative sequelae that victims experience as a result of these responses. This information will be reviewed in the following section. When a woman seeks help following sexual victimization, her first encounter with the legal system is with a patrol officer who asks her to describe the assault. She is then assigned to a detective who conducts further investigation in order to determine if the case should be referred to a prosecutor. During this stage, she is repeatedly questioned about characteristics of the crime such as penetrations, use of force, or other control tactics in order to check for consistency. Many report that this questioning strays into issues involving what they were wearing at the time of the attack, their prior sexual histories, and whether or not they responded sexually to the assault. Victims rate these questions as particularly traumatic and emotionally unsettling, as well as simultaneously reinforcing with respect to feelings of shame and guilt. Research suggests that the investigation is designed to assess the prosecutorial strength of the cases. Indeed, approximately 56 to 82 percent of all reported rape cases are dropped (i.e., not referred to prosecutors) by law enforcement. If a case does progress past the investigation phase, prosecutors often conduct their own interviews with the victim before deciding to file criminal charges. Prosecutors who are disinclined to charge typically engage in a lengthy exploration of any discrepancies in the account of the victim, pressing for explanations and proof. Those that do press charges attempt to coach survivors to respond appropriately when faced with difficult questions in court proceedings. Either way, these women are forced consistently to relive the assault and defend their characters to law enforcement personnel. In one study, interviews were conducted among 47 victims whose cases made it to trial or plea bargaining. Findings indicated that approximately one-third of these women felt inadequately prepared by prosecutors. Although they were repeatedly questioned, they were given little information about what to expect during their hearings. For every 100 sexual assault cases
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reported to law enforcement, on average 33 are referred to prosecutors, 16 are charged and moved into the court system, 12 result in a successful conviction, and 7 end in a prison sentence. Many victims describe their encounters with the legal system as a dehumanizing ordeal characterized by interrogation, intimidation, and blame. Even those who had the opportunity to go to trial described the experience as frustrating, embarrassing, and distressing. Research suggests that secondary victimization can result in negative effects on women’s mental health. For instance, in self-report characterizations of their psychological well-being, survivors indicated that as a result of their contact with the legal system, 87 percent felt bad about themselves, 71 percent felt depressed, 89 percent felt violated, 53 percent felt distrustful of others, and 80 percent were reluctant to seek further help. In a series of studies assessing victim/police contact, findings suggested that insufficient legal action (i.e., the case did not progress or was dropped) was associated with increased PTSD symptomatology. Likewise, high secondary victimization was related to increased PTSD severity. Victims of sexual violence have extensive post-assault medical needs such as treatment for physical injuries, forensic examinations, screening for STDs, pregnancy testing, and emergency contraception. Although the majority of women are not physically injured following their attacks, law enforcement personnel, rape crisis centers, and social service agencies advise them to undergo a medical forensic exam. The medical forensic exam or ‘‘rape kit’’ typically involves plucking head and pubic hairs, swabbing the vagina, rectum, and mouth, and obtaining fingernail scrapings in the event that the victim scratched the perpetrator. Blood samples may also be collected for DNA, toxicology, and ethanol testing. Because sexual assault is rarely life-threatening, victims often experience long waits prior to the exam and are not allowed to eat, drink, or urinate so that the physical evidence remains intact. When these individuals are finally admitted, they receive a brief explanation about the procedure and are often shocked to discover that a pelvic exam is required immediately after being sexually violated. Although forensic exams are the primary focus of hospital emergency departments, survivors also need information on the risk of STDs, HIV, prophylaxis (i.e., preventative medication to treat any STDs contracted during the assault), and pregnancy. Several federal agencies recommend that all sexual assault victims receive STD and HIV prophylaxis on a case-by-case basis. However, meta-analyses of hospital records suggest that only 34 percent of sexually victimized individuals receive these treatments. In one study, victims who were raped by someone they knew were less likely to receive information on STD or HIV prophylaxis than those who were raped by a stranger. Another study found that Caucasian women were significantly more likely than
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ethnic minority women to obtain information on HIV. Post-assault pregnancy services were also inconsistently provided. Only 40 percent to 49 percent of survivors receive information about the risk of pregnancy following sexual assault and 21 percent to 43 percent of women who need emergency contraception actually receive it. In the process of administering the forensic exam, STD services, and pregnancy care, doctors and nurses ask questions about the assault including what the victim was wearing, her sexual response, and what she did to ‘‘cause’’ the attack. As with law enforcement, medical professionals may view these questions as appropriate. However, many victims find them very distressing. For example, negative responses from the medical system significantly exacerbated PTSD symptomatology in one sample of survivors. Another study found that women who did not receive basic medical services rated their medical experience as more hurtful, which was associated with increased PTSD severity. Specifically, nonstranger assault victims who encountered secondary victimization and minimal services had the worst outcomes, even compared to those who did not seek medical services. Survivors of sexual violence may obtain mental health services from treatment outcome research, community clinics, private practice, or specialized agencies. Women who receive services by participating as research subjects typically receive high-quality treatment and numerous benefits. Unfortunately, this option is only available for individuals who live in communities where research is being conducted and who fit eligibility criteria. These treatments are not intended to provide large-scale services but hope to establish empirically supported treatments that can be utilized by many mental health professionals. Indeed, the most common way that victims receive services frequently involves care provided by psychologists, psychiatrists, counselors, and social workers in private or public community settings. Several studies indicate that women tend to have positive experiences with mental health professionals and characterize the therapists’ help as useful and supportive. Research also suggests that community based mental health services are especially helpful for victims who have had negative encounters with the legal and medical systems. For instance, survivors with rape-related PTSD who were unable to obtain needed services from legal and medical professionals had significantly decreased PTSD symptomatology following mental health services compared to controls. Furthermore, victims may also receive services from specialized agencies such as rape crisis centers and domestic violence shelters. Rape crisis centers help victims negotiate with the legal and medical systems and provide individual and group counseling. One study compared PTSD symptoms before and after counseling among victims receiving services at a rape crisis center and found significant reductions in distress levels and self-blame compared to other individuals.
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CONCLUSIONS Sexual violence is prevalent in the United States, with 25 percent of women reporting assault at some point in their lives (Campbell, 2008). Research has consistently documented that victims experience intense psychological distress immediately following the attack (Neville & Heppner, 1999). The most common immediate reactions include fear and anxiety. However, depression, PTSD, mental pollution, and sexual dysfunction are also frequently reported among survivors (Bohn & Holz, 1996; Fairbrother & Rachman, 2004; Koss & Kilpatrick, 2001). Moderators and mediators that explain the relationship between sexual violence and psychological sequelae have also been documented in the literature. These include previous trauma history, coping strategies, negative social reactions, and characteristics associated with the assault, as well as social cognitions involving self-blame and perceived control (Koss et al., 2003). Furthermore, a number of physical health complaints are diagnosed disproportionately among survivors of sexual violence such as physical injuries, gynecological disorders, gastrointestinal disorders, and chronic pain (Koss & Kilpatrick, 2001). Several researchers suggest that classical conditioning, assault characteristics, and psychological distress might act as causal links between abuse and negative health outcomes; however, further research is needed to fully understand this relationship (Bohn & Holz, 1996; Resnick et al., 1997). A growing body of research has reported that sexual violence has harmful effects on neurological functioning. Studies indicate that cognitive functioning, brain structures, HPA axis activity, cortisol levels, and recovery from TBI are different among victims of sexual violence when compared to nonvictims (Campbell, 2002; Fennema-Notestine et al., 2002; Jenkins et al., 2000; Wignall et al., 2004). In addition, survivors of sexual assault experience behavioral disturbances following victimization (Koss & Kilpatrick, 2001). These individuals are more likely to smoke cigarettes, engage in risky sexual activities, abuse substances, and exhibit negative social behaviors than other women (Resnick et al., 1997). Research had documented that victims are even less likely to wear seat belts while driving than those without a history of sexual assault (Koss & Kilpatrick, 2001). The organizational impact of violence has typically focused on the legal, medical, and mental health systems’ reactions to survivors. Several studies have reported that negative experiences with legal personnel and medical professionals exacerbated PTSD severity. Victims who obtained mental health services subsequent to the attack had significantly decreased PTSD symptoms compared to those who did not receive these services (Campbell, 2008). Clearly, the evidence presented demonstrates that women who are sexually victimized experience a wide range of deleterious effects after the initial violence perpetrated against them.
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Littleton, H., & Breitkopf, C. R. (2006). Coping with the experience of rape. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 30, 106–116. Meyer, J. S., & Quenzer, L. F. (2005). Psychopharmacology: Drugs, the brain and behavior. Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates. Neville, H. A., & Heppner, M. J. (1999). Contextualizing rape: Reviewing sequelae and proposing a culturally inclusive ecological model of sexual assault recovery. Applied & Preventive Psychology, 8, 41–62. Reeves, R. H., Beltzman, D., & Killu, K. (2000). Implications of traumatic brain injury for survivors of sexual abuse: A preliminary report of findings. Rehabilitation Psychology, 45, 205–211. Resnick, H., Acierno, R., Holmes, M., Dammeyer, M., & Kilpatrick, D. (2000). Emergency evaluation and intervention with female victims of rape and other violence. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 56, 1317–1333. Resnick, H. S., Acierno, R., & Kilpatrick, D. G. (1997). Health impact of interpersonal violence II: Medical and mental health outcomes. Behavioral Medicine, 23, 65–78. Resick, P. A. (1993). The psychological impact of rape. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 8, 223–255. Sarkar, N. N., & Sarkar, R. (2005). Sexual assault on woman: Its impact on her life and living in society. Sexual and Relationship Therapy, 20, 407–419. Seedat, S., Stein, M. B., Kennedy, C. M., & Hauger, R. L. (2003). Plasma cortisol and neuropeptide Y in female victims of intimate partner violence. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 28, 796–808. Stein, M. B., Kennedy, C. M., & Twamley, E. W. (2002). Neuropsychological function in female victims of intimate partner violence with and without posttraumatic stress disorder. Biological Psychiatry, 52, 1079–1088. Sturza, M. L., & Campbell, R. (2005). An exploratory study of rape survivors’ prescription drug use as a means of coping with sexual assault. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 29, 353–363. Ullman, S. E., & Brecklin, L. R. (2003). Sexual assault history and health-related outcomes in a national sample of women. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 27, 46–57. Ullman, S. E., & Filipas, H. H. (2001). Predictors of PTSD symptom severity and social reactions in sexual assault victims. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 14, 369–389. Ullman, S. E., Filipas, H. H., Townsend, S. M., & Starzynski, L. L. (2007). Psychosocial correlates of PTSD symptom severity in sexual assault survivors. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 20, 821–831. Wignall, E. L., Dickson, J. M., Vaughan, P., Farrow, T. F., Wilkinson, I. D., Hunter, M. D., et al. (2004). Smaller hippocampal volume in patients with recent-onset posttraumatic stress disorder. Biological Psychiatry, 56, 832–836. Zoellner, L. A., Goodwin, M. L., & Foa, E. B. (2000). PTSD severity and health perceptions in female victims of sexual assault. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 13, 635–649.
Chapter 4
Cross-Cultural Violence against Women and Girls: From Dating to Intimate Partner Violence Janet Sigal Dorota Wnuk Novitskie
Violence against women is a worldwide problem that has generated considerable research, political, and international interest, but that has failed to be reduced or eliminated to a significant degree even in the twenty-first century. In a recent opening speech at a United Nations (UN) event during the Commission on the Status of Women in March 2009, the UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon declared that the ‘‘time for talk is over; the time for action is now!’’ In this chapter, we will consider cross-cultural research, explanatory models, and empirical research on violence against women and girls within two contexts: dating violence and intimate partner violence (IPV) or domestic violence. We conceptualize both areas on a continuum: young girls, adolescents, or young adult women, possibly after being exposed to violent interactions between parents or peers, become victims of dating violence. This experience may lead young women to visualize violence between either dating partners or intimate partners as normal or expected. Once they become involved with a man in a long-term relationship, either by marriage or partnership, the violent pattern may continue. At some point, women in these relationships may accept the violence as normal, thus exhibiting attitudes that condone and tolerate the violent interactions.
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In each of our sections, first we will examine some of the definitions associated with dating violence and IPV. In the following sections, we will review models that can be used to explain these types of violence, some estimates of statistics, empirical cross-cultural studies related to each type of violence, consequences to victims, types of perpetrators, and some proposed recommendations or programs to reduce or eliminate these behaviors. Before addressing each type of violent pattern separately, some issues relevant to both dating violence and IPV should be discussed. To begin, accurate statistics are very difficult to determine even in developed countries but particularly in developing countries. In some areas of the world, neither dating violence nor IPV are considered appropriate to discuss in public or even in private. As the World Health Organization (WHO; 2005) report on violence against women suggested, unless accurate prevalence figures are obtained, there cannot be any accountability by nations to reduce this type of violence. In addition, often dating violence and IPV victims experience the same consequences and may blame themselves for their victimization. Perpetrators also may exhibit similar characteristics in dating violence and IPV settings. There are, however, differences in both situations. Obviously, targets of violence in dating settings are younger in general than in IPV, and also may be less educated and established in society. In some parts of the world, particularly in patriarchal societies, dating is prohibited, so that violence in relationships may not occur until a couple is engaged prior to an arranged marriage. In addition, although many countries have specific laws or statutes against IPV, whether or not these laws are enforced, dating violence often is covered under general violence and assault, or sexual assault laws. Peer influence or pressure may be considered to have more of an impact on adolescent or young adults than adults in a marriage or long-term partnership relationship, but pressure also can emanate from cultural or societal contexts. There are some other issues that we will emphasize in this chapter. We believe that cross-cultural attitudes toward dating and IPV are important to ascertain because cultural attitudes can influence whether or not policy or laws against these types of violence are developed and enforced, and even whether victims are willing to go forward with complaints to the police or to the authorities. On a positive note, if attitudes informed by culture can be changed, then there is the possibility that laws against violence in dating and IPV may be adopted. In addition, particular care to maintain confidentiality and protect research subjects must be adopted in these cross-cultural studies to prevent harm from coming to victims who volunteer to participate. Finally, approaches to reduce or eliminate these types of violence must include men in these efforts. As Ban Ki Moon (March 2009) so strongly and
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clearly emphasized, it must be understood that ‘‘real men do not hit women’’ and also that real men do not stand by and watch other men abuse young girls and women without intervening. DATING VIOLENCE According to the Bureau of Justice Special Report on Intimate Partner Violence in the United States (2000), women ages 16 to 24 experience the highest per capita rates of intimate violence. This rate accounts for roughly 20 women out of 1000 (Rennision & Welchans, 2000). The report further indicates that one in three high school students will be, or already have been, in an abusive relationship, with some high schools reporting up to 50 percent of their female students having been abused by a significant other. Such statistics are echoed in a study published by the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine (Roberts & Klein, 2003), which reported that one-third of the 920 students surveyed experienced dating violence during high school. One out of five college-aged women experience some form of dating violence, and more than four in every ten incidents of domestic violence involves nonmarried but romantically involved individuals (Bureau of Justice Special Report: Intimate Partner Violence, May 2000). Furthermore, in 1995, 7 percent of all murder victims were young women who were killed by their boyfriends. Seventeen-year-old Heather Norris met such a fate, when she was ‘‘stabbed, dismembered and discarded in trash bags’’ at the hands of her boyfriend of three years after several attempts to leave the relationship (Olson, 2009). Recent news coverage of dating abuse in the United States has become more prevalent, as illustrated by the widely circulated report of a domestic assault by her boyfriend Chris Brown that left singer Rihanna with ‘‘bruises and a scratch on her face’’ (Blow, 2009). While these reports fall short of offering specific details of the assault, media attention has allowed new discussions to emerge regarding the need for prevention of dating violence. Again, limited research is available regarding the link between the media and dating violence; however, Manganello (2008) suggests that the media may serve as a risk factor in a teen violence. The study further indicates that teens may be prone to spending time acting out in real life that what they see on TV or on the Internet. DEFINITIONS Dating violence is the physical, emotional and verbal abuse of one partner by the other partner in a romantic relationship. Abusive behavior is any act carried out by one partner aimed at hurting or controlling the other. Dating violence occurs in heterosexual and homosexual relationships. A violent relationship means more than physical aggression
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by a person who claims to love the other. Violence in a relationship often is about power and control (Eaton et al., 2007). Research regarding violence in dating has been limited as the focus of interpersonal violence historically has been on married persons. However, the same type of violence happens between people who are dating, and at times may even be more violent and hurtful. Teenagers are not as experienced in relationships and may feel pressured by peers to remain with a violent partner due to reasons of popularity or status or simply for the sake of having a relationship. Oftentimes teens are not aware of the potential signs of a violent relationship. Such relationships may begin with verbal and emotional abuse and control, which then may lead to physical violence (Roberts & Klein, 2003). CLASSIC MODELS OF TEEN DATING VIOLENCE Some experts hold that men and women are equally aggressive. They further suggest that this behavior should be seen as an extension of or part of a larger pattern of family conflict and discord. Supporters of this viewpoint generally focus only on the studies that measure the number of times a person perpetrates or experiences certain acts of violence, such as pushing, slapping, or hitting. What is of interest is that these studies tend to show that women admit to perpetrating slightly more physical violence than men (Archer, 2000). The majority of studies that investigate teen dating violence have focused mainly on using the violence ‘‘act’’ scales. Another school of thought in regard to dating violence is that men are more likely to cause serious injury to a woman, especially when she is his intimate partner. Experts suggest that men tend to come from patriarchal societies. Therefore, the use of violence is a means of exerting and maintaining power and control over women (Dobash & Dobash, 1980). This line of research tends to avoid ‘‘act’’ scales, as ‘‘act’’ scales are not believed to accurately portray the nature of violence in intimate relationships. This criticism is based on the lack of consideration of the degree of injury inflicted, coercion and controlling behaviors in these measures. ‘‘Act’’ scale studies do not consider the fear experienced by the victim, or the circumstances under which the acts occurred (Kimmel, 2002). These arguments further state that studies using ‘‘act’’ scales lack information on the effects of power and control and generally focus on more common and relatively minor forms of aggression. The more severe, albeit relatively rare, forms of violence in dating and intimate partner relationships tend to be overlooked (Dobash & Dobash, 1980). Researchers from this perspective use data related to severe injuries, and generally conduct in-depth interviews with victims and perpetrators (Archer, 2000). While the above views are classic theories of dating violence, historically they stem from adult perspectives. Application to adolescent relationships may be problematic
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and also not appropriate. Although these views of adult IPV can be informative and helpful in understanding some dynamics of teen dating violence, they cannot be relied on to answer all questions. Therefore, there is a need to better understand how teen dating relationships differ from adult romantic relationships. THEORETICAL MODEL OF DATING VIOLENCE Riggs and O’Leary (1989) proposed a model of dating violence. This model offered a comprehensive background situational perspective that drew on social learning theory. The model stipulated that behaviors are learned by watching and imitating others, and then are maintained through various forms of reinforcement. The following situational variables were examined in this model: alcohol or drug use, use of aggression by the partner, skills in resolving conflict, and length of relationship. This model also included the following contextual factors: presence of aggression in dating relationship, exposure to aggression by parent, view of aggression as an appropriate response to problems, and prior aggression. Therefore the effect of situational and contextual factors on teenage relationships was examined. Luthra and Gidycz (2006) evaluated the Riggs and O’Leary model of dating violence using a number of surveys and measures. Their results indicated that specific constructs can be useful in prediction of future dating violence. However, they also found the model to be more predictive of females (83 percent) rather than males (30 percent). It should be noted that the most significant predictor of female violence was presence of aggression by a male partner. These women were 108 times more likely to act out violently against their partner, compared to those women who were not physically assaulted. For men, however, the most significant predictor of perpetration of violence found was the length of relationship. For every six months that the man was in the relationship, his likelihood of aggression doubled. FACTORS AFFECTING DATING VIOLENCE Gender Power Differential One striking difference between teen and adult romantic relationships is the power differential between the man and the woman. Teen relationships tend to lack the elements traditionally associated with greater male power in adult relationships (Wekerle & Wolfe, 1999). This lack of power is a result of several factors. One factor is that unless there are extenuating circumstances, teenage girls are not financially dependent on romantic partners. Unless there are children involved, and there is a need to provide and protect, adolescent girls tend to be more dependent
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on their parents. One study of seventh, ninth and eleventh graders in Toledo (Giordano, 2007) interviewed boys and girls to investigate the power dynamics in these relationships. The majority of the boys and girls interviewed said they had a relatively ‘‘equal balanced’’ relationship in regard to power. However, in cases where a power imbalance was noted, the female students were more likely to admit to having the power over the boyfriend. The boys surveyed agreed, indicating that they had less power than the girls did in the relationship. Furthermore, boys who reported a presence of physical aggression felt even less empowered than the boys who were not in physically aggressive relationships. The presence or lack of aggression did not make a difference in the girls’ perception of power; girls reported no perceived difference in power regardless of whether or not their relationships included physical aggression (Giordano, 2007). LACK OF EXPERIENCE Another major difference between violent adult and violent adolescent relationships is the lack of experience teens have in maneuvering through their romantic relationships. If the teens in the relationships do not know how to negotiate, communicate, and relate to their romantic partner, that can lead to reinforcement of poor coping strategies, such as verbal and physical aggression (Dutton, 1995). A teen who has not had much experience in romantic relationships may struggle to express affection and may act out aggressively when he or she experiences frustration or jealousy toward the romantic partner. This concept was supported by a study in which boys and girls participated in focus groups on dating. The results found that physical aggression can stem from an inability to communicate feelings and a deficit in skills that ordinarily lead to constructive methods of dealing with frustration (Laursen & Collins, 1994). As adolescents get older, their idealist view of a romantic relationship becomes more grounded in reality. In addition, with age, their ability to experience closeness and intimacy increases (Montgomery, 2005). This change is positive, as adolescents who hold on to idealistic beliefs about dating relationships can at times feel disillusioned and may not be able to cope effectively with interpersonal conflict (Kerpelman, 2007). In addition, many adolescents express themselves through aggression as they have not yet learned how to appropriately express and experience intimacy and communication. INFLUENCE OF PEERS Friends are extremely important during the adolescent years. During this time, friends exert more influence on each other than at any other
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time in their development. (Giordano, 2007). Research shows that peer interactions and behaviors have a great impact on adolescents’ attitudes and behaviors, especially in relation to dating violence (Adelman & Kil, 2007). In addition to this influence, friends during the teen years are present in day to day activities and can be very involved in a teenage couple’s social life, as teens tend to date in groups or double date more than twice as much as they go on one-on-one dates (Molidor & Tolman, 1998). Therefore, relationship dynamics tend to be very public, and often are witnessed in groups of friends or during school time hours. Boys and girls tend to act very differently when surrounded by peers, to fit into the expected norms. One study found that boys would respond with physical aggression when hit by their girlfriend, just to save themselves the embarrassment of being hit in front of peers (Fredland et al., 2005). Teens also argue about various issues. For example, many teens argue about jealousy, how much time is dedicated to one another, and threats of a new significant other (Fredland et al. 2005). Although these conflicts can be viewed as normal and almost appropriate for this age group, dealing with such issues when they are not emotionally and developmentally ready can lead teens to experience conflict, physical aggression, and other problematic coping strategies, such as efforts to gain control, stalking, and psychological or verbal abuse. INTERNATIONAL STUDIES ON DATING VIOLENCE Cross-cultural research on dating violence is limited. Much of the data regarding this type of IPV comes from the International Dating Violence Study, which although comprehensive in scope, is limited to just one study (Straus, 2007). The countries involved in this study include two African nations: South Africa and Tanzania; seven Asian countries: China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, India, Japan, South Korea, and Singapore; Australia and New Zealand; thirteen European countries: Belgium (Flemish and French sites), Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Hungary, Lithuania, Malta, Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland (French and German sites); four Latin American countries: Brazil, Guatemala, Mexico, and Venezuela; two Middle Eastern countries: Iran and Israel; and two North American countries: Canada (Anglo and French sites) and the United States (Mexican American, historically black colleges, and other sites) (Straus, 2007). Straus (2007) investigated the widely held beliefs that interpersonal physical violence is almost entirely perpetrated by men, and that the major risk factor for interpersonal violence is male dominance in the relationship. Straus tested his hypothesis across the aforementioned 32 countries and surveyed 13,601 university students. The results showed that almost one-third of the female as well as male students physically
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assaulted a dating partner in the previous 12 months, and that the most frequent pattern was bidirectional where both partners were violent, followed by ‘‘female-only’’ violence. Violence by only the male partner was the least frequent pattern according to both male and female participants. Straus also investigated whether dominance by one partner is a crucial aspect of the etiology of partner violence. The results showed that dominance by either the male or the female partner is associated with an increased probability of violence. These results question the assumption that interpersonal violence is primarily a male crime and that women are only violent at times of self-defense (Straus, 2007). Using the information from the above study, Hines and Straus (2007) also evaluated the relationship between binge drinking and aggression in dating relationship. The study sampled 7,921 students at 32 universities worldwide. The strongest positive association between binge drinking and violence was found in Pune, India. Similar findings also emerged in Mississippi, United States, and Leicester, England. No gender differences were found. Another focus of the data from the International Dating Violence Study was an evaluation of gender in the prevalence and chronic nature of dating aggression (Straus & Ramirez, 2007), with a focus on participants from universities in Mexico and America. Findings indicated that students, across the four universities surveyed, experienced dating violence anywhere from 29.7 percent to 46 percent in the last 12 months, with students in Juarez, Mexico, reporting the highest percentage. Chronicity of severity of assaults was consistent across the four universities. Another interesting finding was that when only one partner was violent, the female was almost twice as likely (19 percent) as the male (9.8 percent) to perpetrate the violence. Lysova and Douglas (2008) also utilized the data from the International Dating Violence Study to focus on dating violence among Russian college students. Their findings indicated no gender difference regarding victimization (females: 23.1 percent; males: 28.6 percent). However, statistical significance was found between the genders regarding reporting having assaulted an intimate partner, with 35.6 percent of females reporting acts of aggression and 20.6 percent of males. Although not statistically significant, women reported higher rates of psychological aggression (66.7 percent) compared to men (56.5 percent). The authors suggested that men in Russian universities either report or commit lower rates of dating violence due to fear of expulsion from universities or forced enlistment in the military. Doroszewicz and Forbes (2008) also utilized the same data pool and focused on physical aggression and injury among college age students in Poland. The findings indicated that 15 percent of men and 25 percent of women reported having perpetrated physical violence against a
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partner at least once. Few other gender differences were noted; however, women did report engaging in more frequent psychological aggression than men. The authors attributed the findings to high rates of domestic violence in Poland, suggesting that violence is a learned behavior. In addition, recent and rapid changes in women’s role in the home and in the workplace are believed to have contributed to these rates. Wang and Petula (2007) conducted interviews and focus groups to explore men’s and women’s views of physical aggression by women in dating relationships. The sample was limited to 20 participants (13 women and 7 men) and offered insight into women’s identification with an aggressive female character in a popular Asian movie ‘‘Sassy Girl.’’ Female participants identified with the aggressive character, and to some extent were reported to appreciate the aggression perpetrated by this character, often justifying and defending her behavior. Men on the other hand, in an attempt to maintain levels of masculinity, reported the woman’s aggression to be playful and not hostile. Furthermore, the men surveyed reported that men cannot be hurt by such physical contact and ‘‘cannot be defeated by such challenges’’ (p. 628). In another cross-cultural study, Sherer (2009) focused on dating violence in Jewish and Arab male and female teens in Israel. The study examined the effect of sociodemographic variables on male and female behavior. The sample consisted of 1,357 Arab and Jewish youths who were surveyed on measures of threatening, relational, physical, sexual and verbal abuse. Dating violence was found to be high among teens in Israel, with the highest rates found among Arab youths. Although girls were involved in every type of dating violence, boys exhibited higher scores. The author explained that such prevalence can be understood in terms of cultural norms and expectations of roles of men and women in society. VIOLENCE IN ENGAGED COUPLES Halford, Sanders, and Behrens (2004) studied the relationship between physical aggression in engaged couples and the presence of violence in the family of origin in Australia. The researchers surveyed 71 engaged couples. Men exposed to parental violence experienced more negative emotions and thoughts, and found it difficult to participate in subsequent focus group discussions. Couples in which only the woman was exposed to parental violence did not appear to have concerns regarding negative affect or conflict between the two engaged people. Haj-Yahia (2006) also examined violence perpetrated against Arab women in Israel who were engaged. Of 1,111 engaged Arab women in the sample, between 1 and 11 percent of the women reported experiencing physical aggression, and between 8 and 48 percent reported experiencing psychological aggression. When conflicts with their partner were
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not discussed or worked through, these women were more likely to suffer from low self-esteem, depression, stress and anxiety. Haj-Yahia and Edleson (1994), in an earlier related study, surveyed Arab-Palestinian men living in Israel as to their means of working through conflict with their fiancees. The research focused on the following three frameworks: male dominance, intergenerational learning, and interpersonal skills deficits to determine the role played by these factors in men’s relationships. Haj-Yahia and Edleson found that men who did not come from violent homes were more likely to engage in discussion and reasoning as a means of resolving conflict, and were more open to an egalitarian household. On the other hand, men who grew up in violent homes were more likely to be verbally and physically abusive toward their fiancees, were less likely to see what was wrong with their actions, and were more likely to hold patriarchal views. OUTCOMES Effects on Mental Health Chan, Straus, Brownridge, Tiwari, and Leung (2008) evaluated the prevalence of dating violence and suicidal ideation among male and female university students. Information also was obtained from the International Dating Violence Study, with a focus on the prevalence of physical assault, sexual coercion, and suicidal ideation among these students. The authors sampled 16,000 students from 22 universities in 21 countries. The results showed that although there were large differences among countries, even the lowest rates of dating violence were quite high. Male and female students had similar rates regarding the proportion of having physically assaulted a partner, and having been a victim of sexual coercion. An increased rate of suicidal ideation was found among both perpetrators and victims of physical assault. This finding was linked to the occurrence of depression. This study highlighted a need for universal screening and targeted services for violence, depression and suicide prevention. Effects of Abusive and Neglectful Childhood Straus and Savage (2005) investigated the relationship between neglectful parents and the child becoming involved in a violent dating relationship. The study was conducted with university students from 17 countries, and the data was once again collected through the International Dating Violence Study. Students in Pusan, Korea, reported experiencing the highest level of childhood neglect (34.4 percent) followed by 28.6 percent of students in Hong Kong. The lowest reported
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prevalence of neglect was in New Hampshire (3.2 percent). Straus and Savage also found that the more neglectful behaviors that the student had experienced, the more likely they were to have assaulted a dating partner. The link between neglect experienced as a child and dating violence was strongest at universities where dating violence was more prevalent. TYPOLOGIES OF ADOLESCENT DATING VIOLENCE PERPETRATION Foshee et al. (2007) interviewed 116 boys and girls who were previously identified to have been perpetrators of dating violence. Using narrative descriptions, the authors developed typologies of dating violence perpetration that were context specific. Most of the boys’ acts of violence were attributed to ‘‘escalation prevention,’’ or attempts to stop a girlfriend from inflicting further violence. Female perpetration was identified by motive, preceding events, and abuse by parents. From these reports, the following four types of perpetrators were proposed: patriarchal terrorism response, anger response, ethic enforcement, and first-time aggression response. Patriarchal terrorism response was created from responses that girls offered indicating that the boyfriends attempted to control them through physical or psychological means. Acts committed by the girls that were coded in this typology included the following: described physical violence against a boyfriend who had historically been psychologically or physically abusive, or acting violently against a boyfriend immediately after he was physically or psychologically abusive. It should be noted that 38.5 percent of females met the criteria for patriarchal terrorism response. Anger response differed from the type listed above in motive, precipitating events, and history of violence. For an act to be labeled as ‘‘anger response,’’ the description given by the female had to meet the following criteria: no indicated history of past physical abuse by the boyfriend, no report of immediately precipitating violence by the boyfriend before the violent act, or the girl needed to report that the reason for such violence was motivated by a desire to be violent. Twenty-five percent of females met the criteria for anger response. Ethic enforcement was reported in 19.2 percent of female participants. For ethic enforcement to be coded, the female had to report the following: violence was used to communicate to the boyfriend that he had done something wrong and she was not going to accept it, no evidence of history of abuse by boyfriend was noted, and there was no report of violence being used against the girl immediately before her violent act. Some common ‘‘wrongs’’ that resulted in the girls’ violence included the following: cheating, flirting with another girl, indulging in
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too much alcohol or drugs, ‘‘talking ugly’’ to her, removing himself from an argument, pressuring her to have sex, and ruining prom night. First time aggression response was reported in 17.3 percent of the females surveyed. For the act to be labeled as first time aggression, the following had to be reported: there was a report of the boy using physical violence against the girl immediately before the act, and there was no history of physical aggression by the boy prior to this incident. In these instances, most of the girls surveyed reported their aggression to be attributed to self-defense, while others reported retaliation against the boy for wronging them. For boys, most of their acts were identified as ‘‘escalation prevention’’ or attempts to stop the escalation of violence by their female counterparts. For the acts to be labeled as such, a male had to report the following: he used restraint while the girlfriend was being violent against him, he attempted to stop her from harming him with a weapon, or stop the possibility of having violence against him. Other acts were noted by the authors; however no commonalities were noted to offer additional specific typologies. RECOMMENDATIONS AND PROGRAMS Black et al. (2008) evaluated factors that resulted in teenaged victims of dating seeking help. The authors found a large risk factor for not seeking help was when the violence occurred in isolation, with no witnesses. However, when the violence was witnessed or observed by a third party, the victim was more likely to begin to speak about the violence, become open to the possibility of intervention, and seek help. In addition, boys were less likely than girls to seek help. In light of such findings, ‘‘Safe Dates’’ programs have gained greater popularity. After a four-year study, participants in safe date programs have seen a decrease in physical, serious physical, and sexual dating violence perpetration and victimization (Foshee et al., 2007). Wekerle and Wolfe (1999) conducted a literature review of six relationship violence prevention programs designed for and practiced with teenage students. One of the programs discussed was in a larger community, while the remaining five programs were school-based. Prevention of dating violence was targeted on two levels: toward all high school students, as well as toward selected adolescent populations, such as youths with histories of maltreatment, or problems with peer violence. These programs addressed specific skills and knowledge that opposed the use of violent and abusive behavior toward intimate partners. In addition, one program addressed interpersonal violence more generally, and was also included in this review because of its implications for dating violence initiatives. Positive changes were found across studies in violence-related attitudes and knowledge. In addition,
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positive gains were noted in self-reported decreases in perpetration of dating violence, with less consistent evidence in self-reported victimization. Limited follow-up and generalizability was noted; therefore the possibility of greater application is questionable. Foshee et al. (2001) studied predictors of dating violence. The study focused on eighth and ninth graders in one county in a U.S. school. These participants were asked to complete baseline questionnaires and were again evaluated 18 months later. Some risk factors found for males being abused by females in a dating relationship included having friends who were victims of dating violence, using alcohol, and being of a race other than white. However, risk factors for males perpetrating the violence included attitudes that condoned dating violence. The researchers also suggested that any interventions that are implemented for school-aged children should be separate and specific for males and females. In addition, those found to be at greater risk should be targets for intervention first, with other interventions becoming more available only when there is funding. Valls, Puigvert, and Duque (2008) reported that schools in Spain are working to implement preventive socialization in the field of education. The authors proposed that a correlation exists between prevention of dating violence measures and promotion of power equality in relationships. They suggested that the current presentation of violence in the media is glorified and made attractive to young teens. Therefore, work should be done to make nonviolent movies, videos, and games just as attractive and normative. The authors suggested that this approach also would undermine double standards in relationships, and healthy care and passion could be viewed as a possible replacement for aggression. IPV: A CROSS-CULTURAL PERSPECTIVE The WHO’s (2005) Summary Report on its multi-country study on IPV and violence against women, stated that ‘‘Since the World Conference on Human Rights held in Vienna in 1993, and the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women in the same year, civil society and governments have acknowledged that violence against women is a public policy and human rights concern’’ (p. vii). The Foreword of the Report further stated that ‘‘Violence against women is both a consequence and a cause of gender inequality (p. viii). CEDAW, or the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, is a UN tool designed to address this issue. DEFINITIONS In 1993, the UN General Assembly adopted the following definition of violence against women: ‘‘Any act of gender-based violence that
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results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual, or psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion, or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or private life’’ (UN, 1993, Article 1). Although recently, considerable research attention has been focused on whether IPV or domestic violence is perpetrated only by men against women, or can be identified with either partner in a marriage or relationship (Archer, 2000; Frieze, 2005), for the purposes of this chapter, we will restrict our discussion to IPV perpetrated solely by men against women. MODELS OF IPV Feminist Power Model In this classic model, male-dominated societies are viewed as reinforcing traditional gender roles in which men are the wage earners and make all the decisions, and women stay at home and take care of the husband and the family. As a result, men have more power and status than women (Sigal & Annan, 2008). As described above, the WHO Report (2005) emphasized inequality between men and women as a cause of IPV. Sexist attitudes also can provide a foundation for gender-based violence that is related to the inequality between men and women. For example, the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory (ASI) which was developed by Glick and Fiske (1997) distinguished between Hostile Sexism, measuring hostility toward the equality of women and men, and Benevolent Sexism, which is rather paternalistic and implies that women are weak and fragile and must be protected. In each case, women are seen as having inferior status. It was established in cross-cultural studies using the ASI, that higher scores on this measure were associated with more gender inequality in the countries sampled. The Gender Equity Index (2008) has compiled a list of gender equity in many countries around the world and will be referred to again later in this chapter. Hypermasculinity This model is an extension of the feminist power model. According to this approach, ‘‘macho men’’ often see violence as an acceptable way to achieve and maintain power over women. In addition, these individuals may associate violence against women with being more ‘‘masculine’’ (Kilmartin & Allison, 2007). Patriarchal Culture and Culture of Honor Models Both of these models stem from an extension of the feminist power model’s conception of women having inferior status.
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Patriarchal Culture As Haj Yahia (2002) describes in his article, the patriarch, or male head of the family, has complete control over the family including making all the decisions for the family. In particular, since patriarchal societies often view men as sexual predators (although without the condemnation that this behavior would produce in other types of cultures), their women must be protected at all times. Therefore, they cannot go food shopping without a male relative or even seek medical help unless their husband allows them to do so. In fact, after the birth of a child, many women lose their lives because of their inability to access emergency medical help.
Culture of Honor This type of culture is an extreme version of a patriarchal society. As described by Vandello and Cohen (2003), in these cultures, the ‘‘honor’’ of the male head of the family is directly related to the purity or ‘‘chastity’’ of the women in his family. If a woman strays, either by committing adultery, being raped, or being seen in the company of men who are not relatives, the patriarch is required to punish her, often violently. The patriarch must ‘‘wash the honor with blood’’ to restore his honor and that of his family (p. 999). In many culture of honor societies, the women in the family are under the control of their fathers until they are married, under the control of their husbands when they are wives, and under the control of their sons when they are widows. In extreme forms, the punishment may take the form of an ‘‘honor killing.’’ As a result of increased punishment for honor killings in some countries (for example, Jordan), some young women in rural areas have been locked in a room with a gun until they kill themselves, an act which is now termed ‘‘honor suicides.’’ There have been many egregious examples of violence against women in honor cultures, but we will just mention a few to illustrate our description of these models. A few years ago, in Saudi Arabia, a girl was in a car with her boyfriend when she was raped by a number of men. She was sentenced to 160 lashings and possibly a jail term, but after the case attracted media attention worldwide, the King pardoned her. More recently, in 2009, a woman in her seventies in Saudi Arabia walked outside her house with two workmen and also was sentenced to several lashings. Media attention so far has not been successful in this case. Another example was in the fall of 2008 in Pakistan. Three girls refused to marry older men chosen for them by their fathers (they were teenagers and the men were in their 40s and 50s), because they wanted to choose their own husbands. These young girls, and two older
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women who supported them, were all buried alive. Finally, in the spring of 2009, a 17-year-old girl was repeatedly lashed by several men in a rural area of Pakistan for an unknown ‘‘crime’’ which many suggested was fraudulent. However, after cell phone photographs were sent all over Pakistan, the incident caused a tremendous outcry, both in Pakistan and throughout the world. The Pakistan chief judge was not satisfied with the legal response to this outrageous violent behavior and sent a government official to the area to report on what actually occurred. INTERNATIONAL STUDIES ON IPV In this section, we will review a selective number of cross-cultural research investigations on the prevalence of IPV and attitudes toward IPV. We will relate these studies to models and explanations described in an earlier section. Clearly, all cross-cultural researchers agree that estimates of IPV most likely represent underreporting worldwide. In addition, comparison of prevalence figures is extremely difficult and any conclusions must be made with caution, due to the variability of the methods used in these estimates. In some of the studies that we will review, the focus has been on attitudes toward IPV rather than on the prevalence of IPV. However, IPV prevalence estimates tend to be highly correlated with attitudes condoning or even supporting IPV. If attitudes are positive toward violence against women, it is likely that women in these cultures will experience IPV to a higher degree than women in cultures that disapprove of and punish perpetrators of IPV. One of the most significant investigations of IPV cross-culturally was sponsored by the WHO in 2005. This study encompassed data from women residing in several countries, and in 15 locations within these countries. Interviewers obtained data from countries representing a widely diverse sampling including 24,000 respondents from Bangladesh, Brazil, Ethiopia, Japan, Namibia, Peru, Samoa, Serbia and Montenegro, Thailand, and the United Republic of Tanzania. Lifetime prevalence of IPV ranged from 15 percent (Japan) to just over 70 percent. Prevalence in the year before the study again revealed large variability among samples. The lowest IPV rate was in Japan, with just under 5 percent, and the highest was in Ethiopia, which had a rate of almost 55 percent. There were many advantages of this worldwide study of IPV including the sponsorship of this major international health organization, WHO, the collaboration of a wide variety of experts and women’s organizations, the very large sample size, the variety of countries involved in the project, and the use of standardized measures and intensive training of female interviewers because of the sensitivity of the
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topic. However, there were several criteria that were used to determine which countries would be included in the study that may limit the generalization of the results. Prior to sampling women in a particular country, the researchers determined if there was a positive political atmosphere in the country which would suggest that the government would respond positively to the survey, there had to be a lack of information on the amount of IPV in the country, and women’s groups had to be active in the country in order to turn the data-collecting phase into the stage of implementation of the recommendations stemming from the report. Although these criteria were reasonable, the question of whether the results may generalize to other countries which may not exhibit these same characteristics is at issue. A further question related to the methods of the study, is that the emphasis was placed on physical and sexual IPV, despite the suggestion in the report that emotional or psychological abuse often is associated with physical abuse, and can have long-lasting negative consequences. However, despite these considerations, the study is one of the best in terms of careful planning, training and collection of data in so many countries using standardized measures.
ASIAN STUDIES Hong Kong and Mainland China Prevalence of figures from Hong Kong and mainland China vary. Xu et al. (2005) sampled about 600 women (with close to a 90 percent acceptance and return rate) at a clinic in Fuzhou, China. Face-to-face measures modified from the WHO multi-country study were administered to determine the percentage of IPV in the sample. Results indicated that 43 percent of women from a sample in mainland China reported having experienced IPV in the lifetime of their marriage, and 26 percent had been abused in the last year. Marital conflict and financial control by husbands were two of the factors associated with IPV. Attitudes were supportive of wife beating: 36 percent of the women surveyed believed that wife-beating was appropriate and approved of if the wife had committed adultery. Although the large sample supports the validity of the conclusions, limitations of the study include the self-report nature of the methodology and the lack of participation of men. One other interesting conclusion stemmed from the research. Xu et al. suggested that although the Chinese society supposedly now supports more economic equality between men and women (women should ‘‘hold up half of the sky,’’ p. 84), their respondents did not appear to have internalized or accepted this concept. Another recent investigation by Chan, Brownridge, Tiwari, Fong, and Leung (2008) concluded that IPV still is a significant problem in
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Hong Kong and Chinese societies. As part of a larger study employing face-to-face interviews in Hong Kong (there was a very high response rate of about 70 percent), the authors selected a sample of 1,870 women and included an additional question on the effect of in-law conflict on IPV. The larger study utilized the Revised Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS2), an often-used standardized measure, to investigate prevalence of IPV. Prevalence figures in this study were lower than in the Xu et al. investigation (lifetime figures were approximately 8.5 percent, and the previous year figures were about 4.5 percent). Since the Chan et al. study was conducted in Hong Kong and the Xu et al. study in mainland China, it is difficult to directly compare these figures. Although Hong Kong has experienced more of a Western influence than mainland China, it still is questionable whether either self-report figure is accurate. In the article, Chan et al. suggested that common risk factors that have been discovered in other countries also may be important in the explanation of IPV victimization in China. The main risk markers in the Chan et al. study included a younger age of the wife, and financial situations being unfavorable in the home, as well as the partner’s alcohol abuse. An interesting finding was that if the wife had a higher income she was more at risk for abuse. The authors offered the explanation that a financially successful wife might demand more equality in the home, and that might cause increased conflict with her husband. Other studies have produced conflicting results regarding the relationship between the wife’s education and income and prevalence of IPV. The major contribution of the Chan et al. research was to investigate the role of in-law conflict in IPV. The authors found that this type of conflict, particularly the involvement of the mother-in-law, was an important risk factor in predicting increased IPV in these families. Although this result may seem inconsistent with the stereotyped view of the Chinese culture as a patriarchal society, the authors suggested a complex interpretation of this relationship. According to Chan et al., Chinese women’s status in the family does not change when their sons get married; they are still under the domination of their husbands to a large extent and of their sons as well. However, since Chinese women may be assumed to identify with the men in their family, if their sons are engaging in IPV, the mother-in-law may feel constrained to participate or at least to condone and encourage her son to continue abusing his wife. Another suggested explanation of the complex role that in-law conflict may play in Chinese marriages, is that if there is conflict with the husband’s family, then the wife can be accused of disrespecting her husband’s family, which can be used as a justification for IPV. However, conflict between the husband and the wife’s family may lead to a diminished amount of time spent with that family, which can reduce the amount of support the wife can experience from her own family.
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Although this study is quite recent, and the sampling procedure and return rate were excellent, as the authors pointed out, the examination of the role of in-law conflict was based on one question which could be interpreted in different ways. As in all these cross-cultural studies, selfreport measures were used, and only women were sampled. Japan Weingourt, Maryama, Sawada, and Yoshino (2001) conducted a selfreport survey in Japan, which was completed by approximately 180 women with a relatively low response rate (close to 25 percent). As an explanation of this low response rate, the authors pointed out that to avoid offending respondents by pressuring them to participate in a study on such a sensitive issue, the researchers avoided contacting individuals who did not send back the survey. The results of the survey indicated that in this middle-class sample in Sapporo in the north of Japan, close to 60 percent were psychologically abused by their partners, around 30 percent were physically battered, and about 25 percent were sexually abused. Very few of these women told anyone about their experienced abuse. The authors explained this lack of disclosure by theorizing that IPV is viewed as the fault of the woman who thinks she has been a bad wife, and therefore she is fearful about disclosing the abuse to anyone. In addition, the wife is considered a ‘‘property’’ of the husband and thus he is permitted to do anything to punish her if she has not been a good wife. This explanation fits within the framework of the patriarchal society discussed earlier. In addition to the lack of follow-up mailings which contributed to the relatively low response rate in the Weingourt et al. survey study, the authors indicated that the survey which was developed for use in a study in Tokyo, has not been tested for reliability and validity. Therefore, it is unclear how valid these results would be in comparison to studies that utilize standardized measures such as the CTS. India Wilson-Williams, Stephenson, Juvekar, and Andes (2008) investigated 64 women’s attitudes toward domestic violence through focus groups in Gangadhar, which is a small community south of Mumbai. The community was described as patriarchal in nature, and the women strongly supported the traditional gender roles associated with the patriarchal culture. Women in this sample were basically from poor households and many were illiterate. Respondents indicated that they viewed physical and psychological abuse as normal within the culture, and suggested that a man has the right to beat a wife in order for her to learn the correct behavior. At times, it was suggested that
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mothers-in-law could be involved in the process, as was found in the Chan et al. study described earlier. Women were expected to be sexually available to their husbands at all times, and were not expected to use contraceptives as a means of preventing pregnancy. If a woman began using contraceptives, that was seen as a precursor to domestic violence. Once again, the authors took particular care to protect their respondents from any adverse effects of participating in this study. Prior to the focus groups convening, a discussion was held with the entire village, and participants were recruited following this meeting. Although the Wilson-Williams et al. investigation revealed several interesting findings that fit within the framework of the effect of the patriarchal culture on domestic violence, the authors mentioned that it was difficult to get women to speak out on this sensitive topic. Since it was self-selected, there clearly is a concern about the representativeness of the sample. In addition, it is difficult to compare attitudes in a qualitative study using focus groups with more quantitative investigations. However, this study was one of the first in this type of small community, and the authors also attempted to connect the desire to use contraceptives with the consequences of subsequently becoming a victim of IPV. Another study conducted in a rural area of India (Jejeebhoy, 1998) found that 40 percent of the sample of about 1,800 women reported having experienced IPV. Many of the respondents again believed that IPV was ‘‘justified’’ because she engaged in the wrong behaviors. However, Jejeebhoy reiterated the point that we have been stating, that this figure is most likely an underestimation of the actual level of IPV in India. Turkey Ozcakir, Bayram, Ergin, Selimoglu, and Bilget (2008) stated that there were no large scale studies of the prevalence of IPV in Turkey. If IPV occurs, it is supposed to be kept within the family, and even if some women actually call the police, only a very few ever prepare a complaint. Turkey is an unusual combination of eastern and western influences, but according to the authors, ‘‘Turkish law endorses a patriarchal family model in which the husband is named the head of the family’’ (p. 636). Therefore, the patriarchal model would suggest that men and women in Turkey might condone and accept physical punishment of women by their partners. In their study, the authors examined attitudes of men toward ‘‘wife beating.’’ Almost 1,200 married men in the city of Bursa, Turkey, were recruited at medical centers and interviewed in a face-to-face setting. Several demographic questions were asked, along with a number of questions about the conduct of marital partners and attitudes toward wife beating. Respondents also were asked ‘‘have you ever beaten your
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wife?’’ (p. 633) and ‘‘have you ever yelled, shouted or used abusive language to your wife?’’ (p. 633). A relatively lower rate of physical abuse (29 percent) than in previous regional Turkish studies was determined from respondents’ self-report, and close to 60 percent acknowledged that they had verbally abused their spouses. Risk factors included the wife’s lack of education or poor educational background, the husband’s alcohol problems, and if the husband had been physically abused as a child. Economic issues played a role in marital conflict as well. In addition, close to 20 percent of the men surveyed believed that men had the ‘‘right’’ to engage in IPV. This study was a significant contribution to the literature because it is important to ascertain what men believe is appropriate and acceptable to be able to attempt to eliminate IPV in Turkey. Many studies only sample women’s attitudes and experiences, but including men in these studies will be useful in determining the extent of the problem. In addition, the finding that childhood physical abuse was related to whether or not men engaged in IPV suggested to the authors that men began to see IPV as a normal part of family life. However, although the sample was large and the response rate was over 80 percent in this large Turkish city, only self-report data was obtained, and two of the significant measures consisted of one question each concerning physical and verbal IPV. These factors, in addition to the issue of only sampling men, possibly could have led to a considerable underreporting of IPV. In fact, the authors reported several regional studies based on women’s self-reports, which estimated very much higher levels of IPV. Despite the patriarchal structure of the Turkish society, men may have been reluctant to report engaging in IPV.
AFRICA Nigeria Antai and Antai (2008) examined rural women’s attitudes toward domestic violence in Nigeria. The authors indicated that rural Nigerian communities embody the ideals of the patriarchal culture. Men hold all the power and women accept their subordinate position in the family and the community. Once again, in accord with our contention, Antai and Antai suggest that it is important to determine women’s attitudes toward IPV because if ‘‘the victim perceives IPV to be an integral part of male supremacy’’ (p. 2), and that the culture supports and condones violence against marital partners, she is unlikely to report this behavior and will see it as a normal part of the marriage. In support of this contention, at a UN symposium in 2007 a woman from Africa asked how she could report her husband’s violence against her when her marriage vows ordered her to obey him?
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In a manner similar to several other national studies, the authors utilized data from the 2003 Demographic and Health Survey conducted in Nigeria. An unusually high response rate of more than 90 percent enabled the researchers to investigate attitudes toward IPV among more than 3900 rural women. Data were collected in face-to-face interviews. More than 40 percent of the rural sample suggested that IPV was acceptable under certain conditions, including arguing with the husband, and not agreeing to sex. Interestingly, there were several variations in condoning IPV related to the specific communities in various geographical locations in the country. Similar to other studies, women with poorer educational backgrounds, Muslim women, and women living in economic hardship, were more likely to justify IPV. However, the authors also found other risk factors. Of particular interest to this chapter, women with little say in the family and those without the ability to read about the news or to be exposed to other media tended to approve of IPV. Antai and Antai suggested that empowerment consists of three components; ‘‘autonomy in domestic decisions,’’ ‘‘access to media,’’ and ‘‘literacy level’’ (p. 4). This study was important for a number of reasons. First, the methodology employed a standardized national face-to-face interview process which had a very high response rate. Second, the authors focused on rural women, an often-overlooked type of sample. Third, the questions included significant categories including specification of empowerment, a concept very much associated with prevention and reduction of IPV. Fourth, the authors identified variations among women respondents that can lead to more complex and possibly more valid interpretations of data. Finally, the interpretations were related to the concept of a patriarchal society, which is support for one of the most common explanations of IPV worldwide. Of course, Antai and Antai’s study is subject to the limitations of self-report measures as well as the focus only on women’s attitudes toward IPV. Kenya and Zambia A study similar to the Antai and Antai study described above was conducted by Lawoko (2008) in Kenya and Zambia. Lawoko suggested that there might be varied interpretations of a man’s positive attitude toward IPV depending on conditions in the country. In general, he indicated that Kenya has a more favorable economic and social climate than Zambia. However, both countries embody the traditional gender role approach suggesting that deviations from the female gender role may have adverse consequences for the wife. Prevalence of IPV in Kenya and Zambia appear to be comparable to other African countries, and are somewhere between 20 and 30 percent. Lawoko indicated that there are no comparative studies of attitudes
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toward IPV among men in these two countries. In both countries, interview data were obtained through a national Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) of men in many households. High response rates (close to 90 percent in each country) increased the validity of the study’s findings. Scenarios were constructed to measure men’s attitudes toward IPV following hypothetical transgressions by women. For example, if the woman neglects her household duties or refuses to have sex with her husband, men were asked if she ‘‘deserved to be punished.’’ In general, men from both countries demonstrated a high and similar rate of acceptance of wife beating ranging from 65 to 71 percent. Most of the justifications for the IPV revolved around the wife’s deviating from normative gender-role expectations, but the correlations and interpretations differed for the two countries. In Kenya, younger marriage partners and living outside of cities predicted higher support for wife beating, but that was not the case in Zambia. Conversely, lower educational levels were associated with higher tolerance of IPV in Kenya but not in Zambia. It was suggested by Lawoko that the educational material in each country might differ. Perhaps part of the educational information in Kenya might lead to a change in patriarchal ideals but not in Zambia. Similarly, access to the media was associated with a lower justification of IPV in Zambia but not in Kenya. Perhaps, as Lawoko indicated, the media in Zambia may support empowering women. Along the same lines of reasoning but in the opposite direction, Lawoko found that men’s positive attitudes toward sharing in decision-making in the home predicted a lower acceptance of IPV in Kenya but not in Zambia. Once again, this comparative study of men’s attitudes toward IPV in two African countries was illuminating and important in identifying certain possible causes of IPV. In addition, by showing that predisposing factors may work differently in various countries, Lawoko made the case for developing culture and country-specific interventions. However attitudes relating to IPV were examined only for men, and both these countries were described as relatively peaceful. Therefore, the results cannot be generalized to African countries experiencing a great deal of conflict. Lawoko described other limitations of his study including the questionable validity of the DHS measures, the plausibility of extensive underreporting because of the face-to-face interviews, and the lack of consideration of alternative factors affecting men’s attitudes toward IPV in addition to issues related to patriarchy. MIDDLE EAST Haj-Yahia (2002) conducted a study in Jordan investigating attitudes of approximately 350 married Jordanian women toward IPV. This convenience sample of women (with a response rate of more than 80
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percent) was recruited from several clinics in a variety of locations including a city, a village, and a refugee encampment. Participants completed surveys in private, since interviews would be considered to be difficult to conduct on such a sensitive subject. Several measures were included such as the Beliefs about Wife Beating and Sex-Role Stereotyping, a measure of attitudes toward women, and the Familial Patriarchal Beliefs scale. All measures were translated and adjusted for cultural appropriateness. Haj-Yahia’s findings suggested that a high proportion of the Jordanian respondents (ranging from about 35 percent to 65 percent depending on the ‘‘offense’’) justified IPV, felt that wives would become ‘‘better wives’’ as a result, blamed the women for their behavior, did not think that violent partners should be punished (‘‘men will be men’’) and thought that the problem should stay in the family and not be dealt with by the government in any form. As in studies described previously, factors associated with increased wife blaming included poor educational levels, more traditional gender-role attitudes and patriarchal beliefs. This study strongly supported our contention that patriarchal belief structures will support and condone, and possibly even demand punishment of ‘‘bad wives.’’ Haj-Yahia pointed out some difficulties with his study including questions about the generalizability of his findings to all women even in Jordan, the use of self-report questionnaires, and the lack of a measure of whether or not the respondents had experienced IPV. In addition, only women were surveyed in Haj-Yahia’s research report. However, the study remains one of the few to examine attitudes toward IPV in the Middle East. In fact, in a meta-analysis, by Boy and Kulczycki (2008), the authors reported that only 21 studies contained statistics on occurrence of IPV in the Middle East and North Africa even though the abuse is known to be extensive and widely condoned and accepted both by men and women.
LATIN AMERICA Peru Flake’s study (2005) of IPV in Peru surveyed more than 15,000 women and revealed that about 40 percent had experienced physical abuse. Several factors were related to the abuse, including poor educational background for the woman, forced early marriages, and alcoholic excesses of the husband. Once again, effects of the woman’s status were unpredictable. Under certain circumstances higher status protected the woman from IPV, but if her status was superior to her partner, it exposed her to more IPV. Flake’s interpretation of these results revolved around the concept of the frequency of patriarchal family relationships in Peru. If a man feels threatened by a woman’s status or achievements, he may use violence to emphasize his control over his
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partner. Although this study supports our emphasis on the importance of the effects of a patriarchal culture on IPV, and the large sample is very positive, the measure of IPV was based on one question and selfreports of the prevalence of IPV are questionable especially in cultures where the issue is sensitive and is not discussed very much in public. Another study in Latin America was conducted by Ceballo, Ramirez, Castillo, Caballero, and Lozoff (2004) using the Conflict Tactics Scale (Strauss, 1979). Thirty percent of the more than 200 poor women sampled in Chile said they had been physically abused, and approximately 80 percent had been verbally abused by their partners. Ceballo et al. identified Chile as a patriarchal society and indicated that IPV is not discussed outside the family. The authors also revealed that until 1989 a husband was considered to ‘‘own his wife’’ and therefore he could do anything he liked with his ‘‘property.’’ Although the Ceballo et al. study surveyed an unusual sample of poor women, and used the CTS which is a standardized measure of IPV, the authors indicated that problems existed in their study including the use of self-report measures which most often underestimate the extent of IPV and the fact that not all types of violence were measured. The advantage of an unusual sample of poor women also is undercut by the fact that the results may not be representative of married women in Chile. Both of these Latin American studies support our contention that patriarchal societies are key elements in the perpetration of physical and verbal abuse particularly in developing nations in Latin America, the Middle East and Africa. CANADA Brownridge (2003) investigated the differences in prevalence in IPV between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Canadian women. Brownridge’s data were based on a large national study, Statistics Canada, conducted in 1999. He analyzed the data from interviews conducted by telephone, sampling close to 150 Aboriginal and close to 7,000 nonAboriginal women. The survey suggested that Aboriginal women were likely to be abused at least three times as much as non-Aboriginal women. On all risk markers, including younger age, living in rural areas, having a partner with a strong belief in patriarchal power, and having a partner abusing alcohol, Aboriginal women were more likely to exhibit these markers than non-Aboriginal Canadian women. However, again illustrating the inconsistency of findings related to the educational level of women and the connection to IPV victimization, as Aboriginal women became more highly educated their chances of experiencing IPV actually increased. Brownridge suggested that Aboriginal men may be reacting against their low status in Canadian society, on the one hand, but also may be internalizing the negative
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views of women characterizing some views of non-Aboriginal men. In addition, if Aboriginal men have low status they may resent the higher status and educational level of Aboriginal women which may lead to increased levels of IPV. Although this study utilized data from a representative Canadian sample, it still is subject to the limitations of a self-reported interview and a relatively small number of Aboriginal women participants. It also is unclear as to how participants were protected from the consequences of participating in this type of study. In addition, only women respondents’ data were considered by Brownridge. OUTCOMES FOR IPV VICTIMS Cwikel, Lev-Weisel, and Al-Krenawi (2003) questioned Bedouin Arab women living in Israel in the Negev area, about the physical and psychological consequences of IPV victimization. The authors described the Bedouin society as highly collectivistic and as exhibiting a patriarchal structure, although there have been some changes as the Bedouins move from a nomadic life to living in a more settled manner in towns. The society also may be termed a ‘‘culture of honor’’ and women are punished for ‘‘straying’’ in order to preserve the honor of the family. Based on a revision of a national Israeli measure that was translated and back translated from the Hebrew, prevalence of physical abuse and consequences of the abuse were investigated. The outcome measures included the shortened form of the CES-D, the Center for Epidemiological StudiesDepression Scale (Sherbourne, Dwight-Johnson, & Klap, 2001). About 200 Bedouin women visiting a medical center were interviewed in person by an Arab nurse. Since the women knew the nurse and trusted her, she obtained cooperation from all the women she approached. Results indicated that Bedouin women were very fertile until about age 40, and that they experienced increased IPV during their fertile years. As a consequence, women who had experienced IPV exhibited ‘‘symptoms of depression, low self-esteem, hopelessness and/or helplessness, low social support . . .’’ (p. 250). One other finding that adds to our discussion of the effect of educational level on IPV experiences, showed that women with a higher educational attainment experienced higher levels of IPV. The authors used an interpretation that we have observed in other studies suggesting that women who have been educated apparently are more likely to challenge their partners’ dominance and the restrictions placed on them by their husbands and the culture. The authors acknowledge the limitations of self-report measures which most probably underestimated the extent of the IPV problem. In addition, they suggested that it will be very difficult to develop culturally appropriate interventions because IPV is closely connected to the heart of patriarchal societies such as the Bedouin culture in Israel.
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A study in Kenya utilizing the previously mentioned Demographic and Health Survey of 2003, was conducted by Emenike, Lowoko, and Dalal (2008). In examining the relationship between IPV and physical consequences to women, the authors looked at data from more than 4,000 respondents. IPV was correlated with a higher rate of a pregnancy ending before term, and a greater chance of the baby not surviving. As indicated by the authors there obviously is no causal link but just suggestions that IPV in Kenya might make women more susceptible to problems in childbirth and infants to possible death. Another cross-cultural study by Weingourt et al. (2001), described in an earlier section of the chapter, examined the consequences of IPV using the General Health questionnaire which was translated into Japanese. A higher percentage of women exposed to IPV expressed symptoms of depression and anxiety, and somatic symptoms, as well as sleep problems, than women who had not experienced domestic violence. Finally, in the previously discussed study by Ceballo et al., the authors reported on the psychological symptoms experienced by their relatively small sample of poor women in suburbs of Santiago, Chile. The CES-D (Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale) and a measure of women’s experiences of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) revealed severe levels of depression and PTSD-type symptoms. All of these studies confirm predictions from researchers that victims of both physical and emotional abuse will demonstrate high levels of psychological distress as a result. Therefore, it is crucial for professionals in countries worldwide to develop prevention and intervention programs to combat this prevalent physical and mental health problem.
TYPES OF PERPETRATORS Recently, some attempts have been made to classify IPV perpetrators. One of the most popular categorizations was developed by Holtzworth-Munroe and Stuart (1994). The different types of possible perpetrators included: 1. ‘‘Family-only’’ batterers who have poor social and conflict resolution skills, may belong to a peer group which is supportive of IPV, and tend to be violent only toward their spouses; 2. ‘‘Dysphoric-borderline’’ batterers have severe psychological problems, may exhibit borderline characteristics, may abuse substances and may be violent toward people outside their family; 3. ‘‘Violent antisocial’’ batterers are violent in every setting, may be criminals and are characterized by antisocial personality disorder diagnoses.
Although these categories have proved useful in identifying which types of perpetrators may respond to an intervention to reduce or
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eliminate IPV in America, and possibly in other Westernized countries, it is unclear how well the categories will apply cross-culturally. For example, in a ‘‘culture of honor’’ country such as Jordan, if a patriarch violently punishes his wife, or even engages in an ‘‘honor killing’’ according to westernized views, and the perpetrator categories described above, he definitely would be classified at least as a familyonly batterer, or more likely as a spouse murderer. In his country, however, this type of individual would be perceived as following the dictates of the culture of the country, at least until recently. Therefore, it is important to develop categories of abusers which would apply cross-culturally to determine what types of interventions would work best in different cultures. RECOMMENDATIONS TO ELIMINATE OR REDUCE IPV WORLDWIDE WHO (2005) developed a series of recommendations to eliminate IPV across the world. We will briefly review some of these recommendations, suggest that there are issues and problems with implementing these recommendations, and describe some intervention programs. The first major recommendation in the WHO report was to enforce adherence to international agreements protecting human rights of women around the world. In particular, patriarchal cultures that subordinate women and place women under men’s control must be changed. If women are to be treated as equals, with the same rights as men, and if these patriarchal cultures stop condoning and even demanding that women be harshly punished for ‘‘straying’’ then violence may no longer be a viable means of gaining control over women by men. Particularly if men and boys are punished for engaging in violence against women, then the behavior will decrease. Although this recommendation is the most important suggestion, it is also true that it will be the most difficult to implement. Individuals in countries where patriarchy and ‘‘culture of honor’’ principles are deeply ingrained will resist these changes even if the government does sign onto international agreements. For example, in 2004 the UN General Assembly passed a resolution prohibiting honor-related violence against women (Women’s UN Report Network, April 25, 2009). However, in countries such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, as our previous examples illustrated, the practices still continue. Key government officials as well as community and religious leaders, particularly men, must be enlisted in the fight to change the violence-supportive patriarchal cultures. From a social psychological perspective, it is clear that attitudes that are based on strongly held values are the most difficult to change. Therefore, there must be a concerted effort by many individuals, at the government, local, community and religious levels to
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engage the populace in a discussion of the harm that is being done, to the women who are victims, to the children who observe and possibly imitate the violence, and to the male perpetrators themselves. Even though many countries where violence is endemic espouse the patriarchal structure of societies, it also is clear that there are other viable explanations and models of IPV which may fit other societies. It is important that researchers, as well as academic and community agents of change recognize that IPV is a complex issue that may be related to a number of different risk factors. It also is crucial to understand that although some risk factors are common across the world, others are specific to individual countries. A related recommendation is that all countries begin to collect data on the prevalence of all types of violence against women, including IPV. These data should be available to international organizations, and the UN should send a special rapporteur around the world to determine whether countries are adhering to the agreements and if in fact, violence against women has decreased. Creating safe environments for women is an essential part of the recommendations. Shelters for battered women should be established with safeguards to prevent men from invading the shelters. Women in the shelters should be provided with treatment for physical and psychological injuries as well as skill-building to permit the women to reduce their dependence on their abusive spouses. The WHO report suggests that women may be identified as victims through clinics associated with reproduction, since many women visit these clinics. Other venues and professionals including primary health care workers should be involved in identifying and protecting women. Education for women and girls is emphasized all through the crosscultural research on IPV. However, since the findings are inconsistent, unless the patriarchal culture is changed, if women receive a high level of education and achieve a high status, it is possible that this situation may become a risk factor for IPV. Even if laws are changed to punish perpetrators of violence against women, law enforcement officials’ attitudes must be changed as well. Women must be encouraged to report IPV, and police and other authorities must provide women with sympathetic and helpful officers who do not identify with and embody patriarchal values. Both primary and secondary prevention programs should be implemented to reduce violence against women. In particular, the media may be useful in primary prevention programs designed to reach many individuals within the country. In Turkey for example, at one point, all the media outlets in Istanbul were owned by women who decided to begin a primary and secondary prevention effort to stop violence against women. Television ads were produced including one showing a young child dressing up in her mother’s clothes and shoes,
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and putting a black eye on as well since she had seen her mother in that condition so many times. In addition, ads stated that the ‘‘shame is not yours’’ while showing an abused women. Other interventions, including training individuals to engage couples in improving their conflict resolution and communication skills, as well as instituting hotlines in the Istanbul area, were designed to attack the problem. Therefore, the media can be used as a positive force to combat this worldwide problem. What also should be included in any of these programs is an evaluation component. The WHO report stated that there should be additional cross-cultural research on the causes of violence and programs to prevent or eliminate violence against women. The WHO report also emphasized the importance of involving men and boys in the effort to eliminate violence against women. Until men who do not engage in violence against women and oppose it speak out and intervene when they see violence occurring, perpetrators will continue to engage in this behavior. Once again the media can act as a forum for nonviolent men to speak out, and these men may become good role models for spousal interactions. Flood (2001) discussed three different ways in which men can become involved in the efforts to stop violence against women. 1. Men can join groups which emphasize that ‘‘men must take responsibility for stopping men’s violence,’’ (p. 3) possibly though public action such as protests. Flood describes the ‘‘White Ribbon campaign’’ in which men wear white ribbons to show the world that not only will they avoid violence but they will speak out and intervene if they observe violence. Flood emphasized the importance of reaching out to boys and young males to try and change fundamental attitudes which condone and support violence against women. These men also can act as proactive role models to teach young men how to interact with women in a positive way. However, Flood contends that men’s groups must work in cooperation with women’s groups in the same effort. 2. Men can become involved in educational media campaigns based on the same concept espoused by Ban Ki Moon: ‘‘Real men don’t bash or rape women.’’ Flood described some programs in Australia which serve this educational function. Sports figures were recruited for advertisements in one of the Australian programs to target men who identify with athletes. Once the athletes define violence against women as wrong, it is hoped that men identifying with these athletes will internalize their new views. However, it is difficult for these programs to succeed because of the violence-supportive culture of many types of sports. Another type of Australian program which targeted violent males found that one of the most effective approaches was to connect men’s violence against women to the negative effects on the children in their family. 3. Men can become directly involved in programs treating violent men, or even men incarcerated for violence against women. However, Flood
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argues that many of these programs have not been rigorously evaluated. In addition, even if these programs were effective, unless the culture and attitudes of members of society are changed to oppose violence against women, single programs will not eradicate the problem.
As a conclusion to this section, we will present an overall program that was instituted in Romania. Wimmer and Harrington (2008) described a comprehensive program, ‘‘Floare de Colt,’’ (p. 623) developed to address IPV in Sighisoara, Romania. This grant-funded project involved international partners who traveled to Sighisoara to hold a three-day conference with community individuals, trained local participants, and provided social work students with the means to live in the town for a brief period to assist in the program. Wimmer and Harrington emphasized that the first step was to achieve community involvement and sensitize the community to the existence of IPV and the need for services for victims. An overall evaluation of the program indicated that as a result, a wide range of services for victims had been established, and utilized by various types of individuals, not just IPV victims. However, the authors reported that several years after the creation of the project, the need for shelters and programs which focus on changing perpetrators’ behavior, as well as access to public funding, still remains. The article by Wimmer and Harrington was an important stage in illuminating the complex nature of any type of IPV prevention and intervention program. The emphasis on involving community leaders and representatives from the beginning of the project, the role that outside international experts can play as partners, and the significance of grants and funding to at least begin a program cannot be overestimated. Despite the success of the initial program, this article also illustrated the difficulty of maintaining a program once the funding and international partnerships are no longer involved. One of the issues associated with this project was the viability of the evaluation process. The authors defended the involvement of the original international partners in the evaluation by suggesting that a sufficient distance between these professionals and the on-site program had been established to enable the researchers to maintain their objectivity. That involvement still may be seen as a barrier to an objective evaluation of the effectiveness of the project. In addition, the lack of direct interviews with victims and the lack of any input of victims in the process of evaluation other than documentation of the use of the services, also may be viewed as a serious drawback of the evaluation process. However, since many programs do not include essential evaluations in their descriptions, the Wimmer and Harrington article represents a significant contribution to the literature.
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COMPARISONS BETWEEN IPV AND DATING VIOLENCE STUDIES As we predicted in the opening section of this chapter, there is a considerably larger volume of cross-cultural studies on IPV than on dating violence. One of the issues is that IPV is more prevalent worldwide, since in some cultures dating is not permitted. However, it also seems clear that dating violence most often is subsumed under a more general category of violence or sexual assault, whereas IPV is conceptualized as a separate form of violence. As a result, there are many more studies on IPV and more estimates of the prevalence than there are for dating violence. Similarities still exist in terms of the estimates of both types of violence. As a result of underreporting which occurs even in countries where these behaviors are discussed publicly, accurate prevalence figures are impossible to obtain. Women victims of IPV and dating violence are reluctant to report because of feelings of self-blame, shame and fear of retaliation. Even in cross-cultural research where considerable efforts have been made to protect participants from retaliation from partners, these individuals still are fearful to give accurate responses. Another issue relates to the variations in methodology among the different studies. Methods range from randomly sampling women from large Demographic and Health Surveys, or WHO surveys, where the response rate is quite high, to individual surveys designed specifically for one country and which are completed by as few as 25 percent of those sampled. As a result, it is impossible to compare estimates of IPV and dating violence among countries when the methods of obtaining these data are so diverse. The situation is even more complex when investigating IPV and dating violence in countries where these issues are ‘‘kept within the family’’ or ‘‘under the veil’’ (in Arab countries). Even women in many of these countries condone IPV and believe that women deserve the abuse to help them become ‘‘better wives’’ (Haj-Yahia, 2002). We also hypothesized that the prevalence of both IPV and dating violence would be more expected and would occur to a more extreme degree in patriarchal and culture of honor societies than in countries with higher gender equity. In addition to the strong support that our contention received in our selective review of cross-cultural studies, this pattern is relevant to our ongoing multicultural investigation of undergraduate students’ perceptions of IPV. In our study, we constructed a scenario describing a domestic violence incident in which a husband abused his wife either after finding out that she had been unfaithful or had been visiting her friend rather than taking care of his dinner. This scenario was followed by a series of measures based on the domestic violence incident. The study has been conducted in Spain,
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the United States, the United Kingdom, Croatia, Israel, Romania, Greece, Georgia, Ghana, Malaysia, Lebanon, and India, and has been translated into seven languages. Based on the Gender Equity Index of 2008 which ranks countries in terms of gender equity (the rankings are a summary of the ‘‘Education Gap’’, Economic Activity Gap’’ and the ‘‘Empowerment Gap’’), students from countries higher in gender equity (the first six of the countries listed above) were more sympathetic toward the wife and more negative toward the husband, whereas undergraduate participants in the latter six countries showed the reverse reactions to the scenario. Since gender equity showed such a strong relationship with prevalence of violence against women worldwide, the recommendation of the WHO that patriarchal attitudes and culture of honor norms be changed is a reasonable approach to the issue. However, as we described earlier, it will be extremely difficult to change such ingrained attitudes and customs which have been characteristic of some cultures for centuries. It is most important that the impetus for change emanates from the top down: male leaders of these societies, both in government and in the religious community, must be at the forefront of these efforts. Men and boys definitely must be involved in the change approach. International organizations should act as models and also pressure member nations to act according to international agreements and eliminate this aversive behavior. The media also can play a role in creating the image that wife-beating and dating violence is wrong and has severe negative consequences. In addition, law enforcement officials also must be involved in the process. Although the type of culture clearly has been implicated in IPV and dating violence, patriarchy is not the sole reason or even the most plausible explanation of these types of violence in all countries. Since IPV and dating violence also occur in countries where gender equity is high, other models and theories must be established to fully comprehend this complex behavior. One other point is important for us to emphasize. In addition to involving men in the effort to eliminate violence against women worldwide, we must focus more attention on types of perpetrators and treatment and punishment for violent men. If we only propose treatment and shelters for women, we may be engaging in an implicit type of ‘‘blaming the victim.’’ Different trends in reports of violence are noted in dating relationships than what is seen in domestic disputes. These discrepancies can be attributed to the following factors: teens generally do not cohabitate with romantic partners, and therefore stereotypical relationship and power dynamics that are seen in marriages have not yet had a chance to develop; adolescent girls are more likely to report abuse and assault, regardless of who the perpetrator was, whereas married women may find such disclosure shameful; adolescent boys, on the other hand, may
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be prone to underreporting or not be willing to accept the blame for assault, and therefore the numbers are lower; and some cultures are in fact changing and shifting, as was noted in the Wang and Ho article (2007), which results in young women feeling more empowered and able to stand up for themselves, even if their actions are not always appropriate, or respected by their romantic counterparts. In conclusion, IPV and dating violence are pervasive and complex behaviors which adversely affect women all around the world. It is important to conduct more cross-cultural comparisons, using standardized measures, in order to obtain accurate figures, as well as to develop models to understand and eliminate the violent behaviors.
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Chapter 5
Intimate Partner Violence as a Workplace Concern: Impact on Women’s Emotional and Physical Well-Being and Careers Michele A. Paludi Jessica Wilmot Lindsey Speach
Barbara Cavalier had been married to her husband, Chris Cavalier, for seven years. During the course of their marriage, Chris had been abusive toward Barbara. When he put a gun to her head, she decided to leave him. For six months her living arrangements were kept secret. One day Chris walked into the Elmwood siding supply business and saw Barbara where she was working as a data-entry clerk. Subsequently, Chris walked into the store, armed with two guns, a .45 caliber automatic pistol and a .357 caliber Magnum revolver. Chris killed Barbara and her coworker, Stephanie Revolta, who had tried to defuse the situation. Stephanie had placed a 911 call, but by the time assistance arrived, Barbara and Stephanie were dead. Chris also took his own life. Barbara’s coworkers reported that Chris had been harassing Barbara all day, calling her at work, and stealing her truck. Authorities had found a note in Chris’s house in which he assigned power of attorney and listed valuables that he wanted to give away. This behavior led police to believe that Chris had planned the murders that day (cited in Paludi, Nydegger, & Paludi, 2006). Ellen works for a small shipping company in the western Canada city of Vancouver. She has been unhappily married to Paul for more than
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20 years, and she and her two daughters bear the brunt of Paul’s verbal taunts and controlling behavior. Though he has never physically abused the children, he often beats Ellen so severely that vicious bruises cover her arms and legs, and she regularly lies to her coworkers about their origin, claiming clumsiness, embarrassed by their true cause. At least once a month Ellen is so badly hurt that she must call out of work. In the past two years alone, she has lost 22 days of work, and thousands of dollars in wages. One night, Paul angrily smacks Ellen’s younger daughter, and she falls down the stairs, cutting open her knee. After years of abuse, Ellen has finally had enough, and leaves. She moves in with a friend, and changes her phone number and personal email address. For a while things are fine. But soon Ellen begins receiving threatening prank phone calls at the office, and nasty emails to her work email account. She thinks it might be Paul, and her suspicions are confirmed when one evening she discovers him waiting for her in the office parking lot. In a dark and menacing tone Paul threatens to kill her—and their children—unless she returns to him. She doesn’t know who to turn to or where to go. For years she has been hiding her abuse from her friends, family, coworkers and employers, and the threats continue to escalate . . . (cited in Soroptimist International of the Americas, 2007).
The experiences of Barbara and Ellen are not unique; approximately 2,600,000 women are victims of intimate partner violence each year (Swanberg & Logan, 2005). Homicide is the leading cause of occupational death for women in the United States (National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, 2009; Reeves & O’Leary-Kelly, 2007; Swanberg & Logan, 2007; Swanberg, Macke, & Logan, 2006). Furthermore, women who are victims perpetrated by their mates/spouses account for one-fourth of all women who are murdered in a given year (McHugh & Frieze, 2006; Rathus & Feindler, 2004). Swanberg et al. (2005) reported that more women in the United States are victimized by their spouses/mates than are harmed because of reported automobile accidents, muggings, and rapes combined. Straus, Gelles, and Steinmetz (1980) noted that one out of every six couples engage in at least one violent act each year. Over the course of a marriage, just over one-fourth of couples will experience intimate partner violence. Intimate partner violence is not confined to marriage. Research suggests that violence in dating relationships and among unmarried couples who live together is even greater than among married couples. Ryan, Frieze, and Sinclair (1999) noted that approximately one-third of U.S. college students reported using or being victims of intimate partner violence. Abuse in relationships includes intense criticisms and put-downs, verbal harassment, sexual coercion and assault, pushing, grabbing, shoving, physical attacks and intimidation, stalking, choking,
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striking a partner with an object, restraint of normal activities and freedoms, and denial of access to resources (Butts Stahly, 1999; McHugh, Livingston, & Frieze, 2008; Ryan et al., 1999). Straus et al. (1980) concluded: ‘‘The American family and American home are perhaps as or more violent than any other American institution or setting (with the exception of the military, and only then in time of war’’ (p. 4). The Fourth United Nations (UN) International Conference on Women concluded that ‘‘in all societies . . . women and girls are subjected to physical, sexual and psychological abuse that cuts across lines of income, class and culture’’ (Walker, 1999, p. 21). Tran and Des Jardins (2000) reported that the incidence of intimate partner violence experienced by Vietnamese and Korean communities is similar to U.S. incidence rates. Horne (1999) noted that intimate partner violence rates in Russia exceed United States rates by four to five times. Intimate partner violence is prevalent in all races and ethnic groups and among women in urban, rural, and suburban areas and in lesbian, gay, and heterosexual relationships (Coleman, 1991; McHugh & Frieze, 2006; Paludi, Nydegger & Paludi, 2006; Potocziak, Murot, CrosbieBurnett, & Potoczni, 2003). In addition, while women are more likely to be victims of intimate partner violence, men may be battered (Heise, 1998; McHugh & Frieze, 2006). Men batter because they want control in the relationship. Women, however, batter in self-defense because of fear of being murdered. Heise (1998) found that more women are seriously injured and killed by male partners each year than men are by female partners. Tjaden and Thoennes (2000) reported that over a lifetime, the prevalence of intimate partner violence for women is triple the prevalence for men. In addition, research suggested that the incidence of same-sex intimate partner violence is similar to that of heterosexual intimate partner violence (McHugh & Frieze, 2006; Potocziak et al., 2003).
INTIMATE PARTNER VIOLENCE SPILLS OVER INTO WORKPLACES Swanberg and Logan (2005) asked U.S. women about the ways in which intimate partner violence spilled over into their workplace. Women’s responses indicated that batterers interfered with women’s employment before, during, and after work. Pre-work interference prevented 56 percent of the women in this study from going to work, including physical restraint, having clothes cut up, being beaten, and being denied access to the car. Swanberg and Logan (2005) and Wetterstein et al. (2004) noted that women reported experiencing prework incidents of violence at least once a week. Interference with women’s employment at the workplace included the following behaviors:
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phone harassment, harassment of the women’s supervisors, threatening comments, stalking, and being physically forced to leave work. Thus, the workplace is not a safe haven for women victims of intimate partner violence; the violence spills over into the workplace. The workplace provides a site where batterers, like Chris Cavalier, can find their victims. And, as Swanberg et al. (2006) noted: When partner violence traverses the boundaries of women’s jobs, the victimized partner is no longer the only victim. Other people on the workplace premises, including supervisors, other workers, and customers, are at risk for injury or some other form of trauma. (p. 573)
Intimate partner violence costs employers more than $727.9 million annually on costs related to lost productivity, including 7.9 million paid workdays each year. In addition, there are additional costs related to health care costs associated with intimate partner violence. Intimate partner violence is thus a workplace issue. In this chapter we review the empirical research on the impact of intimate partner violence on women’s emotional and physical health, self-concept, interpersonal relationships with coworkers and supervisors, and career goals. We offer recommendations for employers in exercising ‘‘reasonable care’’ in responding to women employees who are victims of intimate partner violence, including developing and enforcing an effective policy and investigatory procedures and training programs on intimate partner violence awareness and the organization’s policy. IMPACT OF INTIMATE PARTNER VIOLENCE ON EMPLOYEES The biggest challenge is to convince a woman that it’s not her fault. My daughter is 25; my stepdaughter is 22. As a mother, I want them to know that if a boyfriend is abusive, you cannot ignore it—‘‘Oh, he’s been drinking,’’ or ‘‘He had a bad day.’’ There is no excuse for a man hitting a woman. Ever. —Sen. Debbie Stabenow, Michigan
Research on intimate partner violence has documented impact on several areas of functioning, including emotional/psychological, physiological or health related, career, interpersonal, and self-perception (Lundberg-Love & Marmion, 2006; McHugh et al., 2008; O’Leary & Maiuro, 2001; Reeves & O’Leary, 2007; Swanberg et al., 2006). Examples of emotional/psychological effects of intimate partner violence include, but are not limited to, guilt, denial, withdrawal from social settings, shame, depression, fear, anger, anxiety, phobias, isolation, fear of crime, helplessness, frustration, shock, and decreased self-esteem (Cunradi, Ames, & Moore, 2008; Swanberg et al., 2006).
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The following are reported physical/health-related effects of intimate partner violence: headaches, tiredness, respiratory problems, substance abuse, sleep disturbances, eating disorders, lethargy, gastrointestinal disorders, post traumatic stress disorder, the hostage syndrome, and inability to concentrate (Lundberg-Love & Wilkerson, 2006; McHugh & Frieze, 2006; Walker, 2006; Zorza, 2002). In addition, battered women experience injuries including bruises, cuts, concussions, black eyes, broken bones, scars from burns, knife wounds, loss of hearing and/or vision, and joint damage (Felblinger, 2008; Lundberg-Love & Wilkerson, 2006). Pregnant women who experience intimate partner violence face the risk of severe outcomes for their fetus as well as themselves (Sagrestano, Carroll, Rodriguez, & Nuwayhid, 2004). The impact intimate partner violence has on social and interpersonal relationships includes the following: withdrawal, fear of new people, lack of trust, and changes in social network patterns at work (Lundberg-Love & Wilkerson, 2006; Swanberg et al., 2006). Research by Swanberg (e.g., Swanberg et al., 2006; Swanberg & Logan, 2007) suggested that the impact of intimate partner violence on women employees contributed to women victims’ inability to (a) concentrate and solve problems at work, (b) perform their job, (c) go to work, (d) stay at work, and (e) keep their jobs. In addition, women victims of intimate partner violence may receive threatening emails, calls, and/or faxes at work. This has implications for women employee’s mental state and contributes to their inability to concentrate and failure to follow their job responsibilities and thus be fired. Similar results were obtained by Lloyd and Taluc (1999), who found that out of the 824 women in their sample, 18 percent indicated that they had experienced intimate partner violence, 11.9 percent had incurred more severe violence at the hand of their mate/spouse and 40.3 percent said they had been coerced and threatened by their mate/ spouse. In addition, 28.4 percent had experienced abuse at the criminal assault level. These women reported experiencing unemployment, emotional and physical health problems, and higher welfare rates than women who did not experience intimate partner violence. Ridley’s (2004) research with the Maine Department of Labor and Family Crisis Services indicated that 74 percent of batterers reported having easy access to their partner’s workplace. Twenty-one percent of these men had contacted their partner at the company in violation of a restraining order, and 48 percent indicated they could not concentrate at their own job because of their preoccupation with their partner. Of these men, 19 percent had a workplace accident; 42 percent were late for work because of engaging in battering. Intimate partner violence also has direct implications for a mother’s effectiveness to parent. The dysfunction and disorganization of the home offer little or no support, structure, nurturance, or supervision
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for children (Walker, 1999). Children are often neglected by mothers who are too emotionally and physically abused to care for them (Black & Newman, 2000). IMPACT OF INTIMATE PARTNER ABUSE ON CHILDREN Furthermore, the impact of intimate partner violence on children is significant. Children are in the middle of domestic violence in a number of ways, including arguments about child rearing practices and children’s behavior. Children blame themselves for the violence as a consequence of their stage of cognitive development even though they are not the cause (Paludi, 2002). Walker (1999) and Graham and Rawlings (1999) estimated that each year approximately 3.3 million children in the United States between the ages of 3 and 17 years are at risk of exposure to their mothers being battered by a male spouse/mate. Children learn to become part of a conspiracy of silence. They lie to prevent inappropriate behavior; they learn to suspend fulfillment of their needs rather than risk a confrontation with the batterer. Thus, as Paludi (2002) stated, ‘‘they live in a world of make-believe’’ (p. 351). They themselves are at greater risk for physical abuse than children whose mothers are not battered (Black & Newman, 2000). Homicide is currently one of the five leading causes of child mortality in the United States (Paludi & Paludi, 2000). WOMEN’S FEAR OF LEAVING THE VIOLENT RELATIONSHIP According to Lundberg-Love and Wilkerson (2006): Being a victim of domestic violence can result in serious and long-lasting psychological consequences. The initial emotion reported after a battering incident tends to be helplessness. Over time, most women become fearful, anxious, angry, and depressed . . . many battered women develop PTSD. The duration of the abuse and the victim’s history of prior abuse impact the severity of the symptoms she may experience. (p. 40)
Most battered women remain in the violent relationship because they believe their situation is inescapable. They feel helpless about changing their lives and fear that any action they take will contribute to additional violence, which is justified (Butts Stahly, 1999; Zorza, 2002). Furthermore, cultural factors contribute to remaining silent to protect the family’s honor (Marmion & Faulkner, 2006). Battered women remain in violent relationships for several well-founded reasons (McHugh & Frieze, 2006; Paludi, 2002; Butts Stahly, 1996) including: a. Threats to her life and the lives of her children if she leaves the home b. Fear of not getting custody of her children
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c. Financial dependence d. Feeling of responsibility for keeping the relationship together e. Love for the batterer f. The batterer is not always violent
Grothues and Marmion (2006) noted that women victims of intimate partner violence frequently attempt to leave the relationship; their attempts are thwarted by their partners who exercise more control and coercion with threats. Furthermore, it has been reported that economic issues must be taken into consideration when understanding women remaining in a violent relationship: Women who leave their spouse often have no good alternatives for housing or support for themselves or their children. Because of the nature of the abuse, which often involves increasing isolation from others, victims tend to have a very small support system. Shelters are not readily available in all communities, and even this option has limitations and has an impact on the children. It is not simply a case of not wanting to leave; most women do wish to do so. However, the costs of leaving are significant. (Grothues & Marmion, 2006, p. 11)
We note that Butts Stahly’s (1999) review of the National Crime Survey of the Department of Justice indicated that 70 percent of intimate partner violence occurs after the relationship has ended. Similar findings were reported by Walker (1995) and Birns (1999), who reported that women are at an increased risk for homicide following the break up of a relationship, more so than women who remain in the relationship. EMPLOYEE ASSISTANCE PROGRAM (EAP) ASSISTING WOMEN VICTIMS OF INTIMATE PARTNER VIOLENCE An EAP assists employees with dealing with non-work-related issues that interfere with their ability to perform their job (Smith & Mazin, 2004). EAPs provide short-term counseling on the telephone or in-person, as well as refer employees for help in the community. An EAP can be utilized to help women employees deal with the symptomatology of intimate partner violence reviewed above (Paludi & Paludi, 2000; Rothman, Hathaway, Stidsen, & deVries, 2007). Recommendations for EAPs include: (a) helping women to develop a sense of trust and safety in the current environment, (b) helping women foster relationships with appropriate nonviolent male models, (c) understanding women’s insecurity about their future, (d) countering any sense of guilt about having caused the violence and/or not being able to prevent the battering, and (e) increasing women’s self-esteem.
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An EAP can also assist children of battered women through play assessment and play therapy to encourage preschool children to express feelings about the trauma, individual counseling for children, and women-children support groups (Paludi & Paludi, 2000). Most importantly, women who have left a battering relationship often report that they had learned about intimate partner violence and the impact of this violence on themselves and their children from listening to an EAP counselor discuss the issue at a noon-time seminar. Such programs facilitated by an EAP should include information about local domestic violence shelters, the importance of considering psychological abuse as a form of intimate partner violence, emotional responses to intimate partner violence, consequences of intimate partner violence, religious beliefs and remaining in a battering relationship, and cultural issues involved in reporting the abuse (e.g., Bostock, Plupton, & Pratt, 2009; Mitchell et al., 2006; Watlington & Murphy, 2006). We discuss subsequently in this chapter the role the EAP can play in training supervisors to recognize changes in employees’ behavior as a consequence of intimate partner violence and to refer them to the EAP in a confidential manner (DeCenzo & Robbins, 2007; Paludi & Paludi, 2000).
IMPACT OF INTIMATE PARTNER VIOLENCE ON THE WORKPLACE As we have previously discussed, intimate partner violence impacts the primary employed individual, coworkers, clients, vendors, and customers. Intimate partner violence thus contributes to stress for all in the workplace. This stress consequently results in lost productivity, decreased morale, increased absenteeism, and increased employee turnover. In addition, Gurchiek (2005) reported that intimate partner violence has a ‘‘sweeping effect—on employee safety, work performance and even the employer’s bottom line’’ (p. 1). As we noted earlier, intimate partner violence costs employers more than $727.9 million annually on costs related to lost productivity. The health-related costs of intimate partner violence, including stalking, rape, and murder, exceed $5.8 billion per year. In addition, approximately $4.1 billion of this cost is for employees who require physical and mental health care, both paid for by the employer. Direct costs also include ambulance transport, paramedic assistance, physical therapists’ assistance, and emergency department visits (Swanberg et al., 2005). It is important to note that mental health care may continue for several years after the victimization. Thus, the estimated costs of intimate partner violence are an underestimate in any year (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2009).
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The American Institute on Domestic Violence (2009) reports that victims of intimate partner violence lose approximately 8 million days of paid workdays each year. The average absenteeism rate of victims of intimate partner violence is approximately 30 percent higher than the average employee absenteeism rate (Urban, 2000). In addition, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2009) measured expected value of lost earnings that victims of intimate partner violence who were murdered would have contributed to society if they had lived out their full life expectancies. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated this figure to be $892.7 million, approximately $713,000 per woman. Willman’s (2007) review of Fortune 1000 companies indicated that 49 percent of corporate leaders indicated intimate partner violence had harmful effects on the organization’s productivity. In addition, 47 percent indicated the violence had a harmful impact on attendance. Fortyfour percent said the violence was harmful to their health care costs and therefore, intimate partner violence impacts their bottom lines. ORGANIZATIONS’ USE OF ‘‘REASONABLE CARE’’ IN DEALING WITH INTIMATE PARTNER VIOLENCE AS A WORKPLACE ISSUE ‘‘Reasonable care,’’ adapted from rulings in Burlington Industries, Inc. v. Ellerth (1998) and Faragher v. City of Boca Raton (1998) includes the following at a minimum: 1. Establish and enforce an effective policy. 2. Establish and enforce effective investigative procedures. 3. Facilitate training in intimate partner violence as a workplace issue in general and in the organization’s policy and procedures specifically.
These cases focused on sexual harassment; however, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (1999) has maintained that these basic standards apply to ‘‘all types of prohibited harassment.’’ We pursue an institutional level of analysis to explain the prevalence of intimate partner violence as a workplace issue. We thus focus on educational, psychotherapeutic, legal, management, and sociocultural factors in understanding intimate partner violence that spills over to the workplace. We also discuss the importance of social science research in helping organizations understand why intimate partner violence exists, including issues of power and control (also see McHugh & Frieze, 2006). We thus integrate management theory, case law, and social science research to effectively enforce policies and procedures in an atmosphere of trust that encourages individuals to come forth with their experiences of intimate partner violence.
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EMPLOYERS BEING PUT ON NOTICE ABOUT INTIMATE PARTNER VIOLENCE In Swanberg and Logan’s (2005) research, 46 percent of women in their sample informed their supervisors or managers about the intimate partner violence they were experiencing. Thus, 54 percent of the women decided not to disclose the abuse. Furthermore, 43 percent of the women informed one of their coworkers about the battering; 57 percent did not do so. Swanberg and Logan also reported that those women who did inform their coworkers or managers received support with having their phone calls screened and physical protection from their batterer. We note that women who did not disclose their victimization at work did so because they feared losing their job, were ashamed of being battered, wanted to deal with the battering themselves, were ashamed of their appearance, and were frightened (Paludi & Paludi, 2000). In addition, women who received support from their employer did eventually resign because they were forced by their mate/spouse to stop working and/or because of the stress of fearing their mate/ spouse would come to their workplace (Swanberg & Logan, 2005). We discuss the following prevention strategies to assist organizations in assisting employees who are victims of intimate partner violence: primary; secondary; and tertiary. Primary prevention strategies include the development and enforcement of policies, investigatory procedures, and training programs on intimate partner violence awareness and the organization’s policy. Secondary prevention strategies include facilitating individualized training with employees who are at high risk for being victims. Finally, tertiary prevention includes working with victims of violence, providing counseling services for them. Each of these strategies is addressed in the following sections. PRIMARY PREVENTION STRATEGIES Policies and Procedures Policies that establish a zero-tolerance for workplace violence and intimate partner violence in the workplace require more than a general statement against the behavior (Barling, Rogers, & Kelloway, 2001; Paludi, Nydegger, & Paludi, 2006; Swanberg, Macke, & Logan, 2007). They require the efforts and support of management at all levels and continual training of all employees (to be discussed later in this chapter), as well as procedures that encourage employees to disclose their victimization to the organization (Kelly & Mullen, 2006). All employees would benefit from a workplace climate of respect and cooperation. COMPONENTS OF POLICIES AND PROCEDURES The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2009) and Society for Human Resource Management (2009) recommend an explicit policy
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statement and investigatory procedures for assisting victims of intimate partner violence. Components of effective policy statements are the following (Paludi, Nydegger & Paludi, 2006): a. Statement of Purpose b. Legal Definition c. Behavioral Examples d. Statement Concerning Impact of Intimate Partner Violence on Individuals and Workplace e. Statement of Individual’s Responsibility in Notifying Employer f. Statement of Workplace’s Responsibility in Assisting Employee g. Statement Concerning Confidentiality of Complaint Procedures h. Statement Concerning Sanctions Available i. Statement Regarding Retaliation j. Statement of Sanctions for Retaliation k. Statement Concerning False Complaints l. Identification and Background of Individual(s)
DEALING WITH INTIMATE PARTNER VIOLENCE IN THE WORKPLACE An important consideration for the policy is whether it sets a tone of appropriate seriousness and concern for employees’ rights. Thus, the policy needs to specify the types of behaviors that are prohibited in the workplace and the potential consequences of these behaviors should they occur. Paludi, Nydegger and Paludi (2006) and Occupational Safety and Health Association (OSHA; 2009) recommend the policy including a Personalized Safety Plan for victims of intimate partner violence that outlines the employers’ responsibility in assisting victims. Components to include in this Personalized Safety Plan include the following: a. Providing receptionists and the building’s security officer with a photograph and description of the batterer. b. Screening the employee’s visitors and phone calls. c. Accompanying the employee to and from their cars. d. Permitting the employee to park close to the office building. e. Having a formal notification letter be sent to the batterer by the president of the organization that indicates their presence on the company premises will result in an arrest since the employee has a restraining order on the batterer. f. Providing referrals for individual counseling.
A sample policy statement and personalized safety plan are presented in Appendix 1 and Appendix 2. Additional suggestions for safety plans may be found in Lundberg-Love and Marmion (2006).
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We caution employers however, to be careful in implementing these procedures since they may put employees’ safety at risk. As Wilman (2007) discussed: Abusers, who have anger and control problems, often perceive such efforts as a conspiracy between the employer and the victim. They become frustrated, angry, and feel out of control when employers make it difficult for them to access their victims. (p. 7)
Paludi, Nydegger, and Paludi (2006) have identified components for effective complaint procedures for organizations. Empirical research has indicated that employees will feel more encouraged to discuss their experiences with intimate partner violence when they understand what the process entails (Swanberg et al., 2006). Thus, employees must be given accurate and adequate information about disclosing their victimization, written in understandable language and terms. Failure to provide such information makes the policy statement inhibitive. Components of effective procedures include all of the following at a minimum: a. Informing employees that the workplace will not ignore any disclosure of intimate partner violence. b. Informing employees that the employer will not make determinations about the employee victim based on the reputations or organizational status of the employee involved. c. Informing employees that they will respond promptly to any incident of intimate partner violence. d. Informing employees that witnesses to incidents and/or to changes in the employee’s behavior will be interviewed.
Paludi and Paludi also recommended that: a. The policy statement should be made available in languages in addition to English for individuals and their support systems for whom English is not their first language. b. The policy statement must be made available in Braille and in large type as well as be made available on audio tape.
TRAINING PROGRAMS For Managers Paludi and Paludi recommended that human resource specialists facilitate training programs for managers in two sections: (a) to
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provide information on intimate partner violence awareness, e.g. definitions, incidence, impact on victims and the workplace and (b) the organization’s policy and procedures so that managers know their rights and responsibilities with respect to assisting employees who are victims of intimate partner violence. Lee (cited in Gurchiek, 2005) noted that ‘‘employers should provide an atmosphere for disclosure’’ since victims feel ashamed, embarrassed, and are fearful of losing their job. Results from research by Swanberg et al. (2006) indicated that women who chose not to disclose the intimate partner violence to their employer did so because of stigma associated with the violence (e.g., embarrassed, ashamed, fear of being judged), safety related (e.g., threatened by the abuser not to tell anyone about the violence, didn’t want coworkers to become involved) and work-environment-related (e.g., didn’t know anyone to tell about the violence, couldn’t trust coworkers and supervisors with the disclosure, and the abuser also worked for the same organization). We recommend these findings be made part of the training for managers so they can understand reasons for silence and reasons why the employer must be supportive to victims of intimate partner violence. We also believe it is important to train managers about why victims of intimate partner violence do disclose the abuse at work. Women in Swanberg et al. (2006)’s research who did report the intimate partner violence at work indicated doing so because they needed to talk about the abuse and because their coworker in whom they confided was also a friend. Women who disclosed at work also did so as a way to explain absences and tardiness, to request time off from work to attend court proceedings or to answer a supervisor or coworker who inquired about any potential abuse. Furthermore, some women disclosed at work because they feared for their lives and wanted a coworker or supervisor to know about the abuse in case of their death. These findings can assist managers in setting up a welcoming and safe environment for all employees so they feel encouraged to report abuse. Swanberg et al. (2006) noted that women victims of intimate partner violence who disclosed the abuse at work fared better in terms of having longer job tenure, low job-quitting rates, and higher wages. Thus, it is important to inform managers (and employee victims) that disclosing the intimate partner violence at work does not translate into employees losing their jobs. Paludi, Nydegger, and Paludi (2006) identified the following components of effective training program for managers: a. Ways to encourage employees to report problems. b. Skills in behaving compassionately and supportively to employees who disclose intimate partner violence.
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c. Skills in handling crises. d. Basic emergency procedures.
In addition, Paludi and Paludi (2000) recommended including a unit in the training programs for managers that deal with stereotypes, what Grothues and Marmion (2006) refer to as ‘‘dismantling the myths’’ about intimate partner violence, including blaming women for their victimization, believing intimate partner violence is a rare occurrence, that women are masochistic and ask for the victimization, that intimate partner violence is about sex, not power, and that intimate partner violence only occurs among poor families. Paludi and Paludi also recommended that training programs on intimate partner violence be separate from training on workplace violence in general. Examples of policies, procedures, and training programs may be found in Paludi, Nydegger, and Paludi (2006) and on OSHA’s Web page, www.osha.gov.
For Threat Assessment Team OSHA (2009) has recommended the use of threat assessment teams or crisis intervention teams that receive, evaluate, and respond to threats in the workplace. Members of these teams include management and labor as well as security, human resources, legal, and operations personnel. The teams are trained to implement policies of the company. They must not intervene inappropriately or endanger employees by their responses. As Paludi, Nydegger, and Paludi (2006) noted, these teams may be feared by employees as ‘‘secret police’’ spying on employees to try to get them fired: The following steps can be implemented to insure that these teams are effective and appropriate: (1) an inclusive group of employees to represent the organization should be selected and (2) training that offers legal, management, and psychological perspectives should be provided to the team on a periodic basis. (p. 92)
OSHA (2009) also recommends training for the company’s threat assessment team to deal with situations as they emerge. These teams must receive continuing training on issues related to intimate partner violence. Their training is identical to the components identified for managerial training. In addition, OSHA recommends that: a. These teams need to be professionally competent and know what to do and when to call for help. b. All members need to know the other team members and their individual jobs very well.
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c. They should role-play and practice a wide variety of potential problem situations. d. They should have frequent meetings and ongoing training.
For Employees Paludi and Paludi recommend the same components of the training program for managers be provided to employees as well. In addition, employee training should include a discussion about the personalized safety plans and the role of the EAP in assisting victims of intimate partner violence. Emphasis should be placed on ensuring the employer will take each victim seriously and will provide assistance to the victimized employee. We also recommend including in the training program for employees a discussion on ways they can assist coworkers who are victims of intimate partner violence, including being alerted to changes in the individuals’ behavior. In addition, training in how to respond to a coworker who confides in employees should be provided, including listening without judging, recognizing the difficulty it took for an individual to discuss the topic of intimate partner violence, and being an advocate for the employee by referring them to human resources, a manager, or the EAP. We also advise that intimate partner violence be part of all new employee orientations. As Swanberg et al. (2006) noted: Educating employees about partner violence could help to demystify the disgrace associated with this social problem and consequently help reduce or eliminate the risk of partner violence entering into the workplace. (p. 574)
PEDAGOGICAL TECHNIQUES The pedagogical techniques that have been recommended in the literature (e.g., Paludi & Paludi, 2000) for training programs are ones that: 1. Empower employees. 2. Encourage employees to think strategically. 3. Assist employees in communicating effectively with employees. 4. Manage conflict in the workplace.
The interactive pedagogy encompasses adult learning principles. Research in educational psychology (Slavin, 2008) has identified that adults prefer learning situations that: a. Are practical and problem-centered. b. Promote their positive self esteem.
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c. Integrate new ideas with existing knowledge. d. Show respect for the individual learner. e. Capitalize on their experience. f. Allow choice and self-direction.
We recommend facilitating the training in the following ways: a. Provide overviews, summaries, case studies, and behavioral rehearsals to link research to practice. b. Use collaborative, authentic problem-solving activities. c. Assist individuals in becoming more effective and confident through guided practice and establishing routines. d. Ask individuals what they would like to know about the training topic. e. Provide a quality, well-organized, differentiated experience that uses time effectively and efficiently.
The major objective of the training modules and pedagogical techniques is to facilitate transference to the workplace. We recommend accomplishing this goal by: a. Association: having participants associate the new information with something with which they are already knowledgeable. b. Similarity: presenting information that is similar to material that participants already know; i.e., it revisits a logical framework or pattern. c. Degree of original learning: the degree of original learning for the participants was high. d. Critical attribute element: the information learned by the participants contains elements that are extremely beneficial and/or critical on the job.
We do not recommend Web-based training programs for teaching employees about intimate partner violence. This pedagogy generates high levels of employees’ acquisition and retention of the material presented (Frisbie, 2002; Goldstein & Ford, 2002) as well as offers fastpaced learning. However, Web-based training can create frustration in employees who are not computer literate, who would prefer learning from an individual, not a computer, and because the issue is emotionally laden and therefore sensitive (Dessler, 2009). We do recommend the use of behavioral rehearsal with case studies with managers, asking their input on how to handle an incident presented to them. Discussion of their responses must include providing critical evaluation of their behavior, including whether or not they are following the organization’s policy.
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NEEDS ASSESSMENTS In keeping with the literature in human resource management (e.g., Barbazette, 2006; DeCenzo & Robbins, 2007) we recommend conducting a needs assessment with employees to identify additional issues they expect to be covered in a training session. Brown (2002) identified four reasons why needs assessments must be conducted prior to facilitating training programs: (1) identify problem areas in the company, (2) obtain management support, (3) develop data for measuring the effectiveness of the training program, and (4) determine the costs and benefits of the training program. Needs assessments may be conducted through anonymous surveys and/or focus groups (Lucier, 2008; Tyler, 2002). We recommend the following process (also see Levy & Paludi, 2002): 1. Ask individuals to provide answers to questions regarding discrimination in the workplace via an anonymous mail survey. 2. Facilitate 2-hour focus groups with self-identified employees (no more than 15-20 per session) to elicit in-depth responses. Structured interview questions for individuals who participate in the focus groups center around employees’ goals for training, including their needs with regard to better understanding intimate partner violence and individuals with viewpoints different from their own. 3. Analyze responses from the previous steps using qualitative and quantitative analyses. 4. Prepare a written report that summarizes the needs assessment, including suggestions for the following: .
How to increase awareness
.
Ways to examine attitudes
.
Alternatives to stereotyping
.
Methods of supportive action
5. Make recommendations for post-training evaluations (to be discussed subsequently in this chapter).
The main goal of the needs assessment therefore is to obtain information concerning the manner in which intimate partner violence is addressed in the organizational climate of the company, including topics such as empowerment, the establishment of mutual trust and respect, methods of inclusion or exclusion, and verbal and nonverbal communication. The process of the assessment will be consistent with the goal of the training programs in which the employees will subsequently participate. POSTTRAINING EVALUATIONS In further keeping with the human resource management literature, we highlight the necessity of conducting posttraining evaluations.
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Measuring the effectiveness of training programs in intimate partner violence as a workplace issue is an important aspect of the training program so that the organization may determine if the training delivered or failed to deliver the expected organizational benefits. The measures of success for the training programs in intimate partner violence are ones identified in the needs assessment phase. Issues in the measurement phase can be discussed in two phases: types of information about which to measure and ways to measure whether or not the training effort achieved its goals. It is not enough to merely assume that any training an organization offers, even if it is legally mandated, is effective. The transfer of knowledge from the training room to the workplace is the most important measure of success. The most wellknown model for determining the effectiveness of training programs is the Kirkpatrick Model (1959, 1998) that is comprised of four levels: reaction, learning, behavior, and results. Results concerns the benefits resulted from training. Behavior taps into what extent trainees change their behavior, back in the workplace as a result of this training. The learning level asks to what extent trainees improved their knowledge and skills and changed their attitudes as a result of the training programs. Finally, the reaction component determines trainees’ opinions about the structure of the training program, location of the program, trainer effectiveness, and so on. The most commonly used level of the Kirkpatrick Model is the reactions level. However, this is the least valid evaluation technique (Tan, Hall, & Boyce, 2003). Individuals’ opinions are heavily influenced by factors that may have little to do with the training effectiveness. By measuring reactions, organizations do not obtain information regarding employees’ learning, how well they are integrating the new knowledge and skills on their job, or whether there has been increased disclosure of intimate partner violence posttraining. Common performance-based evaluations that incorporate any of the Kirkpatrick Model levels are posttraining, pre-post training, pre-post training performance with control group, and the Solomon Four Group Design. We encourage the reader to review Graziano and Raulin, 1996, for additional information. We recommend using an ‘‘ecological approach’’ for conducting training programs on intimate partner violence (Paludi & Paludi, 2003). This approach stresses that training be facilitated in a sequence that ensures optimum assistance for all parties. The sequence is as follows: Individuals hearing reports of intimate partner violence Counselors in EAP President and administrators Managers and supervisors Employees
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We suggest report persons and counselors be trained initially so that employees will have an outlet for disclosing intimate partner violence and receiving emotional support. Typically flashbacks can occur during training programs; we want to ensure employees have trained individuals who can assist them with these experiences.
ADDITIONAL HUMAN RESOURCE RESPONSIBILITIES We note the importance of ensuring that victims of intimate partner violence not be retaliated against on other human resource functions (Lemon, 2001; Randel & Wells, 2003). For example, employee victims should not be identified as ‘‘tardy’’ or absent if they have to go to counseling, court, physicians’ appointments, and so on. In addition, performance appraisals should not penalize employee victims on time management, absenteeism, and so on. While managers may not fully be aware of the employees’ situation, the human resource department must ensure protection for employee victims. Furthermore, employers must abide by the General Duty Clause of OSHA, which states that the employer has to provide a safe and healthy workplace free from violence for all its employees. Employers should also provide family and medical leave to employee victims. Organizations that recognize the need and adapt work to employees’ lives will assist employee victims as well as win all employees’ loyalty and thus have a competitive edge (Eastman, 1998, Paludi, et al., volume 3 of this book set). Organizations with family-friendly policies report less stress for employees, lower absenteeism, higher morale, positive publicity, improved work satisfaction, lower turnover rate, staffing over a wide range of hours, child care hours that conform to work hours, and access to quality infant, child, and elder care (Frone & Yardley, 1996; Paludi & Neidermeyer, 2006). Examples of family friendly policies for victims of intimate partner violence include flexible work hours, on-site health services, time off/ career break, and workplace relocation that provide employees with the opportunity to continue working for their employer at a safer and anonymous job site (Paludi, Vaccariello, Graham, Smith, Allen-Dicker, & Kasprzak, 2006; Swanberg et al., 2006). Examples of such policies are found in Paludi and Paludi (2006). In addition, educational materials may be developed for distribution and posting throughout the workplace, including posters with tear-off tabs containing hotline phone numbers. We also note that an intimate batterer may be a coworker of the employee victim. We recommend employers consider adopting a consensual relationship policy (also see Paludi, Nydegger, & Paludi, 2006).
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We recognize that consensual relationships are not illegal, but they do cause difficulties for organizations because: a. The situation involves one person exerting power over another. b. The seduction of a much younger individual is usually involved. c. Conflict of interest issues arise, e.g. how can a supervisor fairly evaluate an employee with whom she/he is having a sexual relationship? d. The potential for exploitation and abuse is high. e. The potential for retaliatory harassment is high when the sexual relationship ceases. f. Other individuals may be affected and make accusations of favoritism (Paludi, Nydegger & Paludi, 2006, pp. 79-80).
Sample consensual relationship policies may be found in Paludi and Barickman (1998). We recommend the implementation of engineering solutions to assist with intimate partner violence as well as workplace violence in general (Middelkoop, Gilhooley, Ruepp, Polikoski, & Paludi, 2008). Examples of engineering solutions include: Controlling or limiting access to work areas after dark Creating clear escape routes Installing locks on doors that lead to ‘‘staff only’’ areas like break or lunch rooms Employee identification badges Increased lighting Video surveillance Alarm systems Buddy system On-site guard services Weapons policy Coded card keys for access Equip field staff with cellular phones and daily work plans Providing a portable ‘‘panic button’’ for each employee Providing handheld alarms.
Security staff are also important in prevention strategies, including: a. Working with administrators to improve the security level of the buildings, grounds, and parking lots. b. Serving as the liaison with local law enforcement. c. Serving as the company’s security experts, providing administrators with a risk management analysis.
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d. Serving as the company’s technologies experts with respect to engineering solutions. e. Assisting with conducting effective background checks as part of the employment process. f. Coordinate electronic surveillance, building security with global positioning, communications, etc. with local law enforcement to provide quicker response times. g. Install voice activated and Braille security call boxes. h. Ensure a company-wide emergency notification system in the event of violence on site, including the parking lot.
THE EAP EAPs can offer the following services in primary prevention of intimate partner violence as well as workplace violence in general (see Paludi, Nydegger, & Paludi, 2006): a. Providing short term counseling to managers and employees. b. Providing referrals for counseling outside of the workplace. c. Consulting with and training Threat Assessment Team. d. Training managers to deal with employee victims without diagnosing the employee. e. Providing referrals for legal counseling. f. Providing referrals for financial counseling. g. Determining whether the employee has sought and/or obtained a protective order against the abusive partner. h. Working closely with human resources to monitor the employee victim in order to protect their safety.
Paludi, Nydegger, and Paludi (2006) outlined steps companies should take for emergency action plans, including: a. Procedures for getting help. b. Emergency escape procedures and routes for every person and for every place in the company. c. Identification of personnel with training needed to perform medical duties. d. Training for employees on how to deal with violence and how to use the emergency action plan. e. Procedures for calling for medical assistance. f. Procedures for notifying law enforcement. g. Procedures for securing the area after a violent event. h. Procedures for accounting for all employees after a violent event.
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We thus take the approach that intimate partner violence that spills over into the workplace is the responsibility of all members of an organization.
SECONDARY AND TERTIARY PREVENTION Relying on the symptomatology of victims of intimate partner violence reviewed in this chapter we can assist employees we believe are at risk for violence as well as those who have disclosed the abuse. The American Bar Association Commission on Domestic Violence (1999) also noted the following observable behavior that may suggest possible intimate partner abuse that may be helpful for secondary prevention measures (p. 16). We recommend providing this listing to managers as well during training on intimate partner violence as a workplace issue: a. Unexplained tardiness and absences. b. Unplanned use of leave time. c. Lack of concentration. d. A tendency to remain isolated from coworkers or reluctance to participate in social events. e. Discomfort when communicating with others. f. Disruptive phone calls or e-mail. g. Frequent financial problems indicating lack of access to money. h. Unexplained bruises or injuries. i. Noticeable change in use of makeup (to cover up injuries). j. Inappropriate clothes (e.g., sunglasses worn inside the building, turtleneck worn in the summer). k. Sudden changes of address or reluctance to divulge where she is staying. l. Court appearances.
The EAP counselor can assist employee victims with conflict resolution, providing guidance about options and procedures, e.g., domestic violence shelter, providing emotional support for concerns about disclosing victim status to the employer, short term counseling, referral services, and countering myths about causes of violence with realities. We also recommend EAP counselors discussing the cycle of violence with employee victims (Walker, 1979). The three phases of the cycle of violence are as follows: In the tension-building phase, there are battering incidents. The victim attempts to avoid escalation of the battering by calming her mate and by staying away from him. However, the
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tension builds too high to be controlled by these efforts and the batterer responds with an acute battering incident in the second phase of the cycle. In the final phase, the tension from the first two phases has ceased and the batterer becomes apologetic and charming toward the victim. The level of violence increases both in frequency and severity as the relationship continues. CONCLUSION Sexual, racial, gender violence and other forms of discrimination and violence in a culture cannot be eliminated without changing culture. —Charlotte Bunch
The Partnership for Prevention (2002) reported that most employers do not have a defined policy and procedures for dealing with intimate partner violence that spills over into the workplace. Smaller companies are less likely to include a policy on intimate partner violence than larger ones. Services that are most commonly offered by companies have included victim referral services, security precautions, and educational materials, e.g., posters, brochures. Roper’s (2002) study of the Liz Claiborne survey of Fortune 1000 senior executives and managers indicated that victim resources were the only focus of these employers’ attention to intimate partner violence, including emergency counseling services, employee benefits that covered the costs of medical assistance, and referrals to organizations that deal with intimate partner violence. We have offered recommendations in this chapter to assist workplaces in implementing effective interventions in intimate partner violence. We borrow from the Higher Education Center’s (Langford, 2006, p. 5) suggestions for campus violence in that workplace interventions must be: Prevention-focused Comprehensive Planned and evaluated Strategic and targeted, using results from a risk assessment of the vulnerability of the workplace Research-based Multicomponent Coordinated and synergistic, ensuring all prevention and response efforts complement and reinforce each other Multisectoral and collaborative, involving campus stakeholders, including counselors and advisors Supported by infrastructure and institutional commitment
In order for these recommendations for primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention strategies to be successful, there must be support and initiative from the president of the organization. Without this
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commitment, the prevention strategies will not be effectively implemented, contributing to employees believing the organization is not seriously committed to the issue of intimate partner violence and thus being silenced about their experiences with this abuse. Furthermore, as we have suggested in this chapter, dealing with intimate partner violence as a workplace issue must be based on a multidisciplinary team approach, including human resources, EAP, security, managers, law enforcement, attorneys, and employees themselves. Unions may also assist by supporting the company’s intimate partner violence policy, facilitating training on intimate partner violence for new stewards/delegates, and ensuring all employees have received the company’s policy and have been trained on intimate partner violence. We also recommend organizations conducting a safety audit to determine whether the prevention strategies are working effectively (Smith & Mazin, 2004), including conducting anonymous organization climate surveys to inquire about employees’ perceptions of the company’s commitment to dealing with intimate partner violence. A safety audit would include: a. Building security (e.g., automatic locked doors? Security guards on duty for all shifts?) b. Visitors (e.g., sign in guests with guard?) c. Health services (e.g., EAP, wellness center?)
The audit will uncover disconnects between the workplaces policies, procedures, and practices and what the workplace wants to achieve in terms of meeting the needs of victims of intimate partner violence. Results from the audit and climate survey must be used to understand the reason for employees’ perceptions and to correct the policies, procedures, and training, and ensure employees feel safe disclosing the abuse. Recommendations can be prioritized based upon the risk level assigned to each item: high (required immediate attention), medium (required to be dealt with in a short time frame), and low (suggestions to make the practices more efficient). From this risk matrix, a workplace security plan can be developed to address the most pressing issues first (Crouhy, Galai, & Mark, 2005). We hope workplaces will find the recommendations in this chapter useful in meeting their goal of helping victims of intimate partner violence so Jerry Moran’s sentiment becomes a reality: Through education, improved funding and support, we can continue to work together to provide safe environments for victims and end the cycle of domestic violence.
Additional resources to assist organizations meeting this goal are presented in Appendix 4.
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APPENDIX 1: SAMPLE POLICY ON INTIMATE PARTNER VIOLENCE AS A WORKPLACE CONCERN Employees of _____ must be able to work in an atmosphere of mutual respect and trust. As a place of work, _____ should be free of violence and all forms of intimidation and exploitation. _____ is concerned and committed to our employees’ safety and health. The Firm refuses to tolerate violence in our workplace. _____ has issued a policy prohibiting violence in the workplace. We have a zero tolerance for workplace violence. _____ also will make every effort to prevent violent acts in this workplace perpetrated by spouses, mates, or lovers. The Firm is committed to dealing with intimate partner violence as a workplace issue. _____ has a zero tolerance for intimate partner violence. Intimate Partner Violence: Definition Intimate partner violence—also referred to as domestic violence, battering, spouse abuse, spousal assault, and intimate partner abuse—is a global health problem. This victimization is defined as violence between adults who are intimates, regardless of their marital status, living arrangements, or sexual orientations. Such violence includes throwing, shoving, and slapping as well as beatings, forced sex, threats with a deadly weapon, and homicide. Intimate Partner Violence: Myths and Realities Myth: Intimate partner violence affects a small percentage of employees. Reality: Approximately 5 million employees are battered each year in the United States. Intimate partner violence is the leading cause of injury and workplace death to women in the United States. Myth: People must enjoy the battering since they rarely leave the abusive relationship. Reality: Very often victims of battering do leave the relationship. Women and men remain in a battering relationship not because they are masochistic, but for several well-founded reasons, e.g., . Threats to their lives and the lives of their children, especially after they have tried to leave the batterer . Fear of not getting custody of their children . Financial dependence . Feeling of responsibility for keeping the relationship together . Lack of support from family and friends . The batterer is not always violent . They still love the batterer
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Myth: Individuals who batter abuse their partners because they are under a great deal of stress, including being unemployed. Reality: Stress does not cause individuals to batter their partners. Society condones partner abuse. In addition, individuals who batter learn they can achieve their goals through the use of force without facing consequences. Myth: Children are not affected by watching their parents in a battering relationship. Reality: Children are often in the middle of domestic violence. They may be abused by the violent parent. Children may also grow up to repeat the same behavior patterns they witnessed in their parents. Myth: There are no long-term consequences of battering. Reality: There are significant long-term consequences of battering, including depression, anger, fear, anxiety, irritability, loss of self-esteem, feelings of humiliation and alienation, and a sense of vulnerability. Myth: Intimate partner violence only occurs in poor and minority families. Reality: Intimate partner violence occurs among all socioeconomic classes and all racial and ethnic groups.
Services Offered by _____ for Employees who are Victims of Intimate Partner Violence _____ will offer the following services for our employees who are victims of intimate partner violence: . Provide receptionists and building security officer with a photograph of the batterer and a description of the batterer . Screen employee’s calls . Screen employee’s visitors . Accompany the employee to her/his car, subway, bus stop . Permit the employee to park close to the office building if required . When there is a restraining order, _____ will send a formal notification to the batterer that indicates that his/her presence on the Firm’s premises will result in arrest . Referrals for individual counseling
Training programs dealing with intimate partner violence will be facilitated annually for managers and employees. Members of the Threat Assessment Team you may contact to discuss intimate partner violence are: Name ____________________ Phone Number ____________________
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APPENDIX 2: SAMPLE PERSONALIZED SAFETY PLAN Name: Date Completed: 1. I can inform my immediate supervisor, security, human resources and _____ at work that I am a victim of intimate partner violence. 2. I can ask _____to help me screen my telephone calls at work. 3. When leaving work, I can walk with _____to my car or the bus stop. I can park my car where I will feel safest getting in and out of the car. 4. If I have problems while driving home, I can__________. 5. If I use public transit, I can __________________. 6. I can go to different grocery stores and shopping malls to conduct my business and shop at hours that are different from those I kept when residing with my battering partner. 7. I can use a different bank and go at hours that are different from those I kept when residing with my battering partner. 8. I can use _____ as my code word to alert my coworkers when I am in danger so they will call for help.
Important Telephone Numbers Police: 911 and _____ Domestic Violence Shelter: District Attorney’s Office: My Supervisor’s Home Phone Number: My Clergy Contact’s Phone Number: Human Resources: Security: Other: ____________________ ____________________ APPENDIX 3: SAMPLE TRAINING PROGRAM FOR MANAGERS Goals of Training To: a. Provide information about the incidence and psychological dimensions of intimate partner violence. b. Discuss the impact of intimate partner violence on individuals and the workplace. c. Distinguish between myths and realities regarding intimate partner violence. d. Discuss reasons employees will disclose and not disclose intimate partner violence at work.
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e. Provide information on ways the workplace can encourage disclosure regarding intimate partner violence. f. Discuss workplace’s policy statement on intimate partner violence. g. Discuss the role of the EAP, security, unions in assisting victims of intimate partner violence. h. Discuss characteristics of perpetrators of intimate partner violence.
At the conclusion of the training program, managers will be able to: a. Assess their own stereotypes and hidden biases regarding intimate partner violence. b. Adequately label emotional, physical, interpersonal, and career impacts of intimate partner violence on individuals and the workplace. c. Identify employees’ rights and responsibilities to disclose intimate partner violence at the workplace. d. Adequately assist employees who wish to disclose intimate partner violence.
Topics for Presentation and Discussion Introduction to training session and goals of training Case presented to managers, managers offer opinions related to case Discussion of case Myths related to intimate partner violence: Intimate partner violence is a rare event. Intimate partner violence is about sex. Women are masochistic and ask to be abused. Intimate partner violence only includes physical assault. Intimate partner violence only occurs in poor families. Intimate partner violence only occurs in heterosexual couples.
Myths vs. realities Definition of intimate partner violence. Incidence of intimate partner violence. Sex vs. power in intimate partner violence. Reasons why women remain in battering relationships. Verbal and physical examples of intimate partner violence. Sex, ethnic, racial, and socioeconomic status related to intimate partner violence. Sexual orientation and intimate partner violence.
Psychological issues in disclosing or not disclosing intimate partner violence in the workplace.
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Pre-work, during work and after work threats by perpetrators. Impact of intimate partner violence on victims. Emotional symptoms Physical symptoms Behavioral symptoms Organizational symptoms
Impact of intimate partner violence on coworkers. Impact of intimate partner violence on workplace. Factors contributing to intimate partner violence. Behavioral risk factors Social and cultural factors Personal and psychological factors
Characteristics of perpetrators of intimate partner violence. Managing intimate partner violence in the workplace. Workplace’s policy and procedures Workplace’s role in responding to disclosure of intimate partner violence Identifying security procedures Personalized safety plans Referring employees to the EAP Ensuring victims are not discriminated against on performance appraisals, etc. Encouraging disclosure: Keeping stereotypes and biases in check
Discussion of case General discussion APPENDIX 4: RESOURCES ON INTIMATE PARTNER VIOLENCE AS A WORKPLACE ISSUE Abusive Men Exploring New Directions www.amendinc.org American Bar Association Commission on Domestic Violence www.abanet.org/domviol/home.html American Domestic Violence Crisis Line www.awoscentral.com American Psychological Association www.apa.org Asian and Pacific Islander Institute on Domestic Violence www.apiahf.org/apidvinstitute Battered Women’s Justice Project www.bwjp.org
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Centers for Disease Control and Prevention www.cdc.gov Department of Justice Violence Against Women Office www.ojp.usdoj.gov/vawo Domestic Violence Clearinghouse and Legal Hotline www.stoptheviolence.org Equal Employment Opportunity Commission www.eeoc.org Family Violence Prevention Fund Endabuse.org Institute on Domestic Violence in the African American Community www.dvinstitute.org National Center for Victims of Crime www.ncvc.org National Center on Domestic and Sexual Violence www.ncdsv.org National Coalition Against Domestic Violence www.ncadv.org National Domestic Violence Hotline www.ndvh.org National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health www.niosh.gov National Latino Alliance for the Elimination of Domestic Violence www.dvalianza.org National Organization for Women www.now.org National Resource Center on Domestic Violence www.nrcdv.org Occupational Safety and Health Association www.osha.gov Safe at Work Coalition www.safeatworkcoalition.org Society for Human Resource Management www.shrm.org U.S. Department of Health and Human Services www.4woman.gov/violence/index.cfm Violence Against Women Office www.ovw.usdoj.gov Violence Prevention www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/category/3242.html
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Tyler, K. (2002). Evaluating evaluations. HR Magazine, 47. Urban, B. (2000). Anonymous foundation domestic abuse prevention program evaluation: Final client survey report. Chicago, IL: The University of Illinois at Chicago. Walker, L. (1979). The battered woman. New York: Harper & Row. Walker, L. (1995). Foreword. In L. Adler & F. Denmark (Eds.), Violence and the prevention of violence (pp. ix–xii). Westport, CT: Praeger. Walker, L. (1999). Psychology and domestic violence around the world. American Psychologist, 54, 21–29. Walker, L. (2006). Battered woman syndrome: Empirical findings. In F. Denmark, H. Krauss, E. Halpern, & J. Sechzer (Eds.), Violence and exploitation against women and girls (pp. 142–157). Boston: Blackwell Publishing. Watlington, C., & Murphy, C. (2006). The roles of religion and spirituality among African American survivors of domestic violence. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 62, 837–857. Wetterstein, K., Rudolph, S., Paul, K., Gallagher, K., Trang, B., Adams, K., et al. (2004). Freedom through self-sufficiency: A qualitative examination of the impact of violence on the working lives of women in shelter. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 51, 447–462. Willman, S. (2007). Too much, too long? Domestic violence in the workplace. Testimony before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Employment and Workplace Safety. Zorza, J. (2002). Battering. In J. Zorza (Ed.), Violence against women. Kingston, NJ: Civic Research Institute.
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Chapter 6
From Victim to Empowered Survivor: Feminist Therapy with Survivors of Rape and Sexual Assault Avigail Moor
Sexual violence against women is a widespread phenomenon affecting a large percentage of women. According to available data, approximately 20 to 40 percent of all women will experience some form of sexual assault during their lifetime (Casey & Nurius, 2006; Koss, 1983; Koss & Harvey, 1991; Moor, 2009). Rape and other forms of sexual violence are traumatic experiences that commonly result in severe psychological sequelae. These include posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, anxiety, loss of meaning, self-devaluation, shame, and impaired sexual functioning (Angell, 1994; Burnam, Stein, Golding, & Siegel, 1988; Foa & Rothbaum, 1998; Gilbert, 1994; Herman, 1992; Jaycox, Zoellner, & Foa, 2002; Lebowitz & Roth, 1994). While the posttraumatic aspects of the clinical presentation of rape survivors are similar to those noted in the aftermath of other types of trauma (Foa & Rothbaum, 1998; Jaycox et al, 2002; Meadows & Foa, 1998), many of the additional symptoms observed are rape-specific and socially determined (Koss & Harvey, 1991; Lebowitz & Roth, 1994; Moor, 2007). Sexual violence against women occurs in a very particular social context, characterized by prejudiced, victim-blaming attitudes toward survivors that fault, shame, and isolate the victim of the assault. Thus, rather than receiving social support and comfort, as is typical in the case of most other forms of trauma, victims of sexual violence are often scorned and abandoned. This can lead to extreme levels of self-blame, guilt, and shame, which incessantly torment victims of sexual violence.
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Although some form of self-blame is common to the experience of trauma in general, the particularly insidious rape-specific self-disdain is incremental to the more customary self-blame, and a serious complication to recovery. Yet this reality is frequently overlooked in therapies uninformed by the social analysis of the aftermath of rape to the detriment of survivors; hence the necessity for a therapeutic model that incorporates this understanding on a most fundamental level. Feminist therapy is such an approach. Rooted in a contextual conceptualization of female psychological distress, it is the optimal perspective from which to treat survivors of rape. This chapter is intended to delineate the principles of feminist therapy that are expected to augment all forms of treatment for rape survivors, regardless of theoretical orientation. It is a philosophy of treatment and shared principles that are meant to accompany all theoretical orientations and approaches to treatment. It should be stated that while the focus of this chapter is on the treatment of rape and sexual assault survivors, much of its content applies equally to victims of other forms of sexual violence such as sexual harassment and child sexual abuse, although each of these has its unique elements that must be addressed as well. Having worked extensively with rape and sexual assault survivors for more than two decades at two regional rape crisis centers and in private practice, I have come to believe that it is the feminist aspects of the treatment, particularly the social analysis and the egalitarian stance of the therapist that benefit these clients most. This holds true in my experience for the majority of victims. The population that I have worked with over the years has been highly variable in age, ethnic background, socioeconomic status, and preassault psychological functioning, as well as in previous exposure to trauma. Their clinical presentations generally fit the typical rape survivors’ profile, with the majority exhibiting PTSD symptoms along with rape-specific symptomatology. Yet all have responded favorably above all else to the feminist tenets of the treatment. This is not to negate the importance, and even the necessity, of specific trauma resolution interventions such as eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR; Power et al., 2002; Rogers & Silver, 2002; Shapiro & Maxfield, 2002), cognitive–behavioral therapy (CBT; Foa & Rothbaum, 1998; Jaycox et al, 2002; Meadows & Foa, 1998), prolonged exposure (Foa, Zoellner, Feeny, Hembree, & Alvarez-Conrad, 2002; Lee, Gavriel, Drummond, & Greenwald, 2002; Pitman, Altman, Greenwald, Longpre, Machlin, Poire, & Steketee, 1991), and other modalities. All of these techniques are positively effective in treating the PTSD aspects of the presenting problem. However, there is also extensive evidence that these interventions alone may not suffice in relieving survivors’ sense of disempowerment and guilt, which often persist after PTSD symptoms have subsided if not targeted directly.
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For example, Pitman et al. reported that while survivors treated with flooding showed considerable decrease in anxiety, their feelings of shame and blame did not respond to further exposure to the narrative. A similar account is provided in Meadows and Foa’s case study of a survivor whose anxiety symptoms responded well to prolonged exposure, while her tendency to berate herself for having been at the bar where she was assaulted actually increased. They report that these feelings of guilt and shame were not alleviated by further exposure to the assault narrative. The integration of feminist principles, with their contextual and egalitarian emphases, into the therapeutic process offers us the chance to provide our clients with the ultimate empowerment needed for recovery. These principles are outlined next. FEMINIST PSYCHOTHERAPY Feminist therapy is a philosophy of psychotherapy rather than a distinct orientation (Hill & Ballou, 1998; Moradi, Fischer, Hill, Jome, & Blum, 2000; Rader & Gilbert, 2005). Being woman-centered, it underscores the social context of women’s distress, maintaining that women’s pain cannot be fully understood outside of social context. Social norms, values, and attitudes are seen as greatly contributing to the creation and maintenance of many of the problems and issues that are brought into therapy (Feminist Therapy Institute, 1990; Hill & Ballou, 1998; Kaschak, 1992; Worell & Remer, 1992; Worell & Johnson, 2001). Each individual’s personal experiences and situations are viewed as reflective of and influenced by society’s attitudes and values. Therefore, one of the goals of therapy is to afford the clients an awareness of these influences so as to bring about change in perspective and an understanding of the interactions between the various social factors and the client’s internal experiences (Brown & Brodsky, 1992; Hill & Ballou, 1998; Rader & Gilbert, 2005). Although feminist therapists are trained in a variety of disciplines and theoretical orientations, they are united amid this diversity by their feminist analyses and perspectives regarding the interactive effects of the client’s internal and external worlds. Another central tenet of feminist therapy stemming from feminist philosophy is a commitment to the empowerment of women and the validation and valuing of their experience and viewpoint. Caring, compassion and respect are, accordingly, the foundation of this approach to treatment (Brown & Brodsky; 1992; Moradi et al., 2000; Rader & Gilbert, 2005; Worell & Remer, 1992). It is a relationship in which clients are empowered to find their strengths and strivings, a practice in which growth-promoting reframing of social realities allows for new ways of thinking and being. It is a process of connectedness in which each client is made to feel worthy of respect, affection, tenderness, and
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judgment-free acceptance, an endeavor of caring that identifies each client’s unique and positive qualities so as to enhance her self esteem. In addition, the principles of feminist therapy call for an egalitarian therapeutic relationship, which is considered a core tenet of this approach to treatment. Recognizing the negative impact of the genderbased power imbalance in the lives of most women, feminist therapy is intent on maintaining an egalitarian structure within its bounds (Feminist Therapy Institute, 1990; Hill & Ballou, 1998; Jordan, Kaplan, Miller, Stiver, & Surrey, 1991; Rader & Gilbert, 2005). Accordingly, feminist therapists are committed to maximizing the equality between therapist and client by exercising power-sharing behaviors of various kinds. These include refraining from placing themselves in the one-up position, working collaboratively with the client, viewing the client as her own expert, treating her with complete respect and belief in her strengths and knowledge, informing the client of the therapy process, allowing the client to guide the sessions, and so on (Hill, 1990; Gilbert, 1980; Hill & Ballou, 1998; Rader & Gilbert, 2005; Worell & Remer, 1992). Equalizing the relationship with the client is seen as a primary responsibility of the therapist, who routinely evaluates her ongoing interactions with her clients for any evidence of hierarchy, biases or discriminatory attitudes and practices. Moreover, she accepts responsibility for taking action to confront and change any interfering, oppressing, or devaluing biases she may have. Feminist therapy is also devoted to the creation of social change and the valuing of the female perspective. Therapy from this perspective is intended to bring about individual as well as social change through raising awareness to the oppressive social forces impacting the client’s wellbeing and offering new ways of being and perceiving. This process reverberates beyond the bounds of therapy into ever-growing circles of awareness and action. In order to increase the social impact of their practice, feminist therapists attempt to reach out to large segments of the population. They also may engage in broadly defined social activism in addition to their professional work. It is suggested that the principles of feminist therapy offer the best conceptual framework for understanding the myriad of symptoms exhibited by survivors of sexual aggression. Treatment from this perspective is likely to deliver optimally suited interventions to this population, while providing the kind of empowering interpersonal experiences that can counteract the utter disregard sustained in rape. We therefore turn next to a discussion of the application of feminist therapy to the treatment of survivors of rape and sexual assault. The discussion begins with a feminist analysis of the social context of the sexual victimization of women, so as to provide a conceptual foundation for the therapy. Application to treatment of each tenet of feminist therapy is considered thereafter.
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APPLICATION OF FEMINIST THERAPY TO THE TREATMENT OF SURVIVORS OF RAPE AND SEXUAL ASSAULT Feminist Analysis of Sexual Violence against Women In accordance with the focus of feminist therapy on the social context of individual psychological distress, the treatment of victims of sexual violence is rooted in an analysis of the interplay between social factors and internal responses to the events. In this analysis, sexual violence against women is considered to be an integral part of the social oppression of women. Similarly, societal attitudes toward the victims of this aggression are viewed as constituting one of the central public forces to negatively impact women’s lives and wellbeing subsequent to rape. Following is an analysis of the social context of rape followed by an application of feminist therapy guidelines to the treatment of its aftermath. Social Context of Rape Rape and other forms of sexual violence epitomize the social oppression of women. In fact, from the feminist standpoint, sexual violence against women is one of the primary means by which patriarchy aims to keep women in their place (McKinnon, 2005). The astronomical prevalence rates of all forms of sexual violence directed at women, coupled with the utter failure of the system to combat this menace, suggest that society is bent, at best, on regulating rather than eliminating it. Katherine McKinnon refers to this social order as the ‘‘Rape Culture.’’ According to her, sexual violence against women is rooted in a discriminatory social hierarchy, which both mobilizes and perpetuates the abuse of women. The ideology of this system amounts to an eroticization of women’s oppression and domination, thereby turning this type of violence into conceivable and even appealing for many individual males, while abandoning the victims in the process. Feminist therapy, anchored in such a conceptualization of sexual violence against women, can empower victims greatly by helping them to realize that their victimization was not due to any contribution of their own, but was rather part of the systematic victimization of women in patriarchy. Consistent with the social function of sexual violence as a means of keeping women in line, social attitudes toward victims of these crimes are oppressive and damaging as well. In fact, the present social environment is extremely detrimental for rape survivors, with societal victimblaming and revictimization being rampant (Campbell, 1998; Campbell & Raja, 1999; Campbell, Wasco, Ahrens, Sefl, & Barnes, 2001). As a consequence, rape survivors are commonly burdened with an external, societal assault of prejudiced collective attitudes that blame and shame them for being raped (Ardovini-Brooker & Caringella-MacDonald, 2002; Burt,
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1980). These stereotyped attitudes, generally subsumed in the term ‘‘rape myths’’ (Lonsway & Fitzgerald, 1994), amount to a second victimization, and are frequently internalized by survivors, often generating an array of severe self-denigrating cognitions and emotional suffering. VICTIM-BLAMING AND SECONDARY VICTIMIZATION Present society is laden with a wide array of detrimental rape myths. Typical myths revolve around the notion that victims somehow contributed to their own victimization and are responsible for its occurrence (Koss & Harvey, 1991). Victim precipitation is the most common and well-known rape myth, which directly holds the victim responsible for the rape (Cowan, 2000). It is founded on a belief that the victim in some way provoked the rape. It claims that she asked to be raped by engaging in ‘‘unsafe’’ behavior, such as drinking or hitchhiking; by placing herself in ‘‘unsafe’’ situations, such as bars or dark streets; by wearing revealing clothes, or by behaving ‘‘promiscuously’’ (‘‘nice’’ girls don’t get raped). Rape myths further proclaim that women can prevent rape if they truly want to, and that no woman can be forced to have sex against her will. Hence, if a woman is raped, she obviously did not mind it or worse yet, secretly desired it. She may also be viewed as having been dishonored by the rape (e.g., rape is shameful, it only happens to certain types of women), particularly, but not solely, if she belongs to an ethnic minority or to a low SES (Alvidrez, 1999; Wyatt, 1992). Finally, there are two related rape myths regarding acquaintance rape (the most prevalent form of rape); that victims of such rapes precipitate the event by leading the perpetrators on, and that women say ‘‘no’’ to sexual advances when they actually mean ‘‘yes,’’ and hence there was no rape at all. There are many indications that endorsement of rape myths is fairly pervasive within the legal, law enforcement, and medical establishment (Campbell, 1998; Ullman & Filipas, 2001). This has been referred to as secondary victimization or second rape. There is also evidence that responses of formal support providers may vary in relation to the victim’s ethnicity, such that minority women may encounter even harsher reactions than do their majority counterparts (Ullman & Filipas, 2001; Ullman & Brecklin, 2002; Wyatt, 1992). Some evidence points to similar revictimization of rape victims within the mental health profession (Campbell, 1998; Campbell, Wasco, Ahrens, Sefl, & Barnes, 2001). In a survey of licensed mental health professionals who work extensively with rape survivors, Campbell and Raja (1999) found that 58 percent of the therapists surveyed expressed the view that mental health professionals may carry out some harmful counseling practices when treating this population. Entirely unaware at
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times of their own prejudices regarding rape and rape survivors, some clinicians may be inclined to view survivors as contributing in some way to the occurrence of the rape. Consequently, they may engage fairly regularly in the interpretation of survivors’ motives and behaviors in matters related to the assault. For example, analyzing a survivor’s motives for accompanying a romantic partner to his place, where she was then raped, is a case in point. This multitude of adverse social factors can inflict serious psychological harm on survivors. THE PSYCHOLOGICAL SEQUELAE OF THE SOCIAL CONTEXT OF RAPE The socially contextual elements of rape and other forms of sexual violence seriously complicate the post-assault clinical presentation of many survivors. This appears to hold true across varied cultural and ethnic backgrounds. Not only must survivors deal with the aftereffects of the humiliating violation that is rape, but also with the devastation of the collective victim-blaming and its internalization. Together, these factors inflict severe agony and pain upon survivors, causing them unbearable levels of self-blame and shame (Koss & Harvey, 1991; Moor, 2007; Ullman, 1996). The all too common accusation that the rape victim precipitated the assault can exacerbate her self-accusation and contempt, heightening her already strong tendency to berate herself for her ‘‘carelessness’’ (e.g., ‘‘How could I have been so stupid . . . putting myself in such a situation and allowing this to happen’’). The belief that she is to blame for being attacked can make the survivor doubt her own perceptions, invalidating her lived experience. While hurting to the core, she may nonetheless consequently feel that she got exactly what she deserved (e.g., ‘‘I decided to hitchhike home so I deserve what I got. . . . there can be no sympathy towards me’’). The pain and despair that result are massive. The charge that the rape occurred because of the type of woman she is coupled with the widespread notion that rape is dishonoring, routinely leads to extreme shame and self-disdain (e.g., ‘‘I am so ashamed; no one can ever know of this’’). The dehumanizing nature of rape, intended to denigrate and demean, typically creates a sense of humiliation, desecration, and helplessness, all of which tend to lead to intolerable shame, disgrace, and self-disgust (e.g., ‘‘I am utterly disgusting’’). While the brunt of the post-assault self-blame is socially driven, it is important to keep in mind that blaming the self also has a function in dealing with trauma (Koss & Harvey, 1991). It provides survivors with some (albeit illusionary) sense of control over the traumatic events designed to counteract the experience of helplessness. If a rape survivor believes that her behavior contributed to the assault in some way, she can believe that changing this particular behavior in the future will prevent a reoccurrence
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of the event. It is important to be aware of this protective function of selfblame and guilt when treating this population. Encountering victim-blaming often discourages survivors from disclosing the incident, thereby reducing their likelihood of obtaining social support that could facilitate their recovery (Botta & Pingree, 1997). For example, some stereotypes may cause survivors to doubt that their experience qualifies as ‘‘real rape,’’ which may keep them, in turn, from seeking help. This problem appears to be especially, although not uniquely, common among survivors of date rape (Alvidrez, 1999; Ullman & Brecklin, 2002). Similarly, accusatory and demeaning social attitudes may drive a sizeable proportion of survivors to isolate themselves from loved ones, friends, and family for on many occasions rape myths are actually accepted and believed by survivors’ close social and familial environment (Sheldon & Parent, 2002; Ullman, 1999). It is not uncommon to encounter victim-blaming on the part of those closest to the victim, in the form of dismay that she behaved in a certain way or failed to do one thing or another. Shame among family members is also common. It may take the form of urging the survivor to keep quiet about the assault and pretend it never happened or of outright disgracing her for having been violated. This can be devastating. Survivors may be further harmed if upon turning to the system for help they meet with second victimization and rape myth endorsement by members of the helping professions. This can increase their feelings of culpability and shame, as well as cause them to feel completely invalidated, misunderstood, and judged. Moreover, survivors are likely to become distrustful of others, making them reluctant to seek further help (Campbell & Raja, 1999; Ullman & Filipas, 2001). In fact, a majority of the therapists surveyed in Campbell & Raja’s (1999) study voiced a concern that interaction with community professionals can actually, at times, worsen the state of survivors’ mental health. In comparison, less than half (48 percent) of the clinicians surveyed believed that contacting community professionals had positive outcomes for rape victims. For this reason, 85 percent of therapists expressed a belief that clinicians must be made more aware of the risks of secondary victimization and its repercussions for the effectiveness of treatment, to avoid inflicting further harm on survivors and to fully maximize the efficacy of therapy. Feminist therapy incorporates such awareness, and in view of that can offer specific treatment principles for working with rape survivors as delineated next. TREATMENT PRINCIPLES In light of the socially contextual aspects of much of the pain experienced by survivors of rape and other sexual assaults, there can be little
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doubt that their treatment must be rooted in a feminist conceptualization and analysis if the correction of the effects of the social factors is to take place. In the absence of a thorough comprehension of the combined impact of rape and related victim-blaming rape myths on survivors’ wellbeing, therapy stands the risk of lacking in effectiveness. Even the direct reprocessing of the traumatic events will be augmented by approaching it from a socially contextual viewpoint. In this process, each tenet of feminist therapy has a particularly healing function as delineated next.
EGALITARIAN THERAPEUTIC RELATIONSHIP Being predicated on nonjudgmental respect and genuine belief in every woman’s innate value and strength, feminist therapy offers survivors the opportunity to restore their sense of dignity and self-worth so brutally shattered by the sexual assault. At its core, this treatment aims to counter the humiliation and dehumanization sustained in the attack, while restoring a sense of dignity and self-worth. The type of non-hierarchical, genuinely caring and compassionate empathy that this approach to treatment is built upon plays a crucial, curative role in the recovery from rape, as it imparts a sense of complete validation of every aspect of each survivor’s experience. The kind of therapeutic relationship in which each woman is made to feel worthy in all respects, aims to foster a sense of trust, as it communicates a true acceptance of all of her feelings and thoughts, her choices and needs. Through these interventions, the therapist aims to convey an accurate appraisal of the suffering endured by survivors, provide support, and relief; and at the same time, affirm survivors’ emotional reality (Paivio & Laurent, 2001; Ullman, 1999). Out of respect for our clients who have been sexually victimized, we aspire to gain comprehensive familiarity with all aspects of the reaction to rape and sexual assault in order to be able to unequivocally validate their experience and help them to put it into words. Imparting our knowledge of what rape survivors have been known to experience provides each individual survivor with a sense of safety and trust, as well as being understood. Her experience is normalized as she is assured that it is a shared one, typical of other women who have been through similar horror. This is usually highly comforting and reassuring, as it gives survivors reassurance that their reactions are not unusual or pathologic, as they often fear, but rather normal reactions to an abnormal situation (Herman, 1992; Koss & Harvey, 1992). In essence we strive to use our expertise and experience to benefit the client, without taking control or power that rightfully belong to her (Feminist Therapy Institute, 1990; Hill & Ballou, 1998; Rader & Gilbert, 2005). In the
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process, the survivor begins to regain a sense of control that she was robbed of during the assault. By viewing the survivor as an equal, we approach therapy with the idea that we are on this journey together, jointly aiming for her full recovery. Our true and genuine presence gives her a sense that she matters, that she is not alone. It counteracts social isolation and loss of trust, as it restores her self-dignity and worth. We give her strength to withstand the devastation, as we believe in her innate coping skills. We also commit to standing by her every step of the way. A survivor expressed the feelings that arise, ‘‘Even though the pain is unbearable almost all of the time, knowing that you are truly with me, I don’t feel so alone and actually am starting to believe that I might actually make it.’’ We believe in her strengths and her ability to help herself. As she feels powerless, helpless, and despondent, we offer her hope by reframing her position as survivor rather than victim. She may find this view hard to accept at first, and so we stand by her with full respect, hoping that as we gently point to those aspects of her experience that make her a survivor in our mind, she joins us in this view before long. The egalitarian position translates into genuine solidarity with the survivors that we treat. While assisting them to process the traumatic events, we share in their pain and permit ourselves to be touched by it, without being overwhelmed or derailed from our therapeutic stance. Recognizing how devastating the experience of sexual violence can be, we validate all aspects of the emotional reality that ensues. We believe in each survivor’s inner wisdom, and we let her know it. We guide her to that place of authentic knowledge, so that she may come to believe in herself and in her own perceptions and thoughts. Where she doubts her own experience, we stand by her conveying our belief in her ability to find all the answers within herself. We never doubt her account of the assault, thus helping her to not question it herself. Nor do we impose our conceptualization or formulation on her, but rather attune ourselves most empathically to hers. From our respectful view of survivors as blame-free in every way, we never pass judgment on their conduct and do our utmost to help ease their sense of blameworthiness and shame, so often contextually heightened. In communicating nonjudgmental acceptance and respect, we aim to counteract the widespread social judgment and reproach (e.g., ‘‘It is so heartbreaking to hear you berating and devaluing yourself so’’). This mirrors a different perspective on the self—that of the one who has been wronged, not the one to be blamed—while conveying supportive caring at the same time. Self-empathy and compassion are expected to follow, and to give way, in turn, to affirming views of self in place of the existing self-loathing and guilt. As survivors deal with their sense of self-disgust and defilement, desecration and shame, our genuine belief that they have not been
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damaged in any way, can help survivors attend to and verbalize their internal experience regarding the sense of self as defiled and shameful. Empathetic mirroring of their feelings of violation and humiliation can help contain these emotions. Insisting that they are shame-free (e.g., ‘‘It sounds like your self-disgust is so impossible to bear . . . we will not rest until we find a way to completely free you of it’’) can help alleviate her shame and foster the emergence of a valued and worthy sense of self. Treating the survivor as an equal and endowing her with the right to determine the pace and direction of the therapy, can also play a major role in enabling the reprocessing of the traumatic memories. While attuning to the survivor’s levels of arousal, voicing our genuine confidence in her ability to sustain the process can afford her a sense of safety, emotional modulation, reassurance, and support, all needed to withstand the painful process of remembering and reliving the traumatic events (Moor, 2007; Paivio & Laurent, 2001). Moreover, experiencing our true caring for her through our soothing and containing responses can help nurture the development of self-soothing capacities and true hope. As the process progresses, the therapist’s belief in the client’s strengths is steadily internalized. We enthusiastically share her cautious optimism, while validating and strengthening her new perceptions of self (e.g., ‘‘Sounds like you’re not blaming yourself anymore . . . how exciting’’). Feedback from many survivors allows us to view the egalitarian stance as instrumental in consolidating a new outlook of the self and the future. EMPOWERMENT The experience of rape and other forms of sexual violence can be utterly disempowering to most victims, shattering their sense of selfworth, control, and dignity (Herman, 1992; Koss & Harvey, 1991; Moor, 2007). It is the role of therapy to counter this devastating experience by helping survivors to regain a sense of personal power and control. A central goal of feminist therapy, empowerment of the client and advocacy for women (Brown & Brodsky; 1992; Feminist Therapy Institute, 1990; Hill & Ballou, 1998; Moradi et al, 2000; Rader & Gilbert, 2005; Worell & Remer, 1992), thus has a major role to play. Beyond the empowerment inherent in the egalitarian nature of feminist therapy, contextual reframing of various aspects of the ordeal and reconstruction of self-devaluing cognitions based on the analysis of their social roots are employed to bring about a corrective perceptual shift. Feminist therapy aims to provide clients with novel ways of seeing, along with helpful information that can facilitate this shift (Rader & Gilbert, 2005). Realizing the degree to which survivors’ self-loathing
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cognitions are rooted in internalized societal victim-blaming myths, the feminist therapist thus suggests new ways of perceiving intended to bring about meaningful cognitive shifts. Any internalized prejudiced attitudes that may underlie the demeaning perception of the self are recognized and subject to reconstruction. Clearly, all unfounded cognitions are fully processed, including those related to safety and ability to tolerate stress (Foa & Rothbaum, 1998; Foa & Jaycox, 1999). However, rebuilding a positive and empowered sense of self is at the very heart of the healing process. Our main objective is restructuring the unfounded views of self as culpable and shameful. The entire array of distorted cognitions regarding precipitation of the assault is targeted. In this process, we encourage the survivor to assess the rationality of these beliefs, so that she can recognize their false nature and their roots in societal victimblaming rape myths. To increase her sense of mastery, self-conviction, and empowerment, we aim to help the survivor absolve herself of culpability on her own, rather than through our insistence. Reaching this conviction from within makes it more meaningful and lasting. A shift to a more realistic blame-free viewpoint should ensue, allowing her to appropriately place fault where it belongs, namely, with the assailant. For example, a survivor who had held on to the notion that she was to blame for being raped because she did not fight back was helped to see that she stood no chance against her assailant who was considerably bigger and stronger than herself. Gentle probes such as ‘‘How big was he? How strong? Now consider your relative size and strength . . . what could you have done?’’ should facilitate the hoped-for shift. To further validate survivors, it is useful point to the contextual origin of much of their self-blame and shame, while letting them know that their response is entirely typical of most rape survivors, who generally feel responsible for their plight (e.g., ‘‘Like you, almost every rape survivor blames herself mercilessly for the ordeal she had endured. . . . and all too often this is because of common, accusatory social attitudes towards rape victims that absolutely cannot be ignored’’). Survivors frequently experience great relief upon realizing that their self-denigration is a characteristic response to the trauma of rape, especially in the current social context. At this stage it is also important to acknowledge and work through the protective function of the self-blame. Following rape, many victims worry that if none of what happened was due to their actions, they may not have any control over future safety either (Koss & Harvey, 1991). Thus, they hold onto self-accusation and are reluctant to let go of it in order to maintain the sense of control it provides. Helping them to distinguish between liability and ill-advised behavior can promote the complete relinquishment of this self-blame. For example, a survivor raped while hitchhiking was unable to stop berating herself for her
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‘‘stupid’’ behavior, which ‘‘caused’’ the rape until she could feel that she would be able to keep herself safe in the future. Interventions such as ‘‘while you now realize that hitchhiking isn’t safe for you, the fact that you hitchhiked in the past in no way makes you guilty of precipitating the rape’’ eventually enabled her to replace the self-accusation with a more realistic appraisal of her ability to recognize and to minimize danger in the future, while not having to hold herself responsible for being raped. Cognitive restructuring can also be used to target the shame and the beliefs, common to many survivors, which they are disgraceful, disgusting, and defiled for having been raped. These beliefs appear to show up in one of two ways; a direct expression of shame in oneself (i.e., ‘‘I am so disgusting and damaged’’) or an indirect, masked manifestation (i.e., ‘‘No one must ever know that I have been raped’’). Interventions aimed at this aspect of the injured self can gently encourage survivors to examine the rationality of their shame (e.g., ‘‘Did you hurt anyone or were you the one being hurt . . . Who should be ashamed, then?’’), which should help them to realize that in reality, they have nothing to be ashamed of, and that, in fact, it is the assailant, as well as society and its prejudiced attitudes that are shameful. A positive sense of self is the expected outcome. Finally, much of the empowerment afforded to survivors stems simply from raising their awareness of the social roots of their distress. The notion of the personal being political underlies all interventions aimed at freeing the survivor from internalized victim-blaming and shame. It also provides answers to the questions regarding the reasons for the assault that trouble them so. ‘‘Why did it happen?’’ ‘‘Why to me?’’ ‘‘If I am not to blame then how can I explain what happened?’’ Helping a survivor to realize that rape generally does not occur because of any individual woman’s behavior, but rather is systematically embedded in patriarchal culture, offers her an alternative explanation for her plight. Redefining male abusive behavior as conformation to society’s promotion of male violence can help her make further sense of the events. Along the way, the changed perspective of each individual survivor is quite likely to reverberate beyond the therapeutic process, contributing in some way to social change in line with this particular tenet of feminist therapy. In essence, by presenting survivors with a social analysis of male violence against women, by shifting much of what they endured from the personal domain into the shared collective one, by reframing their experience in growth-promoting terms, all coupled with trauma reprocessing and cognitive restructuring, feminist therapy stands a rather good chance of freeing rape victims from the agonizing sequelae of rape and sexual assault and turning them into empowered survivors.
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Gilbert, L. A. (1980). Feminist therapy. In A. M. Brodsky & R. T. Hare-Mustin (Eds.), Women and psychotherapy (pp. 245–266). New York: Guilford. Gilbert, B. J. (1994). Treatment of adult victims of rape. New directions for mental health services, 64, 67–78. Herman, J. (1992). Trauma and recovery. New York: Basic Books. Hill, M. (1990). On creating a theory of feminist therapy. In L. S. Brown & M. P. Root (Eds.), Diversity and complexity in feminist therapy (pp. 53–66). New York: The Haworth Press, Inc. Hill, M., & Ballou, M. (1998). Making therapy feminist: A practice survey. Women and Therapy, 21, 2–16 Jaycox, L. H., Zoellner, L., & Foa, E. B. (2002). Cognitive–behavior therapy for PTSD in rape survivors. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 58, 891–906. Jordan, J., Kaplan, A., Miller, J. B., Stiver, I., & Surrey, J. (1991). Women’s growth in connection. New York: Guilford. Kaschak, E. (1992). Engendered lives: A new psychology of women’s experience. New York: Basic Books. Koss, M. P. (1983). The scope of rape: Implications for the clinical treatment of victims. The Clinical Psychologist, 38, 88–91. Koss, M. P., & Harvey, M. R. (1991). The rape victim: Clinical and community interventions. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Lebowitz, L., & Roth, S. (1994). ‘‘I felt like a slut’’: The cultural context and women’s response to being raped. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 7, 363–390. Lee, C., Gavriel, H., Drummond, P., Richards, J., & Greenwald, R. (2002). Treatment of PTSD: Stress inoculation training with prolonged exposure compared to EMDR. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 58, 1071–1089. Lonsway, K. A., & Fitzgerald, L. F. (1994). Rape myths: In review. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 18, 133–164. MacKinnon, C. A. (2005). Defining rape internationally. Columbia Journal of Cross National Law, 44, 940. Meadows, E. A., & Foa, E. B. (1998). Intrusion, arousal, and avoidance: Sexual trauma survivors. In V. M. Follette, J. I. Ruzek, & F. R. Abueg (Eds.), Cognitive-behavioral therapies for trauma (pp. 100–123). New York: Guilford. Moor, A. (2007). When recounting the traumatic memories is not enough: Treating persistent self-devaluation associated with rape and victim-blaming rape myths. Women & Therapy, 30, 19–35. Moor, A. (2009). A preliminary assessment of the prevalence and nature of sexual violence against women in Israel (in Hebrew). Social Issues in Israel, 7, 46–65. Moradi, B., Fischer, A. R., Hill, M. S., Jome, L. M., & Blum, S. A. (2000). Does feminist plus therapist equal ‘‘feminist therapist’’? Psychology of Women Quarterly, 24, 285–296. Paivio, S. C., & Laurent, C. (2001). Empathy and emotion regulation: reprocessing memories of childhood abuse. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 57, 213–226. Pitman, R. K., Altman, B., Greenwald, E., Longpre, R. E., Machlin, M. L., Poire, R. E., & Steketee, G. S. (1991). Psychiatric complications during flooding therapy for posttraumatic stress disorder. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 52, 17–20. Power, K., McGoldrick, T., Brown, K., Buchanan, R., Sharp, D., Swanson, V., et al. (2002). A controlled comparison of eye movement desensitization
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and reprocessing versus exposure plus cognitive restructuring versus waiting list in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder. Clinical Psychology & Psychotherapy, 9, 299–318. Rader, J., & Gilbert, L. A. (2005). The egalitarian relationship in feminist therapy. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 29, 427–435. Rogers, S., & Silver, S. M. (2002). Is EMDR an exposure therapy? A review of trauma protocols. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 58, 43–59. Shapiro, F., & Maxfield, L. (2002). Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR): Information processing in the treatment of trauma. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 58, 933–946. Sheldon, J. P., & Parent, S. L. (2002). Clergy’s attitudes and attributions of blame toward female rape victims. Violence Against Women, 8, 233–256. Ullman, S. E. (1996). Social reactions, coping strategies, and self-blame attributions in adjustment to sexual assault. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 20, 505–526. Ullman, S. E. (1999). Social support and recovery from sexual assault: A review. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 4, 343–358. Ullman, S. E., & Filipas, H. H. (2001). Correlates of formal and informal support seeking in sexual assault victims. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 16, 1028–1047. Ullman, S. E., & Brecklin, L. R. (2002). Sexual assault history, PTSD, and mental health service seeking in a national sample of women. Journal of Community Psychology, 30, 261–279. Worell, J., & Johnson, D. (2001). Therapy with women: Feminist frameworks. In R.K. Unger (Ed.), Handbook of the psychology of women and gender (pp. 317– 329). New York: Wiley. Worell, J., & Remer, P. (1992). Feminist perspectives in therapy: An empowerment model for women. New York: Wiley. Wyatt, G. E. (1992). The sociocultural context of African American and White American women’s rape. Journal of Social Issues, 48, 77–91.
Chapter 7
Gender Microaggressions: Implications for Mental Health Kevin L. Nadal
For the past 40 years, psychologists, educators, and other social scientists have advocated for an increase in multicultural knowledge and awareness in training, practice, and research. For example, the American Psychological Association (APA) has published the ‘‘Guidelines on multicultural education, training, research, practice, and organizational change for psychologists’’ (2003), which focus primarily on ways of being culturally competent toward oppressed racial and ethnic minority groups, with minimal focus on other multicultural subgroups (e.g., gender, sexual orientation, etc.). So while such guidelines recognize the intersections of other identities with race/ethnicity (e.g., the impacts of gender on race and racial identity), the emphasis is primarily on race and ethnicity. And while there is a definite need for the advocacy of racial and ethnic minority issues, several other culturally oppressed groups are often viewed as afterthoughts when discussing multiculturalism. Some of these groups include women, lesbian/gay/bisexual/ transgender (LGBT) persons, disabled persons, elderly, and religious minority groups. Research studies on multicultural competence models in psychology tend to follow this pattern of emphasizing race and/or ethnicity exclusively. Writings involving culturally competent counseling methods, counselor biases, identity development, and other multicultural issues are predisposed to concentrate primarily on race (and sometimes ethnicity). This can be exemplified by the newest line of multicultural research involving racial microaggressions, which are defined as ‘‘brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether
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intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults toward people of color’’ (Sue & Capodilupo, 2007, p. 271). These authors cite that because the United States is more ‘‘politically correct’’ today than it was twenty or thirty years ago, racism takes more subtle and covert forms. However, because of the cumulative nature of these subtle forms of discrimination, persons of color may experience an array of emotions, including belittlement, anger, rage, frustration, sadness, and alienation (Sue, Bucceri et al., 2007; Sue, Nadal et al., 2008), which consequently may lead to depression, anxiety, trauma, and other mental health problems. While the introduction of microaggressions into the forefront of psychology is necessary and eliciting a range of positive and negative reactions in the field, it is important to recognize that previous research with microaggressions focuses primarily on race, following the trend that other social identity groups are ignored or minimized in multicultural discourses. Accordingly, research on microaggressions fails to take into account experiences involving gender, sexual orientation, ability, age, religion, and ethnicity. The purpose of this chapter is to advocate for the expansion of research on microaggressions to encompass other cultural groups. Specifically, this chapter will concentrate on microaggressions involving gender, hypothesizing the various types of gender microaggressions that may impact women in everyday life and in therapy settings. Utilizing the major tenets in the taxonomy of racial microaggressions, this chapter will define gender microaggressions and conjecture numerous categories of gender microaggressions that women may experience. DEFINITIONS OF MICROAGGRESSIONS To understand microaggressions in general, it becomes important to recognize the literature on racial microaggressions. Racial microaggressions consist of brief statements or behaviors that send denigrating and hurtful messages to people of color. By this definition, microaggressions can occur between any two parties (individuals or groups or both), in which the member(s) from a privileged/dominant group communicates a denigrating and hurtful message toward the member(s) from an oppressed group. For example, a man can commit a gender microaggression toward a woman; a heterosexual person can be responsible for a sexual orientation microaggression toward a LGBT person; and an able-bodied person can perpetrate an ability microaggression toward a disabled person (Nadal, 2008). Studies have also indicated there are three forms of racial microaggressions: microassaults, microinsults, and microinvalidations. Microassaults are what are closest to overt, ‘‘old-fashioned’’ racism, with examples ranging from calling a black American the ‘‘N word’’ or yelling at an Asian American or Latin American person to ‘‘go back where
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you came from.’’ However, microinsults and microinvalidations are less obvious, more subtle, and often well intentioned. Microinvalidations are defined as actions that negate or nullify a person of color’s experiences or realities, while microinsults refer to actions that convey insensitivity and are belittling to a person’s racial identity. These are the types of microaggressions that may be more harmful because the perpetrator may not even realize that she/he is insulting or invalidating the individual. Unlike microassaults, that are often conscious and purposefully hurtful, microinsults and microinvalidations may be more unconscious and may have several potential impacts on the recipient. For example, the experience of being treated as an intellectual inferior is a common experience for African Americans, in which many individuals are consistently told that they are ‘‘smart’’ or ‘‘articulate’’ (Sue, Nadal et al., 2008). This would be considered a microinsult because the perpetrator is conveying that because the individual is African American, she or he would not be expected to be smart or would not be expected to speak well. While the statement may have been well intentioned or meant to be a compliment, the recipient may have a negative reaction, with subsequent emotions such as anger, frustration, or hurt. An example of a racial microinsult that may occur toward Asian Americans includes the experience of being exocitized, which is demonstrated by a male individual telling an Asian that he has an ‘‘Asian fetish’’ or that Asian women have ‘‘beautiful skin’’ or ‘‘silky hair’’ (Sue, Bucceri, et al., 2007). Again, while the statement might be meant to be a compliment, the Asian American recipient may feel objectified, hurt, and insulted by the comment. Because such a statement might occur regularly for the recipient, the cumulative impact of similar statements might lead to emotional distress. Some racial microaggressions may be more intentional, in that the perpetrator might be more conscious of her/his behavior. For example, many African American individuals report being treated as criminals on a regular basis; this message is conveyed in situations where storeowners follow African American individuals around while they shop. This microinsult sends the messages that black individuals are criminals who are likely to steal or damage their stores (Sue, Nadal, et al., 2008). However, if the perpetrator in this case would be confronted with her/his behavior, it is possible that the individual would deny that race was involved in their decision making, because she/he is a ‘‘good person’’ who does not ‘‘see race’’ and treats people of all racial groups the same (Sue, 2005). So even when perpetrators of microaggressions may be aware of their behaviors toward persons of color, it is less likely that they would be able to admit to it. A common form of a racial microinvalidation is one where an individual is denied her/his racial reality, often occurring when a person of color is told that her/his experience with racism is invalid and that she/he should
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stop complaining about racial stressors (Sue, Bucceri et al., 2007). In this case, the perpetrator may not realize the impact that such a statement may have on the recipient; the individual may believe that she/he is simply stating one’s opinion and assumes that the recipient should be able to agree with her or his statement. However, the recipient may instead feel misunderstood because the perpetrator is not accounting for her/his experiences with race, leading to potential distress at the clash of their ‘‘racial realities’’ and feelings of belittling, frustration, or sadness. Given these three categories of racial microaggressions, it is likely that similar experiences can occur across different social identities. For example, a sexual orientation microassault may include a heterosexual person calling a gay man a ‘‘faggot’’ or calling a lesbian a ‘‘dyke.’’ An ability microinsult might include an able-bodied person speaking to a disabled person slowly and condescendingly, assuming that she/he would not be able to understand the person. A religious microinvalidation might include a Christian telling a Jewish person that ‘‘You complain about the Holocaust too much’’ (Nadal, 2008). All of these types of statements or behaviors convey a negative and derogatory message toward the member of the oppressed group. And again, the cumulative nature of these statements and behaviors may have lasting impacts on the member(s) of the oppressed group. Given the definitions of racial microaggressions and the ability to apply the experiences of microaggressions to interactions between different social groups, it is now possible to define microaggressions that may occur as a result of gender. Gender microaggressions are brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities (whether intentional or unintentional) that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative sexist slights and insults toward women. These microaggressions are often unconscious in that the perpetrator of the microaggressions may not realize that he is being hurtful in his statements or behaviors. Gender microaggressions are different from other forms of sexism in that they may manifest in various forms: microassaults, microinvalidations, and microinsults; they may be subtle and covert, in that the recipient may often question whether the microaggression would even have a lasting impact on her psychological well being. However, similar to racial microaggressions, the cumulative nature of these gender microaggressions may lead to mental health problems, including depression, anxiety, trauma, or issues with self-esteem.
GENDER MICROAGGRESSIONS Sexism in Everyday Life Little research has been written on the term ‘‘gender microaggressions’’ in psychology, education, and social sciences, but rather describes
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sexism in different forms. The vast range of literature on sexism reveals that sexism, much like racism, has become more concealed than it is open and obvious (Sue & Capodilupo, 2008). Some authors contend that sexism takes three major forms: overt, covert, and subtle (Swim & Cohen, 1997). Overt sexism could be comparable to ‘‘old-fashioned’’ sexism toward women, in which women are directly discriminated against and/or treated unfairly and unequally than men. This can be exemplified by a man blatantly telling a woman that he would not hire her for a position because of her gender, or a man directly insulting a woman by calling her a derogatory term. Covert sexism would include discrimination that is less direct and less revealed. This can be exemplified by some men who might claim to be ‘‘liberal’’ and ‘‘gender-neutral,’’ yet would never vote for women president of the United States. Finally, subtle sexism is defined as ‘‘unequal and unfair treatment of women that is not recognized by many people because it is perceived to be normative, and therefore does not appear unusual’’ (Swim, Mallett, & Stagnor, 2004, p. 117). This can be exemplified by someone assuming that an authority figure or professional (e.g., employer, author, professor, or doctor) is a ‘‘he’’ without knowing the gender of the said person. While covert and overt sexism might be conscious processes, it is likely that subtle sexism is unconscious and/or not maliciously intended (Sue & Capodilupo, 2008). One study conducted on ‘‘everyday sexism’’ or the discriminatory or prejudicial experiences with gender (Swim, Hyers, Cohen, & Ferguson, 2001) found that female participants encounter about one to two impactful sexual incidents per week. Participants reported three major categories of everyday sexism: (1) traditional gender role stereotypes and prejudice, (2) demeaning and degrading comments and behaviors, and (3) sexual objectification. Examples of traditional gender role stereotypes and privilege include a man telling a woman to fold laundry or do the dishes, while illustrations of demeaning and degrading comments and behaviors include men using labels (e.g., ‘‘bitch,’’ ‘‘slut,’’ or ‘‘chick’’) to describe women. Examples of sexual objectification include men making comments about women’s body parts, as well as behaviors like unwanted staring or touching. In these studies, women reported psychological impacts, including a decrease in comfort and self-esteem and feelings of anger and depression. Another study highlighted experiences with sexism with adolescent girls (Leaper & Brown, 2008). The authors found the majority of the participants reported sexism related to academics (e.g., being discouraged about their computer, math, or science abilities) and/or athletics (e.g., being teased about their athletic ability). The majority of these female adolescents also reported several incidents of gender harassment, namely receiving unwanted romantic attention, being teased with an embarrassing or mean joke or a demeaning name, and being teased about physical
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appearance. These two studies on sexism exemplify types of gender microaggressions and the negative psychological effects these experiences may cause. While they may seem like trivial everyday occurrences, these slights may influence a woman or girl’s self-esteem, worldview, motivation to achieve, and mental health. Understanding various measures that assess different types of sexist slights can be helpful in understanding examples of everyday sexist experiences. The Schedule of Sexist Events (SSE) is a measure that assesses perceived frequencies of sexist discrimination (Klonoff & Landrine, 1995). Recent studies have supported three subscales of the SSE, including sexist degradation and its consequences (e.g., been called a sexist name), unfair sexist events at work/school (e.g., denied a raise, promotion, or tenure at work), and unfair treatment in distant and close relationships (e.g., being treated unfairly by people in helping jobs; Matteson & Moradi, 2005). In the initial use of the SSE, it was found that 99 percent of a given sample of women (n = 633) experienced sexism at some point in their life, while 97 percent of the sample experienced sexism in the past year (Klonoff & Landrine, 1995). Since then, the SSE has been used in several empirical studies which have provided support that daily sexist experiences are prevalent in women’s lives (Matteson & Moradi, 2005). However, some research has found that most women may not respond to these sexist events, with majority ignoring the incident (Lott, Aquith, & Doyon2001), instead of confronting the perpetrator. This experience of dealing with sexist incidents is comparable to previous research on racial microaggressions, which state that people of color often find themselves in a ‘‘catch 22’’ when they experience such racist events (Sue, Capodilupo et al., 2007). If the recipient of the racist or sexist incident says something to the perpetrator, she/he runs the risk of being invalidated, ridiculed, or even physically assaulted; if she/he doesn’t say something, she/he may become distressed and regret not standing up for oneself. Sexual Harassment The research on sexual harassment is also important to review when discussing gender microaggressions, as it may explain the impacts of sexist experiences at the workplace on individual mental health. There has been much research in the field of psychology that has documented the psychological impact of sexual harassment on both women and men (Schneider, Swann, & Fitzgerald, 1997). It is imperative to recognize how sexual harassment may relate to gender microaggressions, but how it may also differ. Sexual harassment has been defined as: ‘‘unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature constitutes sexual
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harassment when submission to or rejection of this conduct explicitly or implicitly affects an individual’s employment, unreasonably interferes with an individual’s work performance or creates an intimidating, hostile or offensive work environment.’’ (U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 2008)
It is reported that in 2007, that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) received 12,510 charges of sexual harassment (with 16.0 percent of those charges filed by males), and that EEOC resolved 11,592 of these sexual harassment charges (U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 2008). However, some experts have reported that between 40 to 60 percent of all women in the United States have experienced some form of harassing behavior at work, but that many of these experiences did not meet the legal criteria for sexual harassment and may often go unreported (Murray, 1998). Understanding measurements for sexual harassment can be valuable in recognizing specific examples of sexist experiences in the workplace, leading to further understandings of gender microaggressions. The Sexual Experiences Questionnaire (SEQ) was developed to examine the experiences of women with sexual harassment in the workplace (Fitzgerald, Gelfand, & Drasgow, 1995) and has been used frequently over the past two decades. According to this measure, there are three major components used to define sexual harassment: gender harassment, unwanted sexual attention, and sexual coercion. Gender harassment refers to verbal and nonverbal behaviors that convey insulting, hostile, and degrading attitudes about women. Unwanted sexual attention includes a range of verbal and nonverbal behavior that is offensive, unwanted, and unreciprocated. Sexual coercion refers to the extortion of sexual cooperation for job-related considerations. Given these three categories, one can observe the similarities between different types of sexual harassment and gender microaggressions. Gender harassment seems to be most parallel to unconscious microaggressions, in which the perpetrator of these microaggressions may not even be aware that his statements/behaviors convey a negative message to the recipient. Concurrently, unwanted sexual attention and sexual coercion are likely to be more conscious processes, in which the individual may be more aware of the intentions behind his statements and/or behaviors. As a result, unwanted sexual attention and sexual coercion can be compared to ‘‘microassaults,’’ in that these behaviors are more obvious and noticeable by both the perpetrator and recipient. These microassaults would likely represent the types of behaviors that would qualify for sexual harassment charges. However, it appears that gender harassment is less obvious and is likely to be in line with ‘‘microinsults’’ and/or ‘‘microinvalidations.’’ These types of unconscious statements/behaviors are likely not obvious enough to
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meet the legal requirements for sexual harassment, yet send insulting and invalidating messages to the women that receive them. OBJECTIFICATION THEORY The literature on objectification theory is also important to review in order to further understand illustrations of gender microaggressions and negative psychological effects. Objectification theory can be defined as ‘‘a framework for understanding the experiential consequences of being female in a culture that sexually objectifies the female body’’ (Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997, p. 173). It further explains that sexual objectification can occur through an array of interpersonal interactions including romantic partners, family members, friends, acquaintances, strangers, and even media outlets that depict interpersonal and social interactions. Accordingly, women and girls in an objectifying society may experience various mental health risks, including depression, sexual dysfunction, eating disorders, and body image issues. Through examining current measures of objectification, it can be beneficial to understand how specific experiences of being objectified are interrelated with gender microaggressions. The Interpersonal Sexual Objectification Scale (ISOS) was created to understand how sexual objectification occurred interpersonally and how it related to psychological distress (Kozee, Tylka, Augustus-Horvath, & Denchik, 2007). Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses revealed two factors: body evaluation and unwanted explicit sexual advances. Examples of body evaluation include: ‘‘How often have you been whistled at while walking down a street?’’ or ‘‘How often have you noticed someone staring at your breasts when you are talking to them?’’ Examples of unwanted explicit sexual advances include ‘‘How often have you been touched or fondled against your will?’’ or ‘‘How often has someone grabbed or pinched one of your private body areas against your will?’’ Scores on the ISOS were strongly related to sexist degradation and slightly to moderately related to other sexist events, self-objectification (e.g., internalization of the thin-ideal) and body shame. These findings support that the experiences of being interpersonally sexualized and/or feeling judged about one’s body can lead to psychological distress, including a lower self-esteem and an impaired body image. Similarly to previous research on microaggressions, the cumulative nature of these events increases psychological distress over time. HOSTILE AND BENEVOLENT SEXISM There has been some research that has conceptualized two additional forms of sexism: benevolent sexism and hostile sexism. Benevolent sexism is defined as ‘‘a subjectively favorable, chivalrous ideology
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that offers protection and affection to women who embrace conventional roles’’ (Glick & Fiske, 2001, p. 109) while hostile sexism is defined as ‘‘antipathy toward women who are viewed as usurping men’s power’’ (Glick & Fiske, 2001, p. 109). With benevolent sexism, men may believe that they are nonsexist and that they believe in gender equality. However, in reality these men may endorse traditional gender roles that actually promote female inferiority. For example, men may believe that it is their responsibility to protect and provide for women, which may seem favorable and innocuous, but demonstrates the belief that women need to be taken care of. On the other hand, men may exhibit hostile sexism and feel threatened by women who are empowered, independent, and/or assertive. These men may be averse to feminists or female authority figures and may express this discomfort or disgust in blatant and subtle ways. For example, a man may belittle a female supervisor by referring to her with sexist labels when talking to his male coworkers. Benevolent and hostile sexism are unique to other forms of sexism in that they are personal ideologies that promote male dominance and female inferiority. At the same time, they are related to gender microaggressions because they may be unconscious and may manifest in an array of hurtful behaviors or statements. For example, when a man desires for a woman to uphold traditional gender roles, his behaviors may include asking a woman to cook or clean for him, or treating a woman as if she was not intelligent. He may or may not be consciously aware of the sexist message he is portraying, and he may not recognize the impact such behaviors/statements may have on the recipient. Depending on the consciousness and intent of his actions, these may be considered microassaults or microinsults. Similarly hostile sexism may also take microassaultive, microinsulting, or microinvalidating forms. For example, a man calling a woman in power a ‘‘bitch’’ or ‘‘aggressive’’ may be considered a microassault. A man who unconsciously ignores a woman’s ideas (because he feels threatened by her power or intelligence) may be an example of a microinsult, and a man who tells a woman (particularly an outspoken or assertive woman) to stop playing the ‘‘gender card’’ would be an example of a microinvalidation. GENDER MICROAGGRESSIONS Sue and Capodilupo discuss microaggressions that are related to race, gender, and sexual orientation. Several categories of gender microaggressions are introduced, citing the behaviors/statements and the messages that are being communicated to the recipient. In the theme of ‘‘sexual objectification,’’ men may conduct behaviors that send the message that a woman’s body is a sexual object. Examples
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may include a male stranger putting his hands on a woman’s hips to pass her, or a man whistling or ‘‘catcalling’’ as a woman walks down the street. The theme of ‘‘denial of individual racism/sexism/heterosexism’’ occurs when an individual denies one’s own potential bias or prejudice. An example can include a statement where a male says ‘‘I always treat men and women equally,’’ sending the message that he is incapable of gender bias or sexism. The theme of ‘‘traditional gender role prejudicing and stereotyping’’ takes place when individuals assume that others should hold traditional gender roles or stereotypes. An example may include a person looking at a thirty-year-old woman’s ring finger, sending the message that she should be married because being a wife should be a woman’s main purpose in life. The theme of ‘‘second-class citizen’’ occurs when an oppressed group member receives less preferential treatment than a dominant group member. For example, if a woman is not invited to a social gathering by her coworkers, when clearly all of the male coworkers are, she may feel left out because of her gender. Finally, the theme of ‘‘use of sexist/heterosexist language’’ speaks to the aforementioned subtle sexism (i.e., using the pronoun ‘‘he’’ to refer to all people), but also includes other degrading language (i.e., labeling a woman a ‘‘whore’’). The first of these two examples communicates that the experience of men is universal, while the second imparts that women are meant to be passive and/or are allowed to be sexualized. While these themes of gender microaggressions illustrate the types of behaviors and statements that can convey denigrating messages toward women, they are merely a few samples of types of gender microaggressions that may occur. Therefore, it is important for psychologists to be aware that gender microaggressions exist, how they may impact the psychological processes of women, how they affect women’s mental health, and how they may occur in therapeutic settings. On the basis of the previous literature involving microaggressions, everyday sexism, objectification theory, hostile and benevolent sexism, and sexual harassment, this chapter will provide a hypothesis to the major types of gender microaggressions that may occur in everyday life and in therapeutic settings. This hypothesis is based on several empirical studies that have revealed that women experience various forms of gender discrimination in their everyday lives (see Swim et al., 2001, for a review), in school systems (see Leaper & Brown, 2008, for a review) and in the workplace (see Fitzgerald, Hulin, & Drasgow, 1994, for a review). The hypothesis of these gender microaggression categories is also based on several writings involving gender and experiences of women from a feminist therapy perspective, which focuses on providing culturally-competent therapy toward women (Brabeck & Brown, 1997; Collins, 1998; Enns, 1992; Espin, 1993; McNamara & Rickard, 1998). These empirical studies, theoretical models, social
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justice movements, and personal narratives all provide evidence that gender microaggressions do exist and may have a negative impact on mental health. In understanding these various types of gender microaggressions, it is expected that individuals become aware of their own experiences as perpetrators or recipients of these microaggressions, while understanding the psychological impact that these microaggressions may have. It is also expected that psychologists become more culturally competent in understanding these microaggressions: gaining knowledge about the impact of these microaggressions, increasing awareness of how they may enact these microaggressions in psychological and therapeutic settings, and learning the skills to be able to deal with these microaggressions as they occur in their lives and in the lives of their clients. FORMS OF GENDER MICROAGGRESSIONS Based on the previous literature on microaggressions (Nadal, 2008; Sue, Bucceri, et al., 2007; Sue, Capodilupo, et al., 2007; Sue, Nadal, et al., 2008), sexism (Klonoff & Landrine, 1995), gender harassment (Fitzgerald et al., 1995), interpersonal objectification (Kozee et al., 2007), and benevolent and hostile sexism (Glick & Fiske, 2001), there are eight proposed themes of microaggressions that may occur toward women. Five of these themes are originally conceived in Sue and Capodilupo (2008) and include the following: sexual objectification, assumptions of inferiority, assumptions of traditional gender roles, use of sexist language, and denial of individual sexism. One of the themes is a reconceptualization of Sue and Capodilupo’s (2008) second-class citizen and is described as invisibility. Two of these themes are new microaggression categories that are derived from previous literature on microaggressions, and they include denial of reality of sexism and environmental gender microaggressions. Table 7.1 provides examples of situations involving these microaggressions and the messages that are conveyed to the recipient. These themes of gender microaggressions align with the previous literature with racial microaggressions, citing that (a) many of these microaggressions may be unconscious, in that the perpetrator may not realize the impact on the recipient, (b) these microaggressions (whether conscious or not) communicate various oppressive messages to the women who receive them, and (c) the various themes these microaggressions represent a spectrum of microassaults, microinvalidations, or microinsults. In fact, one of the main ways that gender microaggression is different than other forms of sexism (e.g., everyday sexism, objectification theory, and hostile and benevolent sexism) is that they are clearly categorized into these three subcategories. For example, with the theme of sexual objectification, the example of a man ‘‘catcalling’’ a woman as she walks down the street might be considered a
Table 7.1 Examples of Gender Microaggressions in Everyday Life Example
Message
Sexual Objectification: Occurs when a woman is treated as a sexual object.
A man glances at a woman’s breasts while he compliments her shirt. A construction worker catcalls a woman while she walks down the street A male stranger places his hands on a woman’s hips or the small of her back as he passes her
Your body is not yours; I have a right to stare at you without your permission You are a sexual object; you are meant to entertain men. Your body is not yours; I have a right to touch you without your permission.
Invisibility: Occurs when a woman is overlooked and/or when men are given preferential treatment.
A female employee is passed up for a job promotion. A woman is waiting to order a drink at a bar; the bartender serves the male customers before her. The male head of a company does not know the names of his female employees but knows the names of the male employees.
Your service is not as valuable as a man’s. You deserve to wait. Men are valued more than you.
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Theme
Assumptions of Inferiority: Occurs when a woman is assumed to be less competent than men (e.g., physically or intellectually).
A woman is carrying boxes; without permission, a man grabs the boxes and says ‘‘Let me do it.’’ A woman demonstrates leadership skills at her workplace; a man is surprised and says ‘‘I didn’t know you had it in you!’’ A female student is told ‘‘I didn’t know that women were good at math.’’ A man says ‘‘I don’t think a woman could ever be president because women are too emotional.’’
You are not valuable.
You are not physically capable of doing things. You are not expected to have intellectual or leadership capacities.
You are not expected to be smart in math or sciences. Women should know their place.
Denial of Reality of Sexism: Occurs when a woman is told that sexism does not exist.
Assumptions of Traditional Gender Roles: Occurs when an individual assumes that a woman should maintain traditional gender roles.
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Denial of Individual Sexism: Occurs when a man denies his gender biases or prejudice.
A man tells a woman that she is exaggerating about how many times a day she gets ‘‘catcalled’’ on the street. A woman is told that she didn’t get the job because she wasn’t qualified, not because of her gender. A woman is put in charge of the office party (without volunteering), when there are other lower-ranking males at the company. A forty-year-old woman with a successful career is asked why she never had any children. ‘‘I’m not sexist. I have a wife and daughters!’’ ‘‘I treat men and women the same all the time.’’ ‘‘As a person of color, I’m offended that you would imply that I’m sexist.’’
You complain too much.
You are to blame, not your gender.
Women should know their place.
You are not serving your primary purpose in life. I am incapable of sexism. I have no gender biases. Because I belong to another oppressed group, I am allowed to have biases.
Use of sexist language: Occurs when language is used to degrade a woman.
A male coworker calls his female coworker ‘‘sweetie,’’ ‘‘honey,’’ or ‘‘shorty.’’ A male news correspondent calls a female politician a ‘‘shrew’’ or a ‘‘bitch.’’
You are inferior to men/I have a right to patronize you. Women should know their place.
Environmental Invalidations: Macrolevel aggressions that occur on a systemic and environmental level.
Women make less money than men.
You are not as important or valuable as men. You are an outsider/You do not belong.
Adapted from Sue & Capodilupo (2008)
Majority of university professors in a department are men. A corporation has pictures of the ‘‘Board of Directors’’ of the company featuring all men.
You as a woman will never break the ‘‘glass ceiling.’’
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microassault in that the man is likely more conscious of how he is demeaning the woman and making her feel uncomfortable. While he may not realize the impact of his behavior on her, it is an experience that both parties would be aware. In the same theme, a man may compliment a woman on her shirt, while also glancing at her breasts. This may be considered a microinsult in that the man is drawing attention to a woman’s body, without her permission, and is objectifying her in the process. At the same time, this microaggression may be more unconscious or well intended by the man. He may be conscious that he is looking at her breasts; yet, if he was confronted, he might be defensive and say that he was simply paying her a compliment. However, this ‘‘compliment’’ is actually insulting and objectifying to the woman and may end up causing her distress, frustration, and feelings of objectification. There are also some themes of microaggressions that would be considered microinvalidations, which can also be conscious or unconscious. For example, in the theme of use of sexist language, a male individual may call his female coworker ‘‘honey’’ or ‘‘sweetie’’ when he would never refer to a male coworker in the same way. This may be well intended in that he may believe that he is trying to be personable and cordial with the female coworker, but he may not realize that the recipient may feel dehumanized or belittled. This behavior may not even be conscious by the perpetrator, in that this male individual may call all women some form of a ‘‘pet name’’ and may not realize the impact he has on others. Concurrently, in the same theme, the example of a news correspondent calling a female politician a ‘‘bitch’’ or a ‘‘shrew’’ might be a behavior that is more conscious. However, despite awareness of the comment, it is possible that the perpetrator would deny the invalidating messages that are conveyed if/when he is confronted. This may be supported through many anecdotes of news correspondents who dismissed allegations of sexism when referring to Senator Hillary Clinton with such sexist terms during the U.S. presidential election of 2008. INTERSECTIONS OF GENDER MICROAGGRESSIONS WITH OTHER MICROAGGRESSIONS It is important to recognize that gender microaggressions cannot occur independently from other social identity groups (namely race, ethnicity, social class, age, ability, or religion). In fact, previous authors have written about the impact of identity and experiences based upon the intersection of race and gender (Bowman et al., 2001). Accordingly, the manifestation of these microaggressions is likely to be heavily influenced by a woman’s other reference groups, especially her race and age. For example, with the theme of invisibility, it is likely that a
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woman of color would be viewed as more invisible than a white woman and would likely receive substandard service or recognition. Similarly, with the theme of inferiority, a woman of color (namely a black American or Latina American) woman would likely be treated as less intelligent than her white counterparts, which may even speak to the notion that black and Latina women make significantly less money than white women (National Women’s Law Center, 2008). Finally, with the theme of sexual objectification, a woman’s race would influence the type of microaggression that she receives. For example, black women are stereotyped to be ‘‘independent, assertive, and aggressive’’ (Bowman et al., 2001), while Asian American women are stereotyped to be ‘‘passive’’ and ‘‘exotic’’ (Sue, Bucceri, et al., 2007). As a result, it is important to notice two trends: (1) the ways that women of different racial groups are objectified sexually may be different because of their race, and (2) a woman’s race may always have some impact on her experiences with gender microaggressions. So while it is important to not discount the experiences that white women may experience with sexual objectification, it is necessary to recognize that women of all racial groups may experience gender microaggressions differently. Age may also impact gender microaggressions in many ways. This can be demonstrated through the dehumanizing of women through language. Perhaps women who are called ‘‘honey’’ or ‘‘dear’’ by their male coworkers might be younger, which may contribute to such patronizing language. At the same time, perhaps younger women may struggle more with microaggressions dealing with assumptions of inferiority, in that the combination of their age and gender may contribute to others’ perceptions that they would not be capable. This is not to discount that women of all ages deal with microaggressions involving inferiority, but rather to illuminate how the impact of age may influence one’s general experiences with microaggressions. Accordingly, it is important for research to be conducted to understand these experiences with gender microaggressions more empirically. GENDER MICROAGGRESSIONS IN CLINICAL PRACTICE, EDUCATION, AND OTHER SETTINGS Given these proposed themes with gender microaggressions, there are several implications for clinical practice (e.g., counseling/psychotherapy) and education (e.g., training, classroom settings). First, it is important to recognize that these microaggressions may be enacted in counseling/psychotherapy settings, just as microaggressions may occur in everyday life. As a result, it is important for psychologists, educators, and other practitioners to recognize different ways that microaggressions may manifest in their professional relationships and on different levels (e.g., counselor– client, client–counselor, supervisor–supervisee, supervisee–supervisor,
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professor–student, or student–professor). This type of awareness is one that may be communicated directly (e.g., a client or supervisee points out a microaggression to a therapist or supervisor); however, it is likely that many microaggressions are unconscious and may go unnoticed. Therefore by understanding different types of microaggressions that may exist, psychologists and other clinicians can pay extra attention to their own behaviors and interpersonal dynamics. Table 7.2 describes various examples of gender microaggressions that may occur in clinical and educational settings, as well as other work environments. For clinical settings specifically, there are many ways that microaggressions can be integrated into therapeutic relationships by utilizing the two major principles of feminist psychology and feminist therapy: (1) the personal is political and (2) relationships must be egalitarian (Collins, 1998). In understanding that the personal is political, a counselor/psychotherapist (either female or male) must recognize that she/ he is an agent of social change that can challenge the status quo and advocate for the well-being of all women. Thus, this individual must be aware that she/he has a responsibility to educate her/his clients about gender microaggressions, while also encouraging the elimination of gender microaggressions in everyday life. This would be an advocacy that can be promoted toward both female and male clients who may be either perpetrators or recipients of gender microaggressions. For example, a feminist counselor/psychotherapist might gently point out to a male client that his sexist behaviors send denigrating messages to women, or a feminist counselor/psychotherapist might assist a female client in understanding how her internalized sexism causes her to enact gender microaggressions onto other women. In both of these cases, the counselor/psychotherapist is confronting her/his clients and pushing for individual change, while addressing the impact of microaggressions on both individual and societal levels. Furthermore, in understanding that all relationships are egalitarian, the feminist therapist must be willing to accept client’s feedback about her/his experiences with gender microaggressions (or any other type of microaggression) that may occur in the therapeutic relationship. The counselor/psychotherapist must not become defensive if she/he is provided feedback about enacting potential microaggressions in the room. Rather the counselor/psychotherapist must be open-minded and respect the client’s right for empowerment. This is an incident that can give power to the client, in that she/he will have learned how to communicate her/his feelings with an authority figure, which can be symbolic of a client’s ability to speak her/his voice in an oppressive world. It is also important for psychologists and other practitioners to recognize gender microaggressions, as a way of maintaining the APA Ethical Guidelines and increasing their multicultural competence (Nadal, 2008). In thoroughly understanding the proposed eight microaggressions (and
Table 7.2 Examples of Gender Microaggressions in Clinical Practice and Other Settings Theme
Example
Message
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Sexual Objectification: Occurs when a woman is treated as a sexual object.
A male therapist tells a female that he likes her pants, while glancing at her body.
Your body is not yours; I have a right to stare at you without your permission
Invisibility: Occurs when a woman is overlooked and/or when men are given preferential treatment.
A male psychologist at a staff meeting is credited for a similar comment that a female psychologist made earlier.
Women’s opinions are not as valuable as men’s opinions.
Assumptions of Inferiority: Occurs when a woman is assumed to be less competent than men (e.g., physically or intellectually).
A male client challenges a female therapist’s competence. A female therapist is not hired for a position working with male sex offenders.
Women should know their place.
Denial of Reality of Sexism: Occurs when a woman is told that sexism does not exist.
A therapist tells a client ‘‘I think you spend too much time blaming your problem on sexism.’’
You are to blame, not your gender.
Assumptions of Traditional Gender Roles: Occurs when an individual assumes that a woman should maintain traditional gender roles.
A career counselor encourages a student to pursue social sciences or humanities instead of math or sciences. A therapist focuses sessions on why a middle-aged woman is not married.
Women are not smart enough.
Women should know their primary purpose in life is to be a wife and mother.
Denial of Individual Sexism: Occurs when a man denies his gender biases or prejudice.
A male therapist says: ‘‘Your gender doesn’t affect the way that I view you.’’
I have no gender biases and am incapable of sexism.
Use of sexist language: Occurs when language is used to degrade a woman.
A male therapist calls his female client ‘‘dear.’’
You are inferior to men/I have a right to patronize you.
Environmental Invalidations: Macro-level aggressions that occur on a systemic and environmental level.
In the waiting room of a mental health clinic, there are all pictures of historical male psychologists.
Men are intellectually superior to women.
Adapted from Sue & Capodilupo (2008)
Women are not capable of defending themselves.
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many other potential categories of gender microaggressions that may exist), it is expected that therapists will enhance their multicultural competence by increasing their (a) knowledge, (b) awareness, and (c) skills, that are described in multicultural competence models (see Sue & Sue, 2008). Knowledge of gender microaggressions can be increased by understanding the presence and process of microaggressions as well as the psychological impacts of microaggressions on both perpetrators and recipients. Awareness of gender microaggressions can be strengthened by learning how these microaggressions may occur in therapeutic settings and how they as therapists might serve as perpetrators or recipients of microaggressions. Finally, therapists can gain the skills to deal with gender microaggressions—learning how to confront microaggressions when they occur in therapy, assisting clients in coping with microaggressions in their everyday lives, and healing from microaggressions themselves. It is important to recognize that while it has been discussed that gender microaggressions occur from male perpetrators to female recipients that it is possible for microaggressions to occur from female perpetrator to female recipient and even male perpetrator to male recipient. For example, a married woman may enact a microaggression involving gender roles onto a single woman, by asking her why she is not married or why she doesn’t have any children. An example of sexual objectification that may occur between women is when a woman makes demeaning, unwelcomed comments about another woman’s body (i.e., commenting on her breasts) or if a lesbian woman catcalls another woman as she walks down the street. In addition, men may enact microaggressions onto other men as well. For example, a man may use degrading language toward another man, by referring to him as a ‘‘pussy,’’ a ‘‘queer,’’ or a ‘‘wimp’’ (regardless of the male recipient’s sexual orientation). Given this, it is also important to recognize how sexual orientation microaggressions may exist, how they may be very similar to gender microaggressions, and how they may often be labeled interchangeably. For example, in the aforementioned incident of the man calling another man a ‘‘queer,’’ it might be considered a gender microaggression because the perpetrator is sending a hurtful, denigrating message to the recipient; however, if the recipient identifies as gay, then it could also be considered a sexual orientation microaggression because the man is receiving this hateful message primarily because of his sexual orientation. Furthermore, gender microaggressions in this context did not focus explicitly on transgender persons and those who identify as non-gender-conforming. Accordingly, it is important to recognize that microaggressions may impact transgender women and men in unique ways, in which they may receive denigrating messages about their transgender identity, their gender presentation, or their transgender way of life.
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Research may be beneficial in further exploring the psychological impact of gender microaggressions, sexual orientation microaggressions, transgender microaggressions, and other microaggressions involving religion, ability, age, or size. Future research involving the intersections of these identities (as well as the experiences of microaggressions based on these intersections) would have significant implications for counseling/ psychotherapy. While previous literature demonstrates that women may cope with sexism in various ways (Lott et al., 2001) or that experiences of sexism objectification may lead to various mental health problems (Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997; Kozee et al., 2007), it is unclear how women deal with gender microaggressions and how they may impact one’s psychological health. What is clear is that microaggressions need to be further studied and exposed in the field of psychology, in order to improve the lives of women and of all oppressed and disenfranchised individuals. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to acknowledge Kendra Brewster, Kate Krontris, and Silvia Mazzula Roman for their assistance in conceptualizing and editing this paper. I also would like to acknowledge my mother, aunts, cousins, and grandmothers, for being such amazing female role models in my life. REFERENCES American Psychological Association. (2003). Guidelines on multicultural education, training, research, practice, and organizational change for psychologists. American Psychologist, 58, 377–402. Brabeck, M., & Brown, L. (1997). Feminist theory and psychological practice. In J. Worell & N. G. Johnson (Eds.), Shaping the future of feminist psychology: Education, research, and practice (pp. 15–35). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Bowman, S. L., Rasheed, S., Ferris, J., Thompson, D. A., McRae, M., & Weitzman, L. (2001). Interface of feminism and multiculturalism: Where are the women of color? In J. G. Ponterotto, J. M. Casas, L. A. Suzuki, & C. M. Alexander (Eds.), Handbook of multicultural counseling (2nd ed., pp. 779–798). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Collins, L. H. (1998). Illustrating feminist theory: Power and psychopathology. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 22, 97–112. Enns, C. Z. (1992). Toward integrating feminist psychotherapy and feminist philosophy. Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, 23, 453–466. Espin, O. M. (1993). Feminist therapy: Not for White women only. The Counseling Psychologist, 21, 103–108. Fitzgerald, L. F., Gelfand, M. J., & Drasgow, F. (1995). Measuring sexual harassment: Theoretical and psychometric advances. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 17, 425–445.
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Fitzgerald, L. F., Hulin, C. L., & Drasgow, F. (1994). The antecedents and consequences of sexual harassment in organizations: An integrated model. In G. P. Keita & J. J. Hurell, Jr. (Eds.), Job stress in a changing workforce: Investigating gender, diversity, and family issues (pp. 55–74). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Fredrickson, B. L., & Roberts, T. (1997). Objectification theory: Toward understanding women’s lived experiences and mental health risks. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 21, 173–206. Glick, P., & Fiske, S. T. (2001) An ambivalent alliance: Hostile and benevolent sexism as complementary justifications for gender inequality. The American Psychologist, 56, 109–118. Klonoff, E. A., & Landrine, H. (1995). The schedule of sexist events: A measure of lifetime and recent sexist discrimination in women’s lives. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 19, 439–472. Kozee, H. B., Tylka, T. L., Augustus-Horvath, C. L., & Denchik, A. (2007). Development of psychometric evaluation of the Interpersonal Sexual Objectification Scale. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 31, 176–189. Leaper, C., & Brown, C. S. (2008). Perceived experiences with sexism among adolescent girls. Child Development, 79, 685–704. Lott, B., Aquith, K., & Doyon, T. (2001). Relationship of ethnicity and age to women’s responses to personal experiences of sexist discrimination in the United States. The Journal of Social Psychology, 141, 309–315. Matteson, A. V., & Moradi, B. (2005). Examining the structure of the Schedule of Sexist Events: Replication and extension. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 29, 47–57. McNamara, K., & Rickard, K. M. (1998). Feminist identity development: Implications for feminist therapy with women. In D. R. Atkinson & G. Hackett (Eds.), Counseling diverse populations (2nd ed., pp. 271–282). Boston: McGraw-Hill. Murray, B. (1998). Psychology’s voice in sexual harassment law: A psychologist casts light on the murky area of sexual harassment. APA Monitor, 29. Nadal, K. L. (2008). Preventing racial, ethnic, gender, sexual minority, disability, and religious microaggressions: Recommendations for promoting positive mental health. Prevention in Counseling Psychology: Theory, Research, Practice and Training, 2, 22–27. National Women’s Law Center. (2008). The Fair Pay Campaign. Retrieved September 15, 2008, from http://www.nwlc.org/fairpay/ Schneider, K. T., Swann, S., & Fitzgerald, L. F. (1997). Job-related and psychological effects of sexual harassment in the workplace: Empirical evidence from two organizations. Journal of Applied Psychology, 82, 401–415. Sue, D. W. (2005). Racism and the conspiracy of silence. Counseling Psychologist, 33, 100–114. Sue, D. W., Arredondo, P., & McDavis, R. J. (1992). Multicultural counseling competencies and standards: A call to the profession. Journal of Counseling & Development, 70, 477–486. Sue, D. W., Bucceri, J. M., Lin, A. I., Nadal, K. L., & Torino, G. C. (2007). Racial microaggressions and the Asian American experience. Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, 13, 72–81.
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Sue, D. W., & Capodilupo, C. M. (2008). Racial, gender, and sexual orientation microaggressions: Implications for counseling and psychotherapy. In D. W. Sue & D. Sue (Eds.), Counseling the culturally diverse (5th ed.). New York: John Wiley & Sons. Sue, D. W., Capodilupo, C. M., Nadal, K. L., & Torino, G. C. (2008). Racial microaggressions and the power to define reality. The American Psychologist, 63, 277–279. Sue, D. W., Capodilupo, C. M., Torino, G. C., Bucceri, J. M., Holder, A. M., Nadal, K. L., et al. (2007). Racial microaggressions in everyday life: Implications for counseling. The American Psychologist, 62, 271–286. Sue, D. W., Nadal, K. L., Capodilupo, C. M., Lin, A. I., Rivera, D. P., & Torino, G. C. (2008). Racial microaggressions against Black Americans: Implications for counseling. Journal of Counseling and Development, 86, 330–338. Sue, D. W., & Sue, D. (2008). Counseling the culturally diverse (5th ed.). New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Swim, J. K., & Cohen, L. L. (1997). Overt, covert, and subtle sexism: A comparison between the attitudes toward women and modern sexism scales. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 21, 103–118. Swim, J. K., Hyers, L. L., Cohen, L. L., & Ferguson, M. J. (2001). Everyday sexism: Evidence for its incidence, nature, and psychological impact from three daily diary studies. Journal of Social Issues, 57, 31–53. Swim, J. K., Mallett, R., & Stangor, C. (2004) Understanding subtle sexism: Detection and use of sexist language. Sex Roles, 51, 117–128. U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. (2008). Sexual harassment. Retrieved August 28, 2008, from http://www.eeoc.gov/types/sexual_ harassment.
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Chapter 8
Prejudice and Discrimination against Sexual Minorities: A Brazilian Perspective Eros DeSouza Elder Cerqueira-Santos
This chapter focuses on a neglected population—sexual minorities (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning [LGBTQ] individuals) in Brazil, a developing country, which is relevant to U.S. researchers, clinicians, and policy makers interested in sexual minorities of color who often face similar challenges. We begin by defining some basic concepts concerning gender, sexual orientation, and transsexualism. Next, we briefly discuss prejudice and discrimination, including subtle discrimination toward LGBT individuals. We also discuss pertinent material published in English or Portuguese concerning prejudice, discrimination, and violence toward sexual minorities in Brazil. Moreover, we give a voice to such population by inserting excerpts from interviews that we conducted during 2009 with Brazilian LGBTQ individuals from Porto Alegre (southern Brazil), S~ ao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro (both in southeastern Brazil), and Aracaju (northeastern Brazil). Brazil is the largest Latin American country and is ranked eighth in the world economy. It is slightly smaller than the United States, with a population of about 200 million (54 percent white; Central Intelligence Agency, 2009). Brazilian society differs greatly from region to region, from rural to urban life, with industrialization and urbanization widespread in some regions (e.g., south and southeast) and not as much in others (e.g., north and the interior). Moreover, sexuality and gender
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norms have been changing substantially in contemporary Brazil (DeSouza, Baldwin, Koller, & Narvaz, 2004). According to Parker (1999), Brazil has ‘‘the largest and most visible gay subculture . . . anywhere outside the fully industrialized West’’ (p. 45). Gay and lesbian sexuality are increasingly visible in Brazil, with an emergent gay and lesbian as well as mainstream press discussing gay and lesbian cultural and political issues and a growing commercialization of the Brazilian gay culture, which has been influenced by North American and Western European gay cultures (Klein, 1999; Parker, 1999). It is impossible to discuss homosexuality in Brazil without also discussing how Brazilian society views gender and sexuality in general. Brazil is a machista society (DeSouza et al., 2004); thus, gender relations, as well as relations across different sexual orientations must be viewed in that context as well. BASIC CONCEPTS Sex versus Gender These terms are often used interchangeably, but they carry different connotations. Sex is a biological category used to differentiate human males (individuals with XY chromosomes and male genitalia) from human females (individuals with XX chromosomes and female genitalia). There is a small percentage of humans who are inter-sexed (hermaphrodite), having ambiguous components of their biological sex; however, the overwhelming majority of humans can be unambiguously classified as male or female (Faust-Sterling, 2000). Gender is a socially constructed term that describes social interpretations of what it means to be a man or a woman in a given society; gender stereotypes are beliefs shared by people in a given society about how men and women differ or should differ (Larsen & Buss, 2008). Sexual Identity versus Sexual Orientation Sexual identity refers to one’s sexual attraction (wanting) and pattern of sexual behavior (doing), having both personal and political meanings (Starks, Gilbert, Fischer, Weston, & DiLalla, 2009). Such meanings are interpersonally constructed; thus, they are fluid, changing over time and throughout one’s life. Researchers often categorize sexual identity based on one’s self-assessment (labeling) at a given time (e.g., lesbian, gay, bisexual, heterosexual). One’s sexual identity (how one views oneself as a sexual being) may not always coincide with one’s sexual orientation, which includes one’s physical (sexual) and affectional (emotional) attraction toward another person. Like sexual identity, sexual orientation is fluid and is best conceptualized on a
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continuum, from exclusively homosexual to exclusively heterosexual; it is also complex, including one’s sexual identity, desires, behaviors, disclosures, and experiences (Horowitz & Newcomb, 2001). Research suggests that women, compared to men, are more likely to show variability and transitions throughout their lifetimes for both sexual orientation and identity, probably due to women’s more fluid and less narrow attractions than men’s (e.g., Diamond & Savin-Williams, 2000). Transvestism versus Transsexualism Transvestism refers to obtaining pleasure or sexual fulfillment by adopting the clothes, mannerisms, or gender roles of the opposite sex (e.g., during Brazilian Carnival, many men dress up as women; Cardoso, 2005). According to Cardoso, transvestism is also related to cross-dressing; for example, when gay men dress up as drag queens for entertainment purposes. Cardoso explains transsexualism as a longing to look, feel, and be like the opposite sex from the one with which an individual was born. Some transsexuals opt for permanent sex reassignment through surgery. Transgender is the umbrella term that encompasses both transvestites and transsexuals. PREJUDICE AND DISCRIMINATION Although human sexuality is diverse, with same-sex attraction, desire, and behavior being normal reflections of such diversity, there is resistance in developed and developing countries alike to extend universal principles of equality, justice, freedom, and dignity to LGBTQ individuals (Kitzinger & Wilkinson, 2004; Klein, 1999). Such resistance may be related to sexual prejudice, which Herek (2000) defines as all negative attitudes toward a person because of his or her homosexuality. According to Herek, sexually prejudiced individuals are usually male, report being exclusively heterosexual, and have limited contact with LGBTQ individuals. A recent Brazilian study conducted with 200 students from a public university corroborates the above findings, including the contact hypothesis, which states that heterosexuals who interact with LGBTQ individuals seem to develop more positive attitudes toward sexual minorities than those with limited contact with LGBTQ individuals (Cerqueira-Santos, Winter, Salles, Longo, & Teodoro, 2007). However, Cerqueira-Santos et al. found that the contact hypothesis worked better among heterosexual women, who showed significantly less sexual prejudice, especially toward lesbians, than among heterosexual men. These findings suggest that Brazilian men fear being perceived as not masculine enough if they associate with sexual minorities, which is similar to how U.S. masculinity is construed (e.g., Kimmel, 1997). Moreover, in
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order for the contact hypothesis to work, others must know about one’s sexual orientation. Unlike women and ethnic/racial minorities who have visible phenotypic characteristics, homosexuality is often invisible, dependent on revelation to become known to others (Sedgwick, 1990); thus, Fassinger (1991) refers to their status as an invisible minority in society. Sexual prejudice (i.e., antipathy toward LGBTQ individuals) may lead to discrimination, which is an act, either physical or verbal, as well as avoidance or social exclusion (i.e., not associating with LGBTQ individuals; Crocker, Major, & Steele, 1998). DeSouza and Showalter (in press) recently examined microaggressions (e.g., social exclusion and spreading malicious rumors) directed at sexual minorities that are subtle, yet detrimental. DeSouza and Showalter sampled 133 LGBTQ college students in the United States. After controlling for negative affectivity, they found that LGBTQ students who experienced at least one act of subtle sexual orientation harassment during the past year were significantly more likely to state intention to leave their institution and have a lower GPA than nonharassed students. In addition, DeSouza and Showalter found that LGBTQ students who were open about their sexual orientation reported higher levels of self-esteem and life satisfaction and lower levels of anxiety and depression than those less committed to their sexual identity, suggesting significant benefits for coming out to others. HOMOSEXUALITY IN BRAZIL In the Brazilian sexual script, there is a hegemonic distinction between masculine atividade (activity) and feminine passividade (passivity), in which sexuality is subjected to male desire, reflecting widespread machismo (Parker, 1993). According to Parker, such a distinction is reflected in the daily language Brazilians use to describe sexual relations, in which the role of the macho is to comer (literally to eat, but loosely translated as to fuck) and the role assigned to women, effeminate gay men, and transvestites is to dar (to give). In the Brazilian sexual universe, comer is synonymous with vencer (to win, to conquer) and possuir (to own, to possess). Such a vocabulary of sexual meanings suggests that women, effeminate gay men, and transvestites are socialized to be passive, receptive sexual partners, while macho men are socialized to pursue, to penetrate, and to dominate. Thus, in Brazil, a macho man continues to exercise the power of his virility with any feminine individual, including a bicha or effeminate male homosexual (Mendes-Leite, 1993). In other words, as long as the macho maintains his atividade (i.e., be the active person or penetrator, not the penetrated), he is typically not viewed as a homosexual by society. There is also an internalization of such sexual script by some gay men,
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creating a sexual hierarchy in Brazil, with macho men at the top and feminine individuals (i.e., heterosexual women, effeminate gay men, and transgendered individuals) on the bottom. Here I have to be macho. It does not matter what one does within four walls; it is our secret. As long as you act like a macho in public, everything is fine. Even among other gay men, the idea of being macho [active or penetrator] is strong. If a gay man wants to offend another, just call him a ‘‘passive’’ [or penetrated] queer. —thirty-six-year-old gay man from Aracaju People talk bad about transvestites . . . they say we are the scummiest subgroup of all homosexuals, but nobody questions macho homosexual men who go out with us and pay to have sex with us. They continue to be honorable gentlemen in the eyes of society, because they live an anonymous life and often pass as heterosexual. They think they are the most macho men in the world. They are macho because they eat [have sex with] anyone! —twenty-four-year-old transvestite from Aracaju
According to Prado and Machado (2008), the distinction between masculine atividade (activity) and feminine passividade (passivity) is reflected in same-sex and other-sex relations throughout Latin America. Thus, to be active during sexual intercourse is viewed as dominant, aggressive, and masculine, whereas to be passive is viewed as weak, submissive, and feminine. In the Brazilian culture, the above distinction also applies to one’s public image or persona and interfaces with one’s appearance and socioeconomic status. Thus, certain terms (e.g., being called bofe or macho gay man) carry a more positive connotation than others (e.g., being called frutinha or little fruit, which means to be a delicate or effeminate gay man). It is different to be gay in the wealthy parts of Rio than in the poor sections. There is prejudice everywhere, but in the wealthy areas we have some protection. It is our beach! Besides, gays are a part of the social culture and the way of life in Ipanema. If we are gone, half of the bars will close down! —thirty-eight-year-old gay man from Rio de Janeiro In public, people think I am a heterosexual. It is funny; women flirt with me a lot. I think it is because I take care of myself . . . I am fit, well-dressed, etc. I am sure that if I were a mal-nourished poor queer it would be another story. They would laugh at me instead. One’s appearance makes a big difference, even among other gays who think I am a dominant top, but nobody knows what people do in bed. —twenty-five-year-old gay man from S~ ao Paulo
Moreover, homosexuals seem to be the most oppressed group in Brazil—much more than women, racial minorities, and people with
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disabilities (Almeida & Crillanovick, 1999)—even though open displays of homosexuality are common and widely accepted. For example, former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso was often photographed kissing drag queens; one of Brazil’s top female models was once a man; and crowds cheer nearly naked gay men every year during Carnival (Goering, 1997). Based on historical analyses of events in Rio de Janeiro and S~ao Paulo, Green (1999) reported a growing male homosexual appropriation and transformation of Carnival during the twentieth century, which opened up a more accepting view of male homosexuality, at least in large cities. Green documented a paradox of permissive same-sex eroticism during the four days of Carnival with accounts of intolerance toward homosexuals during the rest of the year. Everybody thinks that being gay is fantastic in Rio, but only if you are good-looking and rich. Poor gays only show up during Carnival or during the LGBT [Pride] parade. Afterwards we should become invisible and quiet. There are two worlds in this city. It is not easy to be a queer from the slums. —twenty-eight-year-old gay man from a favela (slum) in Rio de Janeiro When I am dressed up as a Drag Queen I am a goddess of Carnival, but afterwards everything changes. In their eyes, I am a queer with AIDS whom nobody wants to see or employ! The only path to survive is prostitution. There are plenty of clients. Who are they? The same ones who deny me legal employment and do not want to see me around. —thirty-year-old transgendered person from Rio de Janeiro
A national poll revealed a similar ambivalence toward homosexuality among a cross-section of Brazilian men and women. Fifty percent of those surveyed indicated daily contact with homosexuals at work or in the neighborhood; however, 56 percent said they would change their behavior toward a colleague if they discovered he or she was a homosexual, with 20 percent avoiding contact with such colleague and 36 percent indicating they would not hire a homosexual, even if he or she were the best-qualified candidate for the position; 58 percent reported being opposed to homosexual couples adopting a child even if they had lived in a committed relationship for a long time; and 79 percent said they would be disappointed if they had a homosexual child (O mundo gay rasga as fantasias, 1993). A survey study conducted in the city of S~ ao Paulo (Instituto de Pesquisa e Cultura GLS, 2000) revealed that 67 percent of the LGBT sample reported being discriminated against due to their sexual orientation by family members, friends, and neighbors, as well as in work, school, public, and health services settings. In addition, victims of such discrimination were re-victimized when filing complaints in police stations.
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A study conducted with 220 college students in northeast Brazil indicated that only 24 percent of those sampled were not prejudiced toward homosexuals, with 38 percent being mildly prejudiced and an additional 38 percent being blatantly so (Lacerda, Pereira, & Camino, 2002). As in the United States, Lacerda et al. found that heterosexual Brazilian men had more negative attitudes toward gay men and lesbians than heterosexual Brazilian women did. In addition, a recent study with 891 U.S. and Brazilian college students revealed that in both countries, bystanders often witnessed harassment of homosexuals (DeSouza & Scheinder, 2009). Overall, 77 percent of all respondents reported having experienced at least one act of being a bystander verbal harassment of homosexuals, whereas only 25 percent of the participants reported having experienced at least one act of bystander to exclusion of homosexuals during the past 12 months. Note that these types of bystander experiences are not mutually exclusive. Being a bystander to verbal harassment of homosexuals had negative consequences to bystanders, especially in Brazil. Specifically, being a bystander to verbal harassment of homosexuals was a significant predictor of multiple negative consequences (i.e., physical illness and drug-alcohol use) in Brazil, but this may also be a source of concern in the United States as well (via a link with drug and alcohol use). These findings extend past research on the negative outcomes of being a bystander to sexual (Glomb, Richman, Hulin, & Drasgow, 1997) or ethnic (Low, Radhakrishnan, Schneider, & Rounds, 2007) harassment. Violence against Sexual Minorities As in the United States, violence against sexual minorities is not a new problem in Brazil. In fact, transgendered individuals are the main victims of discrimination and violence based on sexual orientation (Carrara & Vianna, 2006). According to Carrara and Vianna, the police are indifferent to crimes committed against poor transgendered individuals who turn to prostitution to survive. Even their murder is viewed as a ‘‘normal’’ consequence of an illegal way of earning a living. In fact, police officers often look the other way when confronted with hate crimes against homosexuals (Goering, 1997). According to Mott (2002), Brazil ranks number one in the world for hate crimes based on sexual orientation. A recent study by Grupo Gay da Bahia (2009) reports that 190 homosexuals were killed during 2008, with gay men (96 percent) being by far more likely to be killed than lesbians (4 percent). According to Grupo Gay da Bahia, northeastern Brazil, which makes up 30 percent of the Brazilian population, has the deepest anti-gay attitudes and the highest percentage (48 percent) of homosexuals murdered compared to the south/southeast (28 percent), midwest (14 percent), and north (10 percent).
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A study conducted in 2001 in the state of Rio de Janeiro revealed that during an eighteen-month period, the police received 500 reports of violence against LGBT individuals. Of these, 6.3 percent consisted of murder, 10.3 percent were extortion cases, 18.7 percent were of physical assault, and 20.2 percent were of discrimination based on sexual orientation (cited in Conselho Nacional de Combate a Discriminac¸~ao, 2004). Every three days a person is murdered in Brazil because of his or her sexual orientation (Rios, 2002). Note that these statistics reflect crimes that were reported, representing an underestimation of the true prevalence of crimes against LGBT individuals. Thus, it is important to conduct survey studies that tap victimization, potentially revealing crimes committed against LGBT persons that may otherwise go unreported. A survey study conducted in Rio de Janeiro with 416 gay men, lesbians, and transgendered individuals revealed that 60 percent of the respondents reported being victims of violence/discrimination (Carrara, Ramos, & Caetano, 2002). Specifically, 16.6 percent reported experiencing physical assault (the rate almost tripled for transgendered individuals, with 42.3 percent), 18 percent bribery or extortion (the rate almost doubled for transgendered individuals, with 30.8 percent), 56.3 percent experienced verbal insults or threats due to their sexual orientation, and 58.5 percent were discriminated against because of their sexual orientation. This study also revealed that 22.4 percent of the lesbians surveyed were victimized by family members because they were women and lesbian. The above findings suggest that many Brazilian sexual minorities live in silence, secrecy, threat of rejection, and marginality. In addition, these somber statistics require consciousness of the violence against sexual minorities that goes on in their own family of origin. The Brazilian family usually does not accept a homosexual child, especially a transgendered adolescent whose ‘‘inappropriate’’ gender expression is used as an excuse for family-inflicted violence; such a child is eventually expelled from home and often survives through prostitution (Conselho Nacional de Combate a Discriminac¸~ao, 2004). There is a gendered violence in many Brazilian families that ‘‘submit individuals, physically and/or emotionally, consciously and/or unconsciously as a function of their sex’’ (Werba & Strey, 2001, p. 72). According to DeFrancisco (1997), as gender roles play out in Brazilian society and in the family, they are linked to violence, especially physical and sexual abuse; such abuse is aggravated by secrecy and denial of family-inflicted violence. Machismo is often present in the typical family scenery of abusive systems to the extent that these systems reflect more rigid gender roles that correspond to patriarchal systems that are institutionalized in society (DeSouza et al., 2004). Thus, it is easy to see that transgendered people, like women, are often victims of family and social violence.
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Prejudice against homosexuals is everywhere, even inside us. I don’t feel accepted by my family and cannot even mention my partner at work. What is left is a [gay] ghetto. I only befriend other gay men and sometimes they too show machismo. I have dated a transgendered individual and they spoke badly of this relationship. —thirty-one-year-old gay man from Porto Alegre I ended up moving to the big city to escape. Here nobody knows me or my life. I had to bury my past and my life began when I moved here. Now I am myself! —thirty-six-year-old lesbian from S~ ao Paulo When my father found out that I am a transvestite and do shows at night, he told me not to return home. In order to see my mother, she has to come to my house. I do not have a family anymore, you know. I had no choice. It was me or them. —thirty-five-year-old transgendered person from Porto Alegre
Recently, Rocha et al. (2009) interviewed eight transsexuals to find out their perceptions of the Brazilian public health system, which provides universal and free health services to all Brazilian nationals. The findings revealed stereotypes about transsexuals and sexual prejudice by health providers at all levels (e.g., clerical staff, nurses, and doctors), especially toward transgender sex workers. For instance, these participants experienced humiliation from health care providers when they voiced a desire to be called by their chosen names rather than by their birth names, even though by law transsexuals are allowed to have their chosen names in all their medical files. One participant said, ‘‘When they call me [in the health clinic] by my birth name . . . the name written in the identification file, I stand up and go in order not to lose the consultation with the doctor. I walk with my head down, cause I feel embarrassed’’ (p. 14). Another participant recalled a similar experience: ‘‘They [health officials] don’t call you by your chosen name, you know. They are not sensible. On top of that, you can hear the comments and laughs as soon as you leave’’ (p. 14). Rocha et al. reported that staff members simply refused to call transgendered individuals by their chosen name even when explicitly asked to do so: ‘‘A receptionist treated me really bad. She said simply, ‘I will call you R (masculine name)’. I said I would really like to be called by my chosen name G (feminine). The receptionist said, ‘No, I will call you R’ ’’ (p. 15). The interviews also showed a lack of sensitivity and training to deal with transgendered individuals. ‘‘I reckon there is no preparation to deal with us, from those who work in the reception desk up to the doctors. I believe they don’t have a minimum of training’’ (p. 16). Another said: ‘‘How can you develop any rapport with your doctor if, upon arrival, the doctor starts treating you as a ‘he.’ How can I develop rapport with someone who calls me ‘sir’? How can I be open
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enough to talk about my life, to expose myself or talk about intimate stuff with the doctor? There is no rapport! I may need a doctor in the future and not go’’ (pp. 16–17). Another participant brings up the important topic of how public stigma, stereotype, prejudice, and discrimination against transgendered individuals negatively affect treatment seeking, yielding significant harm to this population: ‘‘When they [transvestites] seek health services, they face discrimination instead, and they no longer go back . . . the public perceptions of prejudice and hatred don’t change. Many of them get really bad [with their health] . . . only when their condition worsens significantly, then they seek help’’ (p. 19). Another participant described how physicians stereotype and prejudge transgendered individuals as automatically being HIV positive: ‘‘When you report any health symptom, and they realize you’re a transvestite or transsexual, most [health care professionals] believe that you are infected with HIV straight away . . .’’ (p. 17). Rocha et al.’s interviews support the notion that there is widespread public stigma against sexual minorities, especially against transgendered individuals, even by well-educated professionals. There is a hopeful trend though: Whitam, Daskalos, Sobolewski, and Padilla (1998) suggest that there is increasing public support for the civil rights of sexual minorities in Brazil. IMPORTANT LAWS AND RESOLUTIONS TOWARD EQUALITY Historically, homosexuality has been viewed as pathological and deviant both in the United States and Brazil. Though sodomy was decriminalized in 1830 throughout Brazil (Rios, 2002), it remained a crime in some states in the United States until the Supreme Court’s decision in 2003, which overturned state same-sex sodomy laws (Lawrence v. Texas, 2003). It was only in 1985 that homosexuality was removed as a mental disorder from the Brazilian Federal Association of Medicine (cited in Conselho Nacional de Combate a Discriminac¸~ ao, 2004), compared to its removal from the second edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1973 in the United States (American Psychiatric Association, 1973). On March 22, 1999, the Brazilian Federal Association of Psychology passed a resolution stating that no professional who provides therapeutic services to sexual minority clients can act in a way that reinforces the notion of homoerotic behaviors or practices as pathological (Resoluc¸~ ao CFP # 001/99, 1999). Such resolution is similar to the U.S. resolution on appropriate therapeutic responses to sexual orientation passed by the American Psychological Association council of representatives on August 14, 1997 (American Psychological Association, 1998). There is an important difference, however. In Brazil, such a
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resolution refers to actual standards that are mandatory, whereas in the United States it refers to guidelines or recommendations aimed at motivating psychologists to act ethically toward sexual minority clients without enforcement mechanisms. On May 13, 2002, former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso proposed a program to amend the Brazilian Constitution of 1988—which does not include sexual orientation as a protected group—that would explicitly make sexual orientation a human rights issue, prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation (Leis, 2002). Such an amendment has not yet passed. Currently, Brazil has a patchwork of legal protection, with three states protecting LGBT individuals from discrimination, whereas the remaining 24 states lack such protection (Conselho Nacional de Combate a Discriminac¸~ao, 2004). Such a patchwork of legal protection parallels the situation found in the U.S., where only 20 states ban discrimination based on sexual orientation (National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, 2008). Unlike in the United States, Brazilian federal laws have extended many rights to same-sex domestic partners, including social security and inheritance (Rios, 2002). In addition, legislation was passed on December 3, 2003, extending immigration rights to foreign homosexuals who wish to join their Brazilian partners (Silva & Barbi, 2005). Laws against sexual harassment are relatively recent in Brazil. The first such law was enacted in the state of Rio de Janeiro in 1991, where organizations could be fined and the perpetrator dismissed (Noviski, Davoli, & Castro, 2000). On May 15, 2001, a national law passed that criminalizes sexual harassment and provides for up to two years in jail for perpetrators found guilty (C odigo Penal Brasileiro, 2001). Such law defines sexual harassment only as sexual coercion by a superior in order to obtain sexual favors; it does not include a hostile environment created by peers or subordinates. It emphasizes an abuse of power by a superior. These laws are gender neutral. Pastore and Robortella (2003) found that 9 percent of reported cases involve same-sex sexual harassment. According to the Brazilian Health Ministry (Conselho Nacional de Combate a Discriminac¸~ ao, 2004), the government needs to take several steps to reduce prejudice, discrimination, and violence based on sexual orientation. We highlight the first four because they are of interest to U.S. researchers, clinicians, and decision makers as well. First, there is a need for action by disseminating among all levels of society the notion that homosexual citizenship is a human rights issue. Second, the constitution must be amended in order to protect sexual minorities from discrimination in employment, education, housing, mental and health care, and the military in all Brazilian states, territories, cities, municipalities, and public institutions. Third, it is necessary to cooperate with international organizations to ensure that human rights are
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extended to all sexual minorities worldwide. Fourth, LGBTQ individuals have the right to live in a society free of violence; when crime based on sexual orientation occurs, punishment needs to be swift and just. SEXISM The Brazilian Health Ministry (Conselho Nacional de Combate a Discriminac¸~ao, 2004) also suggested that prejudice based on sexual orientation must be reduced alongside other types of prejudice, such as sexism. Research has shown that sexism is related to negative attitudes toward sexual minorities. Glick and Fiske (1996) differentiated between two types of sexist ideologies. The first is a subjectively positive, but patronizing, orientation of protection, idealization, and affection toward women (benevolent sexism), whereas the second reflects men’s violence against women and exploitation of women as sex objects (hostile sexism). These two types of sexism are complementary. They reinforce and justify patriarchy, including heterosexuals’ hostility toward women who deviate from traditional gender roles (e.g., lesbians; Glick & Fiske, 1997). Research across six U.S. samples showed that men consistently scored significantly higher than did women on both hostile and benevolent sexism; however, the gender gap was greater for hostile sexism than for benevolent sexism (Glick & Fiske, 1996). Moreover, benevolent and hostile sexism have been found to be widespread across 19 nations, including Brazil, reflecting and maintaining the oppression of women (Glick et al., 2000), including lesbians. For instance, in a study across three British samples of high school students, college students, and full-time employees, Masser and Abrams (1999) found that benevolent sexism, hostile sexism, and neosexism were negatively related to support for lesbians’ and gay men’s rights. In addition, in a study of college students at a medium-sized Midwestern U.S. public university, Whitley (2001) found that the best predictors of attitudes toward homosexuality were gender, benevolent sexism, endorsement of the traditional masculine role, and attitudes toward women. DeSouza, Solberg, and Elder (2007) examined the influence of one’s attitudes toward women in general and lesbians in particular on perceptions of woman-to-woman sexual harassment among 952 U.S. and Brazilian college students. The authors found significant relationships between negative attitudes toward lesbians with both benevolent and hostile sexism. Thus, sexist individuals also have anti-lesbian attitudes. The authors also found some support for the contact hypothesis, as there was a significant relationship between associating with homosexuals and having positive attitudes toward lesbians. There were interesting cross-cultural differences. Overall, college students in Brazil viewed hypothetical cases involving woman-to-woman sexual harassment as
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significantly more harassing and more likely to require an investigation than did college students in the United States. There were significant gender differences, but only between U.S. men and women, suggesting that Brazilian men and women are alike in the perceptions of womanto-woman sexual harassment. Finally, hostile sexism and perceptions of what behaviors constitute woman-to-woman sexual harassment significantly predicted views of the hypothetical case as sexual harassment and in need of an investigation. These findings generally supported Fiske and Glick’s (1995) argument that sexist attitudes predict judgments about unwanted social-sexual behaviors.
CONCLUSION The picture of Brazil portrayed by the media is of Carnival, where nudity is the norm, but most Brazilians remain conservative underneath the mask of a sensual and seductive society, where there is no sin below the equator or within four walls everything is permitted (Parker, 1991, 1993, 1999). In fact, machismo is alive and well. However, like its views toward women, Brazilian society has been changing its views toward LGBTQ individuals, with a significant shift toward acceptance of sexual minorities. There are many lenses to understand Brazil. On the one hand, sexual minorities in Brazil experience dehumanization in the form of public stigma, stereotyping, prejudice, discrimination, and violence. On the other hand, Brazilians are discussing homosexuality more openly, which is changing morality from a rigid hegemonic heterosexual viewpoint toward a more accepting view of differences and diversity as desirable. According to Prado and Machado (2008), homosexuality in Brazil has been through a political transformation: from criminalizing and pathologizing homosexuality toward fighting for human rights and dignity of LGBTQ individuals. Increasing numbers of sexual minority individuals in Brazil are coming out of the closet and slowly are being accepted by family members, friends, neighbors, and co-workers. For instance, on June 14, 2009, the city of S~ao Paulo held its 13th Gay Pride parade, the largest in the world with an estimated 3.5 million people in attendance (Parada Gay, 2009). The process is not uniform though. Acceptance is more common in large urban centers, such as S~ ao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, than in rural areas or in the northeast of Brazil. In addition, sexual minority individuals who publicly conform to traditional gender role expectations are more easily accepted than their less gender-typical counterparts, especially transgendered individuals who totally break away from traditional gender expressions and are the most marginalized and the most victimized sexual minority subgroup in Brazil.
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DeSouza, E. R., & Schneider, K. T. (2009). Incivility based on sexual orientation: The impact on North American and Brazilian bystanders. Manuscript in preparation. DeSouza, E. R., Solberg, J., & Elder, C. (2007). A cross-cultural perspective on judgments of woman-to-woman sexual harassment: Does sexual orientation matter? Sex Roles, 56, 457–471. DeSouza, E., & Showalter, B. In M. Paludi & F. Denmark (Eds.), Victims of sexual assault and abuse: Resources and responses for individuals and families. Westport, CT: Praeger. Diamond, L. M., & Savin-Williams, R. C. (2000). Explaining diversity in the development of same-sex sexuality among young women. In L. D. Garnets (Ed.), Psychological perspectives on lesbian, gay, and bisexual experiences (pp. 130–148). New York: Columbia University Press. Fassinger, R. E. (1991). The hidden minority: Issues and challenges in working with lesbian women and gay men. The Counseling Psychologist, 19, 157–176. Fausto-Sterling, A. (2000). Sexing the body: Gender politics and the construction of sexuality. New York: Basic Books. Fiske, S. T., & Glick, P. (1995). Ambivalence and stereotypes cause sexual harassment: A theory with implications for organizational change. Journal of Social Issues, 51, 97–115. Grupo Gay da Bahia. (2009). Relatorio sobre crimes homofobicos no Brasil [Report about hate crimes in Brazil based on sexual orientation]. Grupo Gay da Bahia, Salvador: Grupo Gay da Bahia. Glick, P., & Fiske, S. T. (1996). The Ambivalent Sexism Inventory: Differentiating hostile and benevolent sexism. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70, 491–512. Glick, P., & Fiske, S. T. (1997). Hostile and benevolent sexism: Measuring ambivalent sexist attitudes toward women. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 21, 119–135. Glick, P., Fiske, S. T., Mladinic, A., Saiz, J. L., Abrams, D., Masser, B., et al. (2000). Beyond prejudice as simple antipathy: Hostile and benevolent sexism across cultures. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79, 763–775. Glomb, T. M., Richman, W. L., Hulin, C. L., & Drasgow, R. (1997). Ambient sexual harassment: An integrated model of antecedents and consequences. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 71, 309–328. Goering, L. (1997, April 4). Brazil’s gay men appear singled out, attacked for living ordinary lives. The Chicago Tribune. Chicago, IL. Retrieved March 25, 2005, from http://www.familyresearchinst.org/FRI_EduPamphet4.html Green, J. N. (1999). Beyond carnival: Male homosexuality in twentieth-century Brazil. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Herek, G. H. (2000). Sexual prejudice and gender: Do heterosexuals’ attitudes toward lesbians and gay men differ? Journal of Social Issues, 56, 251–266. Horowitz, J. L., & Newcomb, M. D. (2001). A multidimensional approach to homosexual identity. Journal of Homosexuality, 42, 1–19. Instituto de Pesquisa e Cultura GLS [Institute of Research and Culture GLS]. (2000). 1o. Censo GLS do Brasil [First Census of GLS in Brazil]. S~ ao Paulo: GLS Planet. Retrieved June 8, 2009, from www.censogls.com.br Kimmel, M. S. (1997). Masculinity as homophobia: Fear, shame, and silence in the construction of gender identity. In M. M. Gergen & S. N. Davis (Eds.), Toward a new psychology of gender (pp. 223–242). New York: Routledge.
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Kitzinger, C., & Wilkinson, S. (2004). Social advocacy for equal marriage: The politics of ‘‘rights’’ and the psychology of ‘‘mental health.’’ Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, 4, 173–194. Klein, C. (1999). ‘‘The ghetto is over, darling’’: Emerging gay communities and gender and sexual politics in contemporary Brazil. Culture, Health, & Sexuality, 1, 239–260. Lacerda, M., Pereira, C., & Camino, L. (2002). Um estudo sobre as formas de ~es sociais preconceito contra homossexuais na perspectiva das representac¸o [A study of prejudice forms against homosexuals anchored on social representations]. Psicologia: Reflex~ao e Crıtica, 15, 165–178. Larsen, R. J., & Buss, D. M. (2008). Personality psychology: Domains of knowledge about human nature. New York: McGraw Hill. Lawrence v. Texas, 71 U.S.L.W. 4574 (2003). Leis [Laws]. (2002). Pride. Retrieved May 25, 2009, from http://mixbrasil.uol. com.br/pride/direito/dh.htm Low, K. S. D., Radhakrishnan, P., Schneider, K. T., & Rounds, J. (2007). The experiences of bystanders of workplace ethnic harassment. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 37, 2261–2297. Masser, B., & Abrams, D. (1999). Contemporary sexism: The relationships among hostility, benevolence, and neosexism. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 23, 503–517. Mendes-Leite, R. (1993). A game of appearances: The ‘‘ambigusexuality’’ in Brazilian culture of sexuality. Journal of Homosexuality, 25, 271–282. Mott, L. (2002). O crime anti-homossexual no Brasil [Crimes against homosexuals in Brazil]. Salvador: Grupo Gay da Bahia. National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. (2008, July 31). State nondiscrimination laws in the U.S. Retrieved June 6, 2009, from http://www.thetaskforce.org/ reports_and_research/nondiscrimination_laws Noviski, I. F., Davoli, J. C., & Castro, R. C. (2000). Assedio sexual: Quest~ao que ultrapassa a categoria profissional do secretario executivo [Sexual harassment: A question beyond the category of a superior]. Monografia de conclus~ ao de curso. Universidade do Vale do Paraıba. S~ ao Jose dos Campos, S~ ao Paulo. O mundo gay rasga as fantasias [The gay world tears up the costumes]. (1993, May 12). Veja, 52–57. Parada Gay agita S~ ao Paulo neste domingo [Gay Parade stirs S~ ao Paulo this Sunday]. (2009, June 14). Retrieved June 16, 2009, from http://ultimosegundo. ig.com.br/brasil/2009/06/14/paradaþgayþdeveþreceberþcercaþdeþ35þ milhoesþdeþpessoasþemþsaoþpauloþ6718909.html Parker, R. (1991). Bodies, pleasures, and passions: Sexual culture in contemporary Brazil. Boston: Beacon. Parker, R. (1999). Beneath the equator: Cultures of desire, male homosexuality, and emerging gay communities in Brazil. London: Routledge. Parker, R. G. (1993). ‘‘Within four walls’’: Brazilian sexual culture and HIV/ AIDS. In H. Daniel & R. Parker (Eds.), Sexuality, politics and AIDS in Brazil: In another world? (pp. 65–84). London: Falmer. Pastore, J., & Robortella, L. C. A. (2003) Assedio sexual no trabalho [Sexual harassment at work]. S~ ao Paulo: Makron Books. Prado, M. A. M., & Machado, F. V. (2008). Preconceito contra homossexualidades [Prejudice against homosexualities]. S~ ao Paulo: Cortez.
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~o [Resolution] CFP # 001/99. (1999, March 22). Estabelecer normas de Resoluc¸a atuac¸~ ao para os psic ologos em relac¸~ ao a quest~ ao da orientac¸~ ao sexual [Standards of performance for psychologists concerning sexual orientation]. Rios, R. R. (2002). A homossexualidade e a discriminac¸~ ao por orientac¸~ ao sexual no direito Brasileiro [Homosexuality and discrimination due to sexual orientation in Brazilian law]. In C. Golin & L. G. Weiler (Eds.), Homossexualidades, cultura e polıtica [Homosexuality, culture and politics] (pp. 15–48). Porto Alegre, Brazil: Sulina. Rocha, K. B., Barbosa, L. H. R., Barboza, C. Z., Calvetti, P. U., Carvalho, F. T., Cerqueira-Santos, E., et al. (2009). Attention to health in Brazil based on transvestites, transsexuals and transgender’s perception. Unpublished manuscript. Sedgwick, E. K. (1990). Epistemology of the closet. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Silva, L., & Barbi, H. (2005, February 25). Seus direitos [Your rights]. Retrieved May 25, 2009, from http://mixbrasil.uol.com.br/pride/seusdireitos/visto/ visto.asp Starks, T. J., Gilbert, B. O., Fischer, A. R., Weston, R., & DiLalla, D. L. (2009). Gendered sexuality: A new model and measure of attraction and intimacy. Journal of Homosexuality, 56, 14–30. Werba, G. C., & Strey, M. N. (2001). Longe dos olhos, longe do corac¸~ ao: ainda a invisibilidade da viol^encia contra a mulher [Out of sight, out of mind [lit. heart]: The continued invisibility of violence against women]. In P. K. Grossi & G. C. Werba (Eds.), Viol^encias e g^enero: Coisas que a gente n~ao gostaria de saber [Violence and gender: Things we didn’t want to know] (pp. 71–82). Porto Alegre, Brazil: Edipucrs, 2. Whitam, F. L., Daskalos, C., Sobolewski, C. G., & Padilla, P. (1998). The emergence of lesbian sexuality and identity cross-culturally: Brazil, Peru, the Philippines, and the United States. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 27, 31–56. Whitley, B. E., Jr. (2001). Gender-role variables and attitudes toward homosexuality. Sex Roles, 45, 691–721.
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Chapter 9
Frequency Rates and Consequences of Peer Sexual Harassment: Comparing U.S. and International Students1 Eros DeSouza Joy Chien
Although sexual harassment is widespread on U.S. college campuses, we know of no study that has examined the incidence of sexual harassment among international students. Thus, the purpose of the current study described in this chapter was to fill an important gap in the literature by comparing frequency rates and psychological consequences of peer sexual harassment between U.S.-born and international college students. The findings showed that female international students were at the greatest risk of experiencing peer sexual harassment and were the most bothered by these experiences. There was also a trend for sexually harassed international students, regardless of gender, to have lower self-esteem compared to sexually harassed U.S.-born students. These findings have important practical implications for university officials.
REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE Hill and Silva (2005) reported findings from a recent national survey conducted by the American Association of University Women in which 62 percent of U.S. male and female college students indicated having been sexually harassed, most often by peers (80 percent); the most common form of sexual harassment was unwanted comments, jokes,
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gestures, and looks (53 percent). In addition, many scholars suggest that sexual harassment is about power rather than sexual desire (e.g., Cleveland & Kerst, 1993; Fineran & Bennett, 1999; Jones, 1996; Sandler, 1997). Power may rest on the harasser’s gender, size, race, ‘‘or any number of other dominant characteristics the harasser possesses or is perceived to possess by society’’ (Strauss, 2003, p. 114).
DEFINING SEXUAL HARASSMENT From a psychological perspective, sexual harassment is defined as ‘‘unwanted sex-related behavior at work that is appraised by the recipient as offensive, exceeding her resources, or threatening her wellbeing’’ (Fitzgerald, Swan, & Magley, 1997, p. 15). Sexual harassment is, then, a type of stressor that has deleterious effects on a target’s health and psychological well-being. Although we are interested in psychological sexual harassment, it is worthwhile noting that the definition of sexual harassment varies cross culturally (DeSouza & Solberg, 2003) and from one individual to another due to the subjective nature of sexual harassment (i.e., sexual harassment is in the eye of the beholder). According to Paludi (1997), sexual harassment in educational settings can be defined in legal terms and in behavioral terms. As a legal term, the U.S. Department of Education: Office for Civil Rights (2001) defined sexual harassment as: [u]nwelcome conduct of a sexual nature. Sexual harassment can include unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal, nonverbal, or physical conduct of a sexual nature. Sexual harassment of a student can deny or limit, on the basis of sex, the student’s ability to participate in or to receive benefits, services, or opportunities in the school’s program. Sexual harassment of student is, therefore, a form of sex discrimination prohibited by Title IX under circumstances described in this guidance. (p. 2)
As a behavioral term, sexual harassment ‘‘can also occur where no such formal differential exists, if the behavior is unwanted by or offensive to the individual’’ (Fitzgerald & Ormerod, 1993, p. 556). Sexual harassment is illegal (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 2009; U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights, 2001). It can be classified into two categories: quid pro quo and hostile environment. In quid pro quo sexual harassment, the harasser typically has more organizational power than the target (Sandler & Shoop, 1997); that is, when the harasser is in a position to provide benefits for the target in exchange for sexual favors or to punish the target for not cooperating—for example, when a teacher gives an ‘‘A’’ grade to a student who does not deserve it but is open to sexual interactions, or
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when a teacher fails a student because he or she is not willing to participate in sexual behaviors. The other type of sexual harassment is hostile environment, which is defined as an environment being so hostile that it interferes with an individual’s ability to perform her or his tasks, such as attending classes (Sandler & Shoop, 1997). Examples of behaviors that fall under this category include, but are not limited to, sexual innuendos, sexual bantering, unwanted touching, grabbing and pinching, sexual obscenities, computer harassment, exposure to pornographic materials, and being asked out on a date repeatedly after having said no. Often in situations of hostile environment, the harasser and the target are in an equal organizational position, such as both being students. This form of hostile environment is called peer sexual harassment. However, only a few studies focused directly on peer sexual harassment in educational settings (e.g., DeSouza & Ribeiro, 2005; DeSouza, Schneider, & Hubbard, 2005; Goldstein, Malanchuk, DavisKean, & Eccles, 2007). One of the reasons for the lack of attention on peer sexual harassment in educational settings is that many sexual behaviors that match the peer sexual harassment definition have become normalized in society due to the culture’s perception of gender roles. According to Woods (2007), one aspect for men to be masculine in the United States is to be sexual; in other words, men should be interested in sex all the time. For example, it is common to find a group of men judging women’s appearance and body parts when women simply pass by, and it would be ‘‘naturally’’ argued that judging women is a way of ‘‘men being men.’’ Peer sexual harassment occurs due to societal status bestowed upon men (Fitzgerald & Ormerod, 1993). Thus, it is a form of gender-based dominance and control (Fineran, Bennett, & Sacco, 2001), in which young men show their masculinity by sexually coming on to women (Woods, 2007). Fineran and Bennett (1999) reported that in the United States, high school boys sexually harassed their peers more often than high school girls did, and adolescents’ beliefs that men should be dominant were correlated with engaging in sexually harassing behaviors toward peers. Although Hill and Silva’s study as well as other studies that use their own behavioral checklists (e.g., American Association of University Women, 1993, 2001; Fineran & Bennet, 1999; Ivy & Hamlet, 1996) are informative, these studies are largely atheoretical. They generally use various definitions of sexual harassment and psychometric instruments, making generalizations problematic (Raver & Gelfand, 2005). In the late 1980s, Fitzgerald et al. created a behavioral measure of sexual harassment called the Sexual Experiences Questionnaire (SEQ), which has become the most widely used and rigorous assessment of
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sexual harassment with content, construct, and criterion validity (Arvey & Cavanaugh, 1995; Fitzgerald, Gelfand, & Drasgow, 1995; Stark, Chernyshenko, Lancaster, Drasgow, & Fitzgerald, 2002). Fitzgerald et al. defined sexual harassment as a behavioral construct, comprising three related but distinct dimensions: gender harassment (insulting, hostile, or degrading sexist behaviors), unwanted sexual attention (verbal or nonverbal sexual behaviors that are offensive, unwanted, and unreciprocated), and sexual coercion (when better treatment or rewards are contingent on sexual cooperation, either subtly or explicitly). Note that the term ‘‘sexual harassment’’ is never mentioned in the SEQ. Moreover, gender harassment and unwanted sexual attention parallel the legal definition of a hostile environment, whereas sexual coercion parallels the legal definition of quid pro quo. Research suggests that gender harassment is the most common type of sexual harassment, followed by unwanted sexual attention, with sexual coercion being the least common (Pryor & Fitzgerald, 2003).
DEMOGRAPHIC FACTORS RELATED TO THE INCIDENCE OF SEXUAL HARASSMENT Sexual harassers usually choose individuals who do not have the power to reject behaviors that are unwelcome, degrading, offensive, or intimidating, and that violate standards of interpersonal respect (DeSouza, 2008). In addition, perpetrators of these acts are motivated to maintain or enhance their social status (Berdahl, 2007). Survey studies have shown that female workers are much more likely to experience sexual harassment than male workers (e.g., U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board, 1981, 1988, 1995). In educational settings, although male students can and do become targets of peer sexual harassment, those who seem most vulnerable to be sexually harassed by their peers are female students (Goldstein et al., 2007; Hand & Sanchez, 2000), students of color (Goldstein et al., 2007), and ‘‘effeminate’’ male students. That is, women, sexual minorities, and racial/ethnic minorities have been traditionally viewed as being inferior in compassion to heterosexual men and whites. Factors such as gender, sexual orientation, race, and social economic status reflect an individual’s power in society. Moreover, these factors interface. For instance, sexism and racism have been historically and experientially intertwined (Murrell, 1996). In fact, some researchers concluded that racialized sexual harassment is a central factor in the harassment experience of women of color (e.g., Berdahl & Moore, 2006, 2005; Buchanan & Ormerod, 2002; Cortina, Fitzgerald, & Drasgow, 2002; Schneider, Hitlan, & Radhakrishnan, 2000; Texeira, 2002; Yoder & Aniakudo, 1995).
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Concerning social economic status, DeSouza and Cerqueira recently examined frequency rates, as assessed by the SEQ, and consequences of sexual harassment in a sample of 376 poor women, who were employed as domestic workers in Brazil. Ninety-eight percent of these women earned about US $200 or less a month and 89 percent had less than a high school education. Twenty-six percent of this sample was sexually harassed at work during the past 12 months. Live-in workers (e.g., those residing at their employers’ residence) were at a significantly greater risk of experiencing sexual harassment than those who resided in their own homes after controlling for participants’ age, race, and social class. Women who lived in their employers’ residence used more alcohol/drugs than their counterparts. Harassed women had significantly higher self-esteem impairment and anxiety-depression than nonharassed women. Nonharassed women who resided in their own homes had the best physical well-being. When asked about one’s worst sexually harassing experience, respondents indicated that the perpetrators were typically men (75 percent), who also engaged in more severe types of sexual harassment than female perpetrators. The emotional reaction to such incidents was significantly worse when perpetrated by men than by women. Most sexually harassed domestic workers experienced some form of retaliation (social or work-related) after asking their harassers to stop. DeSouza and Cerqueira concluded that the low social and economic status of domestic workers in Brazil might allow the perpetration of sexual harassment and other forms of mistreatment with impunity. That is, these workers may refuse to file a formal complaint with the police due to fear of being ridiculed by officials and not finding a new job, putting themselves and their families at risk of not surviving (e.g., not being able to pay bills). Another factor that researchers have paid little attention to is one’s nationality/citizenship. Welsh, Carr, MacQuarrie, and Huntley (2006) studied Filipina domestic female workers who emigrated to Canada without full citizenship status. The authors argued that citizenship status was one of the major components that put these women at risk of experiencing sexual harassment and the way they defined sexual harassment. The Filipina domestic workers in their study usually kept their sexual harassment experiences unreported, because they were afraid that if they complained about it, they would lose their right to stay in Canada. Xie, Meng, and Yamagami (1995) investigated the experiences of international students from China who studied in Japan. The student visa of a Chinese student requires sponsorship by a Japanese organization. These Chinese students did not report their experiences of sexual assault to the police because they feared being deported. Welsh et al. and Xie et al. concluded that individuals who do not have full
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citizenship have less power in the host society. In addition, they are fearful to report their experiences to authorities because they might lose their legal right to stay in the host country. According to Sandler, female international college students are more likely to be harassed than college students born in the United States, because the former are objectified as exotic and/or passive and, as suggested above, they have less power in society due to their gender and citizenship status. Unfortunately, none of the previous studies on peer sexual harassment or any other form of sexual harassment have investigated the experiences of international students enrolled in U.S. colleges and universities. This is troublesome because 623,805 international students studied in the United States during the 2007/2008 academic year, accounting for 3.5 percent of the student body (Institute of International Education, n.d.). Thus, it is important to investigate the experiences of international students with peer sexual harassment. Moreover, targets of peer sexual harassment may end up in selfdoubt, affecting their entire education experience and future career, as they may become afraid of attending classes or joining social events in order to avoid the harasser and may end up transferring to another institution or dropping out of college altogether (Sandler, 1997). Furthermore, sexual harassment is a stressor that can have negative psychological outcomes on the targets (e.g., DeSouza & Cerqueira, in press; Willness, Steel, & Lee, 2007). In addition, even relatively mild experiences with sexual harassment may lead to negative consequences in one’s physical and psychological health (e.g., DeSouza & Cerqueira, in press; DeSouza & Fansler, 2003; Goldstein et al., 2007).
THE CURRENT STUDY The purpose of the current study was to examine frequency rates and psychological consequences of peer sexual harassment in a sample of international and U.S.-born students enrolled in a large midwestern state university. We examined whether being female and an international student moderated both the frequency of peer sexual harassment and its consequences on the victims’ psychological well-being. Specifically, we predicted that female international students would experience the most peer sexual harassment and would be most bothered by it because they have the lowest power in society due to their gender and citizenship status compared to both male and female students from the United States and international male students. We also predicted that female international students would fare worst psychologically (i.e., lower self-esteem and more anxiety-depression) compared to the other groups.
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All international students (n ¼ 429) enrolled in a large midwestern state university and 426 randomly selected U.S.-born counterparts, who were matched by age and gender, received an e-mail in the fall of 2007 asking them to participate in a Web survey about social-sexual behaviors between college students. Of these, 165 college students (69 international students and 96 U.S.-born students) completed the Web survey, yielding a response rate of 19 percent. The age of the total sample (N ¼ 165) ranged from 19 to 37, with the average age being 26; 55 percent were women and 61 percent were graduate students. Most U.S.-born students were European American/white (88 percent), whereas most international students were Asian (66 percent), followed by white (25 percent), black (6 percent), and Latino (3 percent). The vast majority of international students (90 percent) reported that English was their second language. Also, most international students (64 percent) reported to be studying in the United States for two years or less, with 36 percent studying in the United States for three years or more. All students completed the following measures in the order presented below. Items about psychological well-being preceded all sexual harassment items to minimize response bias. DEMOGRAPHIC AND PERSONAL INFORMATION We asked all students their age, gender, race/ethnicity, student status (undergraduate or graduate student), and whether or not they were an international student. If they were an international student, they were asked whether or not English was their native language and how long they have been in the United States. PSYCHOLOGICAL WELL-BEING Students completed 15 items that assessed their psychological wellbeing. First, they answered five items from the Mental Health Index (MHI), developed by Veit and Ware (1983), that measured anxietydepression during the 12 months. These items are scored on a 6-point scale from 1 (Never) to 6 (All the time). We reversed the scores of two positively worded items. Then, we averaged all responses, so that higher scores represent higher self-reported levels of anxiety and depression. A sample item reads, ‘‘I have felt downhearted and blue.’’ In the current study the internal reliability (Cronbach’s alpha) of the MHI was .83, which indicates that it is a reliable measure of anxietydepression. Then, students completed the 10-item Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (RSES; 1986), which is scored on a 4-point scale from 1 (Strongly disagree) to 4 (Strongly agree). A sample item reads, ‘‘I certainly feel useless
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at times.’’ The RSES is a widely used measure of global self-esteem, with sound construct validity and psychometric properties (Robins, Hendin, & Trzesniewski, 2001). The Cronbach’s alphas for the RSES across various samples ranged from .77 to .88 (Blascovich & Tomaka, 1993; Rosenberg, 1986). According to Rosenberg’s recommendation, the scores of five negatively worded statements were reversed. Then, all scores were averaged, so that higher scores represent higher reported levels of self-esteem. In the current study the internal reliability (Cronbach’s alpha) of the RSES was .87, which indicates that it is a reliable measure of self-esteem.
Student-to-Student Hostile Sexual Harassment Students completed a shortened version of the SEQ (Stark et al., 2002), containing 12 behaviors initiated by either male or female college students during the past 12 months that may constitute hostile sexually harassing experiences (a sample item includes, ‘‘told sexual stories or jokes that were offensive to you’’). That is, since hostile sexually harassing behaviors are far more common than coercive ones (Pryor & Fitzgerald, 2003), and since we were interested in student-to-student sexual harassment, we eliminated four items that measure sexual coercion (e.g., ‘‘implied certain rewards or better treatment if you were sexually cooperative’’), as these behaviors would be unlikely to be initiated by students to other students. As stated earlier, the validity of the SEQ has been well established (Arvey & Cavanaugh, 1995; Fitzgerald et al., 1995). Stark et al. (2002) reported reliability estimates (Cronbach’s alphas) of .91 men and .92 for women for the 16-item SEQ. In the current study, each of the 12 SEQ items branches out into two response sets. The first set measures incident frequency, whereas the second set measures the emotional reaction to the experience (i.e., how bothersome it was if it happened at least once). That is, for each item, students first indicated how often it occurred on the following 5-point scale: 1 (Never), 2 (Once or twice), 3 (Sometimes), 4 (Often), and 5 (Many times). We averaged these responses, so that higher scores represent higher reported frequency of sexually harassing experiences. The Cronbach’s alpha for the frequency measure was .86, which is comparable to the 16-item SEQ described above. Next, if students had experienced a sexually harassing behavior at least once, they were asked how bothersome it was on the following 5-point scale: 1 (Not at all), 2 (Slightly), 3 (Somewhat), 4 (A lot), and 5 (Extremely). We averaged these responses, so that higher scores represent higher reported levels of feeling bothered by such incidents. The Cronbach’s alpha for the bothersome measure was .81, which indicates good reliability.
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RESULTS AND DISCUSSION Eighty-six percent of the total sample reported having experienced at least one sexually harassing behavior from peers during the past 12 months. This figure suggests that peer sexual harassment is widespread, supporting Hill and Silva’s findings. The data generally supported our predictions. First, female students (M ¼1.78) experienced significant more peer sexual harassment than male students (M ¼ 1.50; F(1, 151) ¼ 11.74, p < .01. These findings are in keeping with past studies, which found that female students were much more likely to be targets of sexual harassment than were male students (e.g., Goldstein et al., 2007; Hand & Sanchez, 2000). Second, female students (M ¼ 1.81) were more bothered by these experiences than were male students (M ¼ 1.48; F(1, 151) ¼ 14.06, p < .01. These findings are also in keeping with past studies, which found that men perceived sexually harassing experiences as less severe, less upsetting, less inappropriate, less bothersome, and less threatening than did women (Berdahl, Magley, & Waldo, 1996; Cochran, Frazier, & Olson, 1997; Hurt, Maver, & Hoffman, 1999; LaRocca & Kromrey, 1999; Marks & Nelson, 1993). Recent studies also found that female college students were much more likely to perceive social-sexual behaviors between students as constituting peer sexual harassment than did male college men (DeSouza & Solberg, 2004; DeSouza, Solberg, & Elder, 2007). Although the main effect for citizenship was not significant for either the frequency or bothersome measure, we found significant interactions between gender and citizenship for both the frequency measure, F(1, 151) ¼ 4.12, p < .05, and the bothersome measure, F(1, 151) ¼ 3.93, p < .05. These interactions were in the expected direction, which supported our predictions. That is, female international students (M ¼ 1.80) experienced the most peer sexual harassment and male international students the least (M ¼ 1.25), with female U.S. students (M ¼ 1 .75) and male U.S. students (M ¼ 1.61) scoring in between. A similar and significant pattern was found for the bothersome measure: Female international students (M ¼ 1.83) were most bothered by these experiences and male international students the least (M ¼ 1.24), with female U.S. students (M ¼ 1.78) and male U.S. students (M ¼ 1.60) scoring in between. We did not find a significant interaction for either the self-esteem or anxiety-depression measure. However, there was a trend for harassed international students (M ¼ 3.19) to score lower on self-esteem than did harassed U.S.-born students (M ¼ 3.37), F(1, 134) ¼ 2.93, p ¼ .089. In addition, harassed women (M ¼ 2.61) scored significantly higher on anxiety-depression than did harassed men (M ¼ 2.33), F(1, 134) ¼ 5.16, p < .05. The latter is in keeping with past research (e.g., DeSouza & Fansler, 2003).
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CONCLUSION The current study advances our understanding of sexual harassment by comparing its incidence and psychological consequences between U.S.-born students and international student. Female international students experienced the most peer sexual harassment and were the ones most bothered by these experiences, which seem to add to their acculturation stress in a new culture (Wadsworth, Hecht, & Jung, 2008). Harassed international college students, regardless of gender, may even blame themselves for their victimization. Thus, their lower selfesteem, compared to harassed U.S.-born college students, evidenced in our study is easy to understand, because being sexually harassed implies low status, as noncitizens, and a sense of powerlessness, as they may fear losing their student visa if they complain to university officials and returning home in shame. The above findings have important implications for university officials who are in a position to prevent sexual harassment in all its forms. According to Hill and Silva, ‘‘[t]he ramifications of sexual harassment can be serious. Sexual harassment can damage the emotional and academic well-being of students, provoke and exacerbate conflict among students, and contribute to a hostile learning environment . . . society as a whole is affected as graduating students bring their attitudes about sexual harassment into the workplace and beyond’’ (p. 4). University officials have a duty to protect international students from sexual harassment. International students may need extra help understanding how sexual harassment is defined in the United States and what can be done to redress the situation. Residence hall assistants (RAs) are often the first resource for international students residing on campus. Thus, RAs may need additional training about how international students may have a different conceptualization of sexual harassment. For example, Brazilian laws define sexual harassment only as sexual coercion by superiors, that is, quid pro quo sexual harassment (C odigo Penal Brasileiro, 2001).
Limitations and Future Directions One important limitation of our study is that our sample was from one midwestern university, limiting the generalizability of our findings. Another limitation is that our study was cross-sectional rather than longitudinal, which precludes an examination of the consequences of sexually harassing experiences over time. Thus, we cannot infer causality from our correlational study. Hence, future studies need to include longitudinal designs to test the causality of the relationships found in our study. Future research should also include qualitative approaches, such as in-depth interviews and focus groups, in order to
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contextualize the sexual harassment experiences of international students. Researchers (e.g., Lim & Cortina, 2005) suggest that sexual harassment does not happen in isolation, but rather in an environment permeated by generalized hostility. Hence, other types of mistreatment (e.g., bullying and incivility) should be simultaneously investigated in future studies. NOTE 1. Preliminary findings were presented at 2008 meeting of the International Coalition Against Sexual Harassment and at the Association for Psychological Science.
REFERENCES American Association of University Women. (1993). Hostile hallways: The AAUW survey on sexual harassment in America’s schools. Washington, DC: Harris/Scholastic Research. American Association of University Women. (2001). Hostile hallways: Bullying, teasing, and sexual harassment in school. Washington, DC: Author. Arvey, R. D., & Cavanaugh, M. A. (1995). Using surveys to assess the prevalence of sexual harassment: Some methodological problems. Journal of Social Issues, 51, 39–52. Berdahl, J. L. (2007). Harassment based on sex: Protecting social status in the context of gender hierarchy. Academy of Management Review, 32, 641–658. Berdahl, J. L., Magley, V. J., & Waldo, C. R. (1996). The sexual harassment of men? Exploring the concept with theory and data. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 20, 527–547. Berdahl, J. L., & Moore, C. (2006). Workplace harassment: Double jeopardy for minority women. Journal of Applied Psychology, 91, 426–436. Blascovich, J., & Tomaka, J. (1993). Measures of self-esteem. In J. P. Robinson, P. R. Shaver, & L. S. Wrightsman (Eds.), Measures of personality and social psychological attitudes (3rd ed., pp. 115–160). Ann Arbor, MI: Institute of Social Research. Buchanan, N. T. (2005). The nexus of race and gender domination: Racialized sexual harassment of African American women. In J. E. Gruber & P. Morgan (Eds.), In the company of men: Male dominance and sexual harassment (pp. 294–320). Boston: Northeastern University Press. Buchanan, N. T., & Ormerod, A. J. (2002). Racialized sexual harassment in the lives of African American women. Women & Therapy, 25, 107–124. Cleveland, J. N., & Kerst, M. E. (1993). Sexual harassment and perceptions of power: An underarticulated relationship. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 42, 49–67. Cochran, C. C., Frazier, P. A., & Olson, A. M. (1997). Predictors of responses to unwanted sexual attention. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 21, 207–226. C odigo Penal Brasileiro [Brazilian Penal Code]. (2001). Lei 10.224, Art. 216-A. Brasılia.
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Cortina, L. M, Fitzgerald, L. F., & Drasgow, F. (2002). Contextualizing Latina experiences of sexual harassment: Preliminary tests of a structural model. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 24, 295–311. DeSouza, E., & Fansler, A. G. (2003). Contrapower sexual harassment: A survey of students and faculty members. Sex Roles, 48, 529–542. DeSouza, E., Schneider, K. T., & Hubbard, C. R. (2005, August). Sexual harassment among high school students of color. In A. J. Ormerod & L. L. Collinsworth (Chairs), New issues in high school sexual harassment. Symposium presented at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association, Washington, DC. DeSouza, E., & Solberg J. (2003). Incidence and dimensions of sexual harassment across cultures. In M. Paludi & C. A. Paludi, Jr. (Ed.), Academic and workplace sexual harassment (pp. 3–30). Westport, CT: Praeger. DeSouza, E. R. (2008). Workplace incivility, sexual harassment, and racial micro-aggression: The interface of three literatures. In M. Paludi (Ed.), The psychology of women at work: Vol 2. Obstacles and the identity juggle (pp. 65– 84). Westport, CT: Praeger. DeSouza, E. R., & Cerqueira, E. (in press). From the kitchen to the bedroom: Frequency rates and consequences of sexual harassment among Brazilian domestic workers. Journal of Interpersonal Violence. DeSouza, E. R., & Ribeiro, J. (2005). Bullying and sexual harassment among Brazilian high school students. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 20, 1018–1038. DeSouza, E. R., & Solberg, J. (2004). Women’s and men’s reactions to man-toman sexual harassment: Does the sexual orientation of the victim matter? Sex Roles, 50, 623–639. DeSouza, E. R., Solberg, J., & Elder, C. (2007). A cross-cultural perspective on judgments of woman-to-woman sexual harassment: Does sexual orientation matter? Sex Roles, 56, 457–471. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. (2009, March 11). Sexual harassment. Retrieved May 12, 2009, from http://www.eeoc.gov/types/sexual_ harassment.html Fineran, S., & Bennett, L. (1999). Gender and power issues of peer sexual harassment among teenagers. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 14, 626–641. Fineran, S., Bennett, L., & Sacco, T. (2001). Peer sexual harassment and peer violence: South African children at risk. Social Work, 37, 211–221. Fitzgerald, L. F., Gelfand, M. J., & Drasgow, F. (1995). Measuring sexual harassment: Theoretical and psychometric advances. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 17, 425–445. Fitzgerald, L. F., Shullman, S., Bailey, N., Richards, M., Swecker, J., Gold, Y., et al. (1988). The incidence and dimensions of sexual harassment in academia and the workplace. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 32, 152–175. Fitzgerald, L. F., Swan, S., & Magley, V. J. (1997). But was it really sexual harassment? Legal, behavioral, and psychological definitions of the workplace victimization of women. In W. O’Donohue (Ed.), Sexual harassment: Theory, research, and treatment (pp. 5–28). Boston: Allyn & Bacon. Fitzgerald, L. F., & Ormerod, A. (1993). Sexual harassment in academia and the workplace (pp. 553–581) In F. L. Denmark & M. A. Paludi (Eds.), Psychology of women: Handbook of issues and theories. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
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Goldstein, S. E., Malanchuk, O., Davis-Kean, P. E., & Eccles, J. S. (2007). Risk factors of sexual harassment by peers: A longitudinal investigation of African American and European American adolescents. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 17, 285–300. Hand, J. Z., & Sanchez, L. (2000). Badgering or bantering? Gender differences in experience of, and reactions to, sexual harassment among U.S. high school students. Gender & Society, 14, 718–746. Hill, C., & Silva, E. (2005). Drawing the line: Sexual harassment on campus. Washington, DC: American Association of University Women. Hurt, J. L., Maver, J. A., & Hoffman, D. (1999). Situational and individual influences on judgments of hostile environment sexual harassment. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 29, 1395–1415. Institute of International Education (n.d.). International students. Retrieved May 12, 2009, from http://opendoors.iienetwork.org/?p=131531 Ivy, D. K., & Hamlet, S. (1996). College students and sexual dynamics: Two studies of peer sexual harassment. Communication Education, 45, 149–166. Jones, C. (1996). Sexual harassment. New York: Facts On File, Inc. LaRocca, M. A., & Kromrey, J. D. (1999). Perception of sexual harassment in higher education: Impact of gender and attractiveness. Sex Roles, 40, 921–940. Lim, S., & Cortina, L. M. (2005). Interpersonal mistreatment in the workplace: The interface and impact of general incivility and sexual harassment. Journal of Applied Psychology, 90, 483–496. Marks, M. A., & Nelson, E. S. (1993). Sexual harassment on campus: Effects of professor gender on perception of sexually harassing behaviors. Sex Roles, 28, 207–217. Murrell, A. J. (1996). Sexual harassment and women of color: Issues, challenges, and future directions. In M. S. Stockdale (Ed.), Sexual harassment in the workplace: Perspectives, frontiers, and response strategies (pp. 51–65). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Paludi, M. A. (1997). Sexual harassment in schools. In W. O’Donohue (Ed.), Sexual harassment: Theory, research, and treatment (pp. 225–240). Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon. Pryor, J. B., & Fitzgerald, L. F. (2003). Sexual harassment research in the United States. In S. Einarsen, H. Hoel, D. Zapf, & C. L. Cooper (Eds.), Bullying and emotional abuse in the workplace: International perspectives in research and practice (pp. 79–100). New York: Taylor & Francis. Raver, J. L., & Gelfand, M. (2005). Beyond the individual victim: Linking sexual harassment, team processes, and team performance. Academy of Management Journal, 48, 387–400. Robins, R. W., Hendin, H. M., & Trzesniewski, K. H. (2001). Measuring global self-esteem: Construct validation of a single-item measure and the Rosenberg Self-esteem Scale. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 27, 151–161. Rosenberg, M. (1986). Conceiving the self. Malabar, FL: Krieger. Sandler, B. R. (1997). Student-to-student sexual harassment. In B. R. Sandler & R. J. Shoop (Ed.), Sexual harassment on campus (pp. 50–65). Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon. Sandler, B. R., & Shoop, R. J. (1997). What is sexual harassment? In B. R. Sandler & R. J. Shoop (Ed.), Sexual harassment on campus (pp. 1–21). Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon.
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Schneider, K. T., Hitlan, R. T., & Radhakrishnan, P. (2000). An examination of the nature and correlates of ethnic harassment experiences in multiple contexts. Journal of Applied Psychology, 85, 3–12. Stark, S., Chernyshenko, O. S., Lancaster, A. R., Drasgow, F., & Fitzgerald, L. F. (2002). Toward standardized measurement of sexual harassment: Shortening the SEQ-DoD using item response theory. Military Psychology, 14, 49–72. Strauss, S. (2003). Sexual harassment in K—12. In M. Paludi & C. A. Paludi, Jr. (Eds.), Academic and workplace sexual harassment: A handbook of cultural, social science, management, and legal perspectives (pp. 105–145). Westport, CT: Praeger. Texeira, M. T. (2002). ‘‘Who protects and serves me?’’ A case study of sexual harassment in one U.S. law enforcement agency. Gender & Society, 16, 524–545. U.S. Department of Education: Office for Civil Rights. (2001, January 19). Revised sexual harassment guidance: Harassment of students by school employees, other students, or third parties. Retrieved May 12, 2009, from http:// www.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/shguide.html#Guidance U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board. (1981). Sexual harassment in the Federal workplace: Is it a problem? Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board. (1988). Sexual harassment in the Federal Government: An update. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board. (1995). Sexual harassment in the Federal Government: Trends, progress, continuing challenges. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. Veit, C. T., & Ware, J. E., Jr. (1983). The structure of psychological distress and well-being in general populations. Journal of Counseling and Clinical Psychology, 51, 730–742. Wadsworth, B. C., Hecht, M. L., & Jung, E. (2008). The role of identity gaps, discrimination, and acculturation in international students’ educational satisfaction in American classrooms. Communication Education, 57, 64–87. Welsh, S., Carr, J., MacQuarrie, B., & Huntley, A. (2006). I’m not thinking of it as sexual harassment: Understanding harassment across race and citizenship. Gender & Society, 20, 87–107. Willness, C. R., Steel, P., & Lee, K. (2007). A meta-analysis of the antecedents and consequences of workplace sexual harassment. Personnel Psychology, 60, 127–162. Woods, J. T. (2007). Gendered lives: Communication, gender, and culture. Belmont, CA: Thomson Wadsworth. Xie, L., Meng X., & Yamagami A. (1995). Chinese student victims of sexual assault in Japan. International Medical Journal, 2, 214–217. Yoder, J. D., & Aniakudo, P. (1995). The responses of African American women firefighters to gender harassment at work. Sex Roles, 32, 125–137.
Chapter 10
In Women’s Voices Janet Boyce
When I began writing this, I had to take a step back and think about what feminism really means to me. I then began to ask female friends and family members what feminism means to them. Surprisingly, I don’t think that any two women had the same response. However, there was one predominant underlying factor, and that was the right to be given equal treatment. Women just want to be treated as equal to their male counterparts. Although women have made great strides over the last 50 years, there is still a ways to go before women are viewed as equals to men. Traditionally, women were expected to get married, have a family, and stay home to take care of them. This changed, in a sense, when women went to work outside of the home during wartime and began to experience the freedom associated with earning a paycheck. Many of these women were then replaced by men returning from war. It was at this time that women noticed the inequalities in the workplace both from an economic and social standpoint. As the baby boomers came of age in the 1960s, many with college educations did not accept the economic and social inequalities being imposed on them. These are the women that paved the way for the generations to come. These women mirrored the way activists were able to lobby for equality with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 legally prohibiting race discrimination and gender discrimination. This was later amended by Title IX, which prohibited discrimination in education and athletics. Although legislation made it illegal to discriminate against a person based on their gender, the traditional biases were still there in the workplace and in education.
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As a woman born in the early 1960s, my own experiences in school were proof of these lingering biases. One example of this was when I entered my senior year of high school and met with my guidance counselor to talk about college. I remember him asking me whether I had thought about colleges and what I wanted to do after graduation. I told him that I wanted to go to Penn State and major in accounting. I will never forget his response, and perhaps it is still an underlying factor in what drives me today. He told me that accounting is not a woman’s field, and that I should consider teaching or attending the local community college to learn to be a secretary. I had never felt as dejected in my life as when I walked out of his office that day. I am sorry to say that I believed him and began to pursue a teaching degree. I hated it, so I left school and did what was expected—got married and raised a family. I did return to school more than 20 years later to pursue a degree in a field of my choice. Because of the courageous women who became activists and fought for all women, I am glad that my daughter never had to feel that same dejection as I did. I am thankful to say that my daughter’s guidance counselor did everything he could to help her get into the college of her choice and pursue the degree of her choice. Although women have a come along way through the years, they still have barriers to overcome in the workplace. One such barrier is that of equal pay—where any two people doing the same job should earn the same wage regardless of their gender. According to the Department of Labor (2003), as of 2002, women earn, on average, 78 percent of the salary that their male counterparts do for the same job. This means that white women earn on average 78 cents for every dollar a man makes, while women of other races earn significantly less than that. Although the wage gap is closing, there is still significant ground to cover. Because women still tend to be the primary caregivers in the family unit, if their workplaces offered more family-friendly programs and policies, the gap could be offset. Many women today are faced with the challenge of taking care of aging parents and their own children. Many women in this position would opt to take advantage of a program like this in exchange for a lower wage. In conclusion, I am a realist and know that my daughter will probably still suffer from inequalities in the workplace. I do believe that the millennial generation will continue to push forward and equality will be attained. I am optimistic that by the time my granddaughter comes of age the playing field will be more level in the workplace. REFERENCE Department of Labor. (2003, October 16). Women’s earnings 78 percent of men’s in 2002. Retrieved June 12, 2009, from: http://www.bls.gov/opub/ ted/2003/oct/wk2/art03.htm
Chapter 11
Bullying and Sexual Harassment of Adolescents James Gruber Susan Fineran
Interpersonal violence, whether defined as sexual harassment or bullying, frequently occurs in schools and is both experienced and observed by students and school personnel alike (Stein, 1999). Sexual harassment is defined as discrimination and is illegal, while bullying, although abhorrent, is not considered discriminatory. However, because sexual harassment and bullying have emerged from two different paradigms (employment law and criminal law), exploration of their impact on students has been very different.
SEXUAL HARASSMENT AND BULLYING: DEFINITIONS AND DIFFERENCES Studies of bullying and sexual harassment have two different historical and theoretical roots. The problem of bullying was brought to international attention most prominently by Dan Olweus, a Norwegian researcher in the 1970s. Nansel et al. (2001) defined bullying in a manner that reflects the perspective developed and subsequently modified over the years by Olweus: ‘‘Aggression that is intentionally harmful, that is repeated, and centers on an imbalance of power.’’ This asymmetry of power ‘‘may be physical or psychological, and the aggressive behavior may be verbal (e.g. name calling, threats), physical (e.g., hitting), or psychological (e.g. rumors, shunning/exclusion)’’ (p., 2094). School bullies have been described as children who use physical or
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relational aggression in a systematic and calculated way with a group of weaker peers (Crick, 1996; Olweus, 1993; Pellegrini, 2001; Schwartz, Dodge, Pettit, & Bates, 1997). Formal theories and definitions of sexual harassment originated in the United States in the 1970s with the work of Catharine MacKinnon, who defined it as a form of sex discrimination (1979). While bullying has often been characterized as inappropriate or aggressive interpersonal behavior (between individuals or between a group and an individual (‘‘mobbing’’), sexual harassment was originally defined as behavior by males who used organizational power or cultural privilege to coerce sexual favors from women (quid quo pro). This initial formulation expanded both theoretically and legally over the decades to include gender- or sexually focused behaviors by men that made it exceedingly difficult for women to work (hostile environment), and more recently, same-sex harassment involving the use of sexual threats, taunts, or attacks (e.g., Oncale v. Sundowners, 1998). The definition of sexual harassment by the U.S. Department of Education parallels that of other state and local governments and government agencies insofar as it includes both unwelcome interpersonal behavior (e.g., date pressures, sexual contact) ‘‘that is sufficiently severe, persistent, or pervasive . . .’’ and hostile environment (1997, p. 12,038). While bullying focuses on aggressive behavior that occurs between individuals or by a group against an individual, it does not acknowledge differences in gender or sexuality as significant factors in perpetration or victimization. Bullying research tends to focus on situational and interpersonal dynamics. Sexual harassment, in contrast, is theoretically linked to hegemonic masculinity and consequently focused on structural and culturally sanctioned roles and meanings (masculinefeminine, heterosexual-homosexual) that are key aspects of social stratification. The term ‘‘sexual bullying’’ has surfaced recently and has muddled the definition of both sexual harassment and bullying. Some researchers (Craig, Pepler, Connolly, & Henderson, 2001; Pellegrini, 2001) view school sexual harassment as an adolescent form of bullying. This is an unfortunate development for two reasons. First, bullying is constructed as an interpersonal problem, while sexual harassment is a legal issue. Consequently, many students and their parents who perceive sexual harassment as a form of bullying may not exercise their rights to have schools address the issue as they are legally mandated to do. Also, when sexually-based experiences are viewed as bullying and not identified specifically as sexual harassment, problems of victimization that stem from gender or sexuality may be interpreted as private or interpersonal troubles experienced by unfortunate students who are caught up in difficult situations. The fact that most bullies are male, that girls experience more harm than boys from sexual harassment, and that homophobic comments are used routinely (mostly by boys) to
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humiliate and control others (primarily other boys) misses the point about the power of culturally-based stereotypes (AAUW, 2001; McGuffey & Rich, 1999; Kimmel & Mahler, 2003). Two recent studies by Jessie Klein (2006a, 2006b) have highlighted the role that gender and sexual stereotyping played in school shootings—a fact that has escaped public scrutiny because of a focus on ‘‘bullying’’: Most of the school shooters targeted girls primarily; and the shooters, who fell well outside the range of acceptable masculine body types, had weathered attacks on their masculinity, including homophobic taunts, for months—and in some cases, years. PREVALENCE OF SEXUAL HARASSMENT AND BULLYING IN U.S. SCHOOLS Four national studies of student victimization—two on sexual harassment and two on bullying—provide the broadest statistics regarding these behaviors in U.S. schools in the last two decades. The earliest study on bullying in the United States, conducted in 1998 by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (Nansel et al., 2001) that used Olweus’s theoretical construction found that onethird of early adolescent children were directly involved in bullying, with 10 percent as bullies, 13 percent as victims, and 6 percent as bully-victims. The U.S. Department of Education School Crime Supplement to the National Crime Victimization Survey (2003) reported that in 2001, 8 percent of middle and high school students were bullied (9 percent males, 7 percent females). The American Association of University Women (AAUW) conducted both national studies on sexual harassment, the first in 1993 and the second in 2001. The two studies showed similar results: 81 percent of students experienced some form of sexual harassment during their school years. Fifty-nine percent of students were harassed occasionally and 27 percent were targeted often (AAUW, 2001). In addition, 54 percent of students said they sexually harassed someone during their school years. One interesting contrast with bullying outcomes, which tend to decrease with age and grade level was that sexual harassment frequency increases with grade level: 55 percent of eighth and ninth graders and 61 percent of tenth and eleventh graders reported that they had been physically sexually harassed at school (Hand & Sanchez, 2000). When these four national studies are compared, it appears that sexual harassment is a national disaster that affects nearly all school children. The statistical contrast is stark: Over 80 percent of students said they had experienced sexual harassment, while fewer than one of six reported being bullied. Even more interesting, more than half of students said they perpetrated sexual harassment, while only 10 percent reported bullying others; and students who reported being both
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harasser and harassed constituted 55 percent (AAUW, 1993) while those who were bullied or who bullied others were about a quarter of that figure (Nansel et al., 2001). At first glance, then, it appears that sexual harassment is much more common than bullying. But significant differences in measurement are largely responsible for these discrepancies. Because the issues of bullying and sexual harassment emerged from different paradigms (bullying as a criminal offense and sexual harassment as illegal discrimination), they have evolved with different methodologies. Research conducted on peer sexual harassment in schools uses a behavior scale that asks students to indicate the frequency of each of 14 different sexually harassing behaviors they experienced (AAUW, 1993, 2001). In contrast, bullying research inspired by Olweus has for the most part used only one or two questionnaire items which contained the word ‘‘bullying’’ along with a definition (e.g., Elsea, Menesini, Moore, & Morita, 2003; Nansel et al., 2001; Olweus, 1993; Williams, Connolly, Pepler, & Craig, 2005). It is likely that asking a single question (e.g., Have you ever been bullied?) that allows the respondent to decide whether the behaviors they experienced were ‘‘bullying’’ produces a significant underreporting of experiences that might otherwise be construed as bullying. Sexual harassment research is instructive in this regard. The use of multiple survey items (checklists) has been standard protocol since the mid-1980s and has allowed researchers to tap different dimensions of sexual harassment (e.g., Fitzgerald and her colleagues identified three forms of sexual harassment—gender harassment, unwanted sexual attention, and sexual coercion). It was discovered early in research endeavors that using the words ‘‘sexual harassment’’ resulted in significantly lowered estimates of experiences that could otherwise be deemed ‘‘sexual harassment’’ according to theoretical or legal definitions (Fitzgerald & Shullman, 1993; Gruber, 1990). In addition, most harassment surveys since the 1980s have asked respondents if they experienced ‘‘uninvited and unwanted sexual attention’’ with no mention of the term, ‘‘sexual harassment’’ (e.g., United States Merit System Protection Board [USMSPB], 1988, 1995). In line with that practice, the AAUW surveys ask adolescents ‘‘How often has anyone done the following [14] things to you when you did not want them to?’’ Compounding the measurement problem, researchers have also used different time frames. Some researchers inquired whether respondents’ experiences occurred during an entire school year, while others asked about behaviors that occurred during a short time span (e.g., past week or month. The AAUW (1993, 2001) surveys inquired whether students had ever had one or more sexual harassment experiences during their ‘‘school years’’, while the National Crime Victimization Survey asked about bullying experiences that occurred ‘‘during the last 6 months.’’ In some victimization studies different time frames
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were used even when both phenomena were studied together. DeSouza and Ribeiros (2005) used ‘‘last 30 days’’ for bullying and ‘‘last 12 months’’ for sexual harassment. Similarly, Williams et al. (2005) framed bullying as experiences that occurred ‘‘during the last 2 months’’ and sexual harassment as ‘‘during the last 6 months.’’ Another study comparing bullying and sexual harassment behaviors conducted by Holt and Espelage (2007), utilized AAUW (2001) questions with a one-year time frame (‘‘during the last twelve months’’) and then included a 30day time frame (‘‘last 30 days’’) for their own bullying scale items. Perhaps not surprisingly, their results showed that 70 percent of the students had been harassed while a little more than half (54 percent) had been bullied. Based on this measurement conundrum, it would seem that sexual harassment is rampant in schools compared to bullying. In an attempt to address these measurement issues, Gruber and Fineran (2008a) conducted a study comparing bullying and sexual harassment using experience checklists, one that asked students to indicate the frequency of sexually harassing behaviors they experienced (AAUW, 2001) and the second that inquired about the frequency of bullying behaviors (Holt and Espelage, 2007). Using an identical time frame and the same benchmark for determining whether or not victimization has occurred, bullying was revealed as a much more common experience than sexual harassment. More than half (52 percent) of students had experienced bullying during the current school year while approximately one-third (34 percent) were sexually harassed. GLOBAL PREVALENCE OF SEXUAL HARASSMENT AND BULLYING Internationally, bullying and sexual harassment are shown to be prevalent in many countries and reflect a wide range of incidence: 15 percent to 77 percent for bullying and 18 percent to 80 percent for sexual harassment. The ensuing overview of research highlights, although not exhaustive, shows the global prevalence of these issues and their damaging impact on victims. A 1999 study by Olweus found that 15 percent of 150,000 Norwegian and Swedish students ages 7 to 16 were involved in bully-victim problems that occurred at least once a week (Olweus & Limber, 1999). A much larger study of students in seven countries that used the same question format and same time frame designed by Olweus in each country found incidence rates that parallel those of the United States that use the same methodology: Bullying perpetration did not exceed 17 percent, bully-victim incidences were less than 20 percent and bullying victimization rates were less than 25 percent (Elsea et al., 2003). Other European studies find somewhat higher incidence rates. In Great Britain, Stephensen and Smith (1989) estimated that 23 percent of children were involved
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in bullying either as bullies or as victims, and O’Moore and Hillery (1989) found that 34 percent of Irish students were occasionally bullied and 8 percent were bullied frequently. A South African study (Holan, Flisher, & Lombard, 2007) that used the Olweus model found that 8.2 percent were bullies, 19.3 percent were victims, and 8.7 percent were bully-victims. Research that does not use the Olweus paradigm finds much higher rates of bullying or peer aggression. A national study on bullying in Israel found that 53 percent of elementary and middle school students and 30 percent of high school students reported being seized and shoved by schoolmates at least once during the previous month (Zeira, Astor, & Benbenishty, 2003). Other bullying behavior described by students included having their personal belongings stolen. Specifically, 45 percent of elementary and middle school students and 34 percent of those in high school reported being victimized in this manner. The study used a checklist of nineteen behaviors and asked students to indicate the frequency and severity of these. In other parts of the world, Brazilian and Japanese research on bullying report similar statistics. DeSouza & Ribeiros (2005) used a bullying scale developed by Bosworth and found that 60 percent of Brazilian high school students bullied a classmate during the past month. Kobayoshi (1999) reports that 77 percent of Japanese sixth graders and 62 percent of eighth graders were involved in bullying incidents, either as a bully or as a victim of bullying behavior. Similar to the prevalence of bullying world wide, sexual harassment also appears to be a major social problem for students, and unfortunately is as widespread. Bullying has been researched much more extensively than sexual harassment, but nonetheless there exists a number of studies showing that sexual harassment is rampant and affects students negatively as well. Studies in Sweden, South Africa, Brazil, and the Netherlands confirm that students consider a variety of behaviors in their schools to be problematic. A random sample of 540 female high school students in Sweden were surveyed in 2005 by researchers Witkowska and Menckel. They found that 49 percent of the female students identified verbal behaviors such as sexualized conversations, attractiveness rating, demeaning comments about gender, name-calling, and sexual personal comments as a problem present in their schools. Fineran, Bennett, and Sacco (2003) found that 78 percent of students in four South African high schools in Johannesburg reported experiencing sexual harassment. A survey of 2,808 Dutch students by Timmerman (2005) revealed that 18 percent had experienced unwanted sexual behavior. Boys reported more verbal incidents while girls reported significantly more physical incidents. Most of these studies examined only ’victimization, but DeSouza & Ribeiros (2005) inquired about
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perpetration of sexual harassment as well. Results showed that 24 percent of 400 high school students admitted to sexually harassing a classmate. PEER SEXUAL HARASSMENT AND BULLYING PERPETRATION The 1993 AAUW study inquired broadly about sexual harassment perpetration and found that 54 percent of the students admitted sexually harassing another student during their school years. However, only two studies have focused specifically on the perpetration of bullying and sexual harassment (Pellegrini, 2001; Pepler et al., 2002). Pellegrini’s (2001) longitudinal study of U.S. sixth- and seventh-grade students found that ‘‘bullies (who tended to be boys) also engaged in sexual harassment, and this relation was mediated by self-reported dating frequency. . . . That is, bullies who also estimated their frequency of dating to be high . . . tended to sexually harass their peers’’ (p. 131). Thus, as bullies became interested in opposite-sex dating, their proclivity to become perpetrators of sexual harassment increased as well. Pellegrini also found that sexual harassment behaviors at the end of seventh grade were predicted by bullying at the start of sixth grade. Pepler et al. (2002) studied four cohorts of students in Canadian schools grades five through eight and examined the relationship between aggressive behavior and substance use. They found that students who bullied others were at significant risk for substance abuse before entering high school. Their results also indicated that girls or boys who acknowledged sexually harassing others were between four and six times more likely to use alcohol than those who did not sexually harass their peers. PEER SEXUAL HARASSMENT AND BULLYING VICTIMIZATION: GENDER Nationwide, the AAUW 1993 and 2001 studies found that more than 50 percent of male and female students experienced sexual jokes, comments, gestures, or looks. More than 30 percent of students also experienced physical behaviors, such as being touched, grabbed, pinched, or brushed up against in a sexual way from schoolmates. In addition to physical and verbal harassment, Fineran and Bennett (1999) found that 43 percent of girls and 30 percent of boys reported unwanted sexual attention in the form of pressure for dates and sex, while a Connecticut study found a quarter of the girls and 5 percent of boys reported unwanted sexual attention (Permanent Commission [CT] on the Status of Women [PCSW], 1995). Gender differences in victimization are common with girls experiencing sexual harassment more frequently than boys and boys perpetrating sexual harassment more frequently than
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girls (AAUW, 1993, 2001; Fineran & Bennett, 1999; Hand & Sanchez, 2000; Lee, Croninger, Linn, & Chen, 1996; McMaster, Connolly, Pepler, & Craig, 2002; PCSW, 1995; Stratton & Backes, 1997; Trigg & Wittenstrom, 1996). With regard to bullying, Nansel et al., (2001) found that males both bullied others and were bullied significantly more often than females. Results also showed that males reported being bullied by being hit, slapped, or pushed, while females were bullied more frequently through the use of rumors and sexual comments. A meta-analysis of studies examining peer victimization that occurred over the past twenty years, showed that bullied boys are four times, and girls eight times, more likely to be suicidal than their non-bullied peers (Hawker & Boulton, 2000). PEER SEXUAL HARASSMENT AND BULLYING VICTIMIZATION: SEXUAL ORIENTATION An annual school survey, The Massachusetts Youth Risk Behavior Survey (Commonwealth of Massachusetts, April 1998), compared gay, lesbian, and bisexual students to their peers. Results showed that sexual minority students were four times more likely to have attempted suicide, and five times more likely to have missed school because of feeling unsafe. Fineran (2002a) found that lesbian girls experienced significantly more sexual harassment than heterosexual girls. A recent follow-up to the Massachusetts Youth Risk Behavior Survey (Massachusetts Department of Education, 2007) reiterated many of its finds from their earlier study: Sexual minority students had higher suicide rates, were more apt to skip school because they felt unsafe, had been threatened with or injured by a weapon at school, and experienced more dating violence and non-consensual sex. Fineran (2002a) found in a study of 712 high school students that sexual minority students were physically assaulted and sexually harassed more frequently than heterosexual students. She also reported that heterosexual girls were significantly more upset and threatened by peer sexual harassment than their heterosexual male peers. According to Williams et al. (2005), gay and lesbian students also experienced both bullying and sexual harassment at higher levels than their heterosexual counterparts; and, according to Poteat and Espelage (2007), being the target of homophobic victimization had significant psychological and social consequences for students. A report on Michigan schools by the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network [GLSEN], 2005) revealed that two-thirds of students in their sample were harassed because they were, or appeared to be, gay or lesbian, and more than 80 percent of these students reported hearing derogatory homophobic comments. In a recent study (Gruber & Fineran, 2008a), sexual minority adolescents not only had significantly
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higher rates of sexual harassment and bullying victimization but they also had poorer mental and physical health, more trauma symptoms, and higher levels of substance abuse as a result of victimization than did heterosexuals. According to Thurlow (2004), however, most adolescents rate homophobic slurs as both more common and less serious than racial slurs. It appears, then, that homophobia may be a ‘‘normalized’’ means of categorizing and victimizing peers during adolescence that has devastating consequences for some teens, in particular, sexual minorities. PEER SEXUAL HARASSMENT AND BULLYING VICTIMIZATION: CHILDREN WITH DISABILITIES Most of the research on peer victimization and disability takes a bullying perspective rather than a sexual harassment perspective. That is, victimization is assessed in terms of aggression (hitting, kicking, etc.), social isolation (having few friends or being shunned), or verbal abuse (ridicule or parodying a disability). Only rarely is victimization determined by sexual behavior on the part of the perpetrators—for example, sexual touching or grabbing, spreading sexual rumors, or sexual namecalling (‘‘fag,’’ ‘‘queer,’’ ‘‘slut’’). The research on peer victimization (‘‘bullying’’) suggests that disabled children experience a number of problems in school. A metaanalysis of research on children with learning disabilities found that they were rated by their peers as unpopular, socially incompetent, and socially isolated (Kavale & Forness, 1996). Learning disabled students reported more aggression and teasing than other students (Martlew & Hodson, 1991). A study in Great Britain found that almost two thirds of children with special needs were bullied compared to only one quarter of mainstreamed children (Thompson, Whitney, & Smith, 1994). Though research presents evidence of higher levels of peer victimization or bullying among disabled students, an unanswered issue is the impact of victimization on health and school outcomes. Research indicates that bullied children have more mental health problems (depression, psychosomatic symptoms) and school problems (problems concentrating, poor grades) than other students (see Gruber & Fineran, 2009, for a review). There is overall, however, a dearth of research on bullying outcomes among adolescents with disabilities. There is even less research on sexual harassment experiences and their impact on students with disabilities. A small pilot study consisting of 26 disabled students conducted by Rousso (1996) showed that girls were more likely to be sexually harassed by non-disabled male peers, and both male and female students reported sexual harassment from the adults who care for them. Fineran (2002b) found that students with disabilities experienced significantly more sexual harassment in
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school from classmates than non-disabled students did. Bullying research on disabled students is also sparse. A study of eighth graders by Fineran and Gruber (2004) found while disabled and able students had similar levels of sexual harassment victimization, disabled students experienced more negative mental health outcomes as a result of these experiences. A more recent study (Gruber & Fineran, 2009) revealed that adolescents with disabilities who were harassed or bullied had lower self-esteem, weaker attachment to school, and lower satisfaction with school. Students with disabilities were sexually harassed more frequently than their peers, but their bullying experiences were comparable. PEER SEXUAL HARASSMENT AND BULLYING VICTIMIZATION: RACE AND ETHNICITY Research on differences in victimization among racial groups reveals inconsistent findings. Several recent studies (Nansel et al., 2001; Juvonen, Nishina, & Graham, 2006; Peskin, Tortolero, & Markham, 2006) found that black adolescents were bullied more frequently than white or Hispanic students. However, it appears that there are few differences in the types of bullying between race groups. Peskin and her colleagues found that verbal bullying (teasing and name-calling) did not vary between groups but physical bullying (hitting) did. In general, it appears that specific types of bullying (e.g., name calling, teasing) do not vary substantially in frequency across populations, whether racial, regional, or international (Borg, 1999; Demaray & Malecki, 2003; Rigby, 2000). While there are studies of race differences in bullying victimization, research on adolescent sexual harassment victimization and race is fairly sparse. The largest study to look at racial differences was conducted by the AAUW (2001). Similar percentages of African Americans and whites of both sexes said that their school had ‘‘a lot’’ or ‘‘some’’ sexual harassment. Some types of harassment were more prevalent among blacks than whites: Having their clothes pulled off or down, being touched or grabbed in a sexual manner, or being forced to kiss someone (p. 24). The most common places where victimization occurred did not vary by sex or by race: In halls, in classrooms, and in the gym or on the playing field. In another study that looked at both bullying and sexual harassment, there were no racial differences in frequency for the former, but a small though statistically significant difference for the latter—blacks were harassed more often (Gruber & Fineran, 2008b). AAUW (2001) found that blacks reported less emotional and behavioral impact than whites. This was true for both sexes. For example, a substantially larger number of white girls said that harassment made them feel self-conscious (49 percent), or made them feel less self
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confident (35 percent) compared to black girls ( 25 percent and 17 percent, respectively). The fact that peer sexual harassment victimization may have less impact for blacks than whites may be due to the fact that racism and racial discrimination play significant roles in the health and well-being of African Americans. This point is made well by African American focus group members in Welsh and her colleague’s (2006) study of workplace harassment who said that sexual harassment was easier to deal with and less pressing than racial harassment (p. 98). In particular, they found that sexual harassment from black males was not defined as such while similar treatment from whites was (p. 99). Buchanan and Fitzgerald (in press) found that adverse job and health outcomes for African American women that resulted from workplace sexual harassment were exacerbated by racial harassment. PEER SEXUAL HARASSMENT AND BULLYING VICTIMIZATION: HEALTH AND SCHOOL OUTCOMES There have been a number of studies on bullying and sexual harassment that point to negative outcomes for mental and physical health and school performance. Nansel et al., 2001 states that research on bullies and those bullied has consistently found that ‘‘youth who are bullied generally show higher levels of insecurity, anxiety, depression, loneliness, unhappiness, physical and mental symptoms, and low self esteem’’ (p. 2095). The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (Nansel, 2001) also reports that students who were bullied experienced greater difficulty making friends, had poorer relationships with classmates, and reported greater loneliness. In additional studies, Espelage and Holt (2001) investigated depression among children who were bullied and found that 20 percent of middle school victims scored within the clinical range on a standard depression and anxiety measure, while Boulton and Hawker (2000) found that bullied kids were five times more likely to be depressed. Hazler, Hoover, and Oliver (1992) reported that 90 percent of bullied students experienced a drop in school grades, while Kochenderfer and Ladd (1996) showed that bullying victimization was related to school absenteeism or dropping out. When examining sexual harassment victimization, AAUW studies (1993, 2001) revealed student reports of negative psychosocial effects such as depression, loss of appetite, nightmares or disturbed sleep, low self esteem, and feelings of being sad, afraid, scared, or embarrassed (Hand & Sanchez, 2000; Lee et al., 1996). Similar to bullying victims, students also reported loss of interest in regular activities, isolation from friends and family, and loss of friends. School performance difficulties included absenteeism, decreased quality of schoolwork, skipping or dropping classes, poor grades, tardiness, and truancy (AAUW,
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1993, 2001; Corbett, Gentry, & Pearson, 1993; Hand & Sanchez, 2000; Lee et al., 1996; Loredo, Reid, & Deaux, 1995; PCSW, 1995; Roscoe, Strouse, & Goodwin, 1994; Shakeshaft et al., 1995; Stein, Marshall, & Tropp, 1993; Stratton & Backes, 1997; Trigg & Wittenstrom, 1996). In addition, students also reported feeling afraid, upset, or threatened by the sexual harassment (AAUW, 1993, 2001; Fineran & Bennett, 1999; PCSW, 1995; Stein, Marshall, & Tropp, 1993).
SEXUAL HARASSMENT OF ADOLESCENTS AT WORK An emerging area of litigation and policy development is sexual harassment of adolescents who hold jobs in the formal (wage) economy while attending school. Over the past ten years, litigation filed against employers by adolescents was uncommon. For example, during 2002, sexual harassment complaints filed by teenagers comprised approximately 2 percent of more than 14,000 suits filed nationwide. By 2005 that number had quadrupled to 8 percent—and these rates have continued to rise (Drobac, 2007). In 2005 alone, for example, the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) filed fifteen employment discrimination lawsuits on behalf of teenagers who were sexually harassed at their jobs. The descriptions of their experiences parallel those of many adults. The following lawsuits are recent examples of sexual harassment in the workplace that have been filed by teens. These cases reflect the extent of sexual violence that is, too often, not associated with sexual harassment. These are not in any way ‘‘fringe cases’’ but are representative of sexual harassment occurring to male and female teens who work. A class action case filed in February 2005 by the EEOC involved teenage female employees who were subjected to sexual harassment by a male assistant manager. The girls described having their breasts grabbed, being backed against walls while having their shoulders rubbed, and being rubbed up against. The lawsuit states that although the female employees complained to management, no appropriate action was taken to correct the situation (EEOC vs. GLC, Inc., 2005). A second class action suit involved young men who were subjected to same-sex sexual harassment by a male supervisor. Behaviors experienced by the men included requests for sex, sexual remarks, and unwanted touching. One employee had his work hours cut in retaliation for opposing the sexual harassment (EEOC v. Pand Enterprises, Inc., 2005). In both of these suits the EEOC asks the courts in Arizona and New Mexico (respectively) to order (both companies doing business as) McDonald’s to provide the harassment victims with back wages, compensatory damages, and punitive damages and stop McDonald’s from engaging in any practice that discriminates based on sex or retaliation.
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Other cases recently settled have involved sexual assault, stalking, and verbal abuse. Successful lawsuit settlements have included payments of $150,000 to employees, along with letters of apology and a requirement that stores train employees regarding sexual harassment and post signs explaining employees’ right to a workplace free of sexual harassment. Examples of teen work related sexual harassment lawsuits are listed on the EEOC website: http://youth.eeoc.gov/ cases.html. While there is much information known about the type of work teens perform, including the number of hours they work and their wages (e.g., Mortimer, 2005), the pervasiveness and impact of sexual harassment has received only minimal attention (Fineran, 2002a). It is quite apparent that research has not kept pace with growing legal and social concerns over this issue. Numerous studies of adult sexual harassment have been conducted over the past 20 years, but few studies have explored the problem among adolescents who work part time while attending school. Five studies documenting adolescent workplace sexual harassment have been conducted since 1981 (Fineran & Gruber, in press; Fineran & Gruber, 2009; Fineran, 2002a; Stein, 1981; Strauss and Espeland, 1992). Stein (1981) surveyed 22 female students attending a Massachusetts vocational high school. Eight students reported experiencing workplace sexual harassment that occurred while employed as babysitters, store clerks, or wait staff. Harassers were reported to be employers, customers, managers, and coworkers. All of the students eventually quit because of the harassment or were fired from their jobs for non-compliance. A second survey conducted by Strauss and Espeland (1992) found that 30 percent of 250 female vocational students surveyed from four Minnesota school districts had been sexually harassed at work. This was similar to the findings by Fineran (2002a). In a sample of 712 high school students, 35 percent of the 332 students who worked part-time reported experiencing sexual harassment (63 percent girls; 37 percent boys). Findings showed that students experienced harassment from supervisors (19 percent), coworkers (61 percent), and unidentified others at work (18 percent). Girls reported being significantly more upset and threatened by the harassment than boys. None of these studies examined the impact of harassment on adolescent health or well-being. Recently, research by Fineran and Gruber (in press) found that girls experienced a rate of sexual harassment that was higher than those typically found in samples of adult women. More than 52 percent of the girls reported that they had experienced some form of sexual harassment during the past year at their jobs. Harassed teens also faced problems similar to women in terms of work stress and alienation from coworkers and supervisors. An analysis of their ‘‘most upsetting’’
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harassment experience revealed that more than half (56 percent) of the perpetrators were coworkers, while supervisors and vendors/customers accounted equally for the remainder. A large majority of the perpetrators were older than the girls, with nearly half (46 percent) described as older than 30. Another study by the same authors (Fineran & Gruber, 2009) found that young adolescents (ages 13-15) were impacted significantly by sexual harassment. In particular, girls’ health—self esteem, physical and mental health, and post-traumatic symptoms—and work attitudes and behavior were adversely affected more so than boys’. CONCLUSIONS Research conducted nationally and internationally on teen sexual harassment and bullying describes a problem of victimization that persists throughout adolescence and has a number of unhealthy effects. Despite the varieties of sample sizes, theoretical definitions, measurements, and time frames, several important generalizations can be gleaned from the research. It appears at first glance that sexual harassment occurs at a much higher rate than bullying does. On closer inspection, it appears that a significant amount of this difference may be attributed to the ways in which these forms of victimization are measured. The only study to date (Gruber & Fineran, 2008a) that used similar measures and time frames found that bullying was more prevalent. A clearer understanding of victimization rates across time and space—e.g., comparing victimization in 2009 to 2001, or comparing rates between the United States and European Union nations—would result from the use of similarly-constructed measures (e.g., a listing of behaviors found in the AAUW studies) and similar time frames. Across the globe, regardless of culture and language it is clear that victimization and perpetration are not random but are indeed highly predictable events. Boys are perpetrators and frequently victims; girls are victims but seldom perpetrators. Also, sexual minority children are at risk for bullying and sexual harassment victimization. Though there is less research on them, children with disabilities also seem to be frequent targets of victimization. The research on racial and ethnic differences in bullying and harassment is mixed. Most studies find few differences either in the overall incidence of victimization or in the specific types of victimization. Since most perpetration and victimization is an in-group phenomenon (e.g., blacks bully and harass other blacks), the dynamics of cross-race experiences remain a research issue for the future. Research from across the globe clearly shows that bullying and harassment victimization is not a trivial event in children’s lives. Despite
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popular claims that victimization is ‘‘just part of growing up’’ that most children experience and weather successfully, a plethora of studies suggest otherwise. There are clear health risks associated with victimization to children’s psychological well-being (e.g., poor self esteem, high anxiety, depression, trauma symptoms, suicidal behavior) as well as to adjustment to and functioning within school. Victimized children enjoy school less, perform poorly, and harbor negative attitudes toward teachers. But these adverse health and school outcomes are not spread evenly across the student population. Some types of students suffer more. In particular, girls and sexual minorities experience significant harm as a result of victimization. The gender difference in harm seems to be the case whether the environment is school or a workplace. We end our chapter on a cautionary note. Recently, bullying has become the probleme de jour both in the United States and the European Union. The number of research papers, articles in popular literature, and television specials devoted to the problem is quite phenomenal. The attention to bullying, while well-meaning and well-deserved, has diminished the attention that sexual harassment is receiving. The research we have conducted recently suggests that placing sexual harassment in the shadow of bullying does not serve our schools and our children well. Specifically, we found that sexual harassment poses greater health risks for boys and girls, and especially for sexual minorities. Our research on school outcomes, which remains unfinished at this point, suggests similar findings.
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Stein, N., Marshall, N. L., & Tropp, L. R. (1993). Secrets in public: Sexual harassment in our schools. Wellesley, MA: Wellesley College Center for Research on Women. Stephensen, P., & Smith, D. (1989). Bullying in the junior school. In D.P. Tatum & D.A. Lane (Eds.) Bullying in schools. London: Trentham Books. Stratton, S., & Backes, J. (1997, February/March). Sexual harassment in North Dakota public schools: A study of eight high schools. The High School Journal, 80, 163–172. Strauss, S., & Espeland, P. (1992). Sexual harassment and teens. Minneapolis: Free Spirit Publishing, Inc. Thompson, D., Whitney, I., & Smith, P.K. (1994). Bullying of children with special needs in mainstream schools. Support for Learning, 9, 103–106. Thurlow, C. (2004). Naming the ‘‘outsider within’’: homophobic pejoratives and the verbal abuse of lesbian, gay and bisexual high-school students. Journal of Adolescence, 24, 25–38. Timmerman, G. (2005). A comparison between girls’ and boys’ experiences of unwanted sexual behaviour in secondary schools. Educational Research, 47, 291–306. Trigg, M., & Wittenstrom, K. (1996). That’s the way the world goes: Sexual harassment and New Jersey teenagers. Initiatives, Special Issue: Sexual Harassment 57, 55–65. U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights. (1997). Sexual harassment guidance: Harassment of students by school employees, other students, or third parties. Federal Register 62, 12034–12051. U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights. (2003). School crime supplement to the National Crime Victimization Survey. Washington, DC: Author. U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board (USMSPB). (1995). Sexual harassment in the Federal workplace: Trends, progress, and continuing challenges. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board. (1988). Sexual harassment in the Federal workplace: An update. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. Welsh, S., Carr, J., MacQuarrie, B., & Huntley, A. (2006). I’m not thinking of it as sexual harassment: Understanding harassment across race and citizenship. Gender & Society, 20, 87–107. Williams, T., Connolly, J., Pepler, D., & Craig, W. (2005). Peer victimization, social support, and psychosocial adjustment of sexual minority adolescents. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 34, 471–482. Witkowska, E., & Menckel, E. (2005). Perceptions of sexual harassment in Swedish high schools: Experiences and school-environment problems. European Journal of Public Health, 15, 78–85. Zeira, A., Astor, R. A., & Benbenishty, R. (2003). School violence in Israel: Findings of a national survey. Social Work, 48, 472–483.
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Chapter 12
Great Is Our Sin: Pseudoscientific Justifications for Oppression in American Education Jennifer L. Martin
If the misery of our poor be caused not by laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin. —Charles Darwin
The above quotation by Charles Darwin is still very relevant in contemporary American society. Not only the poor, but also those who experience disenfranchisement in a variety of forms, for example, gender, race, ethnicity, and so on, are subject to inequity on multiple levels: personal, interpersonal, institutional, and cultural. These levels of oppression are interactive, and it is easy to see how the majority viewpoint can subtly make its way into the cultural framework. For example, one’s personal values, beliefs, and feelings can lead to interpersonal interaction (behavior), which can then lead to the creation of institutional rules and policies and then finally to cultural views involving the nature of beauty, truth, and right. It is frightening to examine our own history and the history of the American public education system in this light, but the same is true for both: personal values and beliefs were held that excluded and were detrimental to minority viewpoints. These racist and sexist beliefs were used to create a sociopolitical agenda that separated people into racial categories and promoted the ‘‘superiority’’ of the white race. In Inheriting Shame: The Story of Eugenics and Racism in America (1999), Steven Selden discusses
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how such personal values and beliefs led to institutional policy in the American school system, the repercussions of which are still with us. Although most people associated with American education were not overtly radical racists, it is frightening when one considers that they nonetheless attached their names to philosophical ideas that were the basis for organizations that advocated for the segregation and sterilization of ‘‘undesirables.’’ For example, G. Stanley Hall, developer of Child Study, which was highly influential on curriculum in the twentieth century, was a firm believer in biological determinism. He felt that nature defined ‘‘educability.’’ He also advocated for a wide range of curricula to correspond to the wide range of abilities in individuals, which, not surprisingly, were more often than not based on racial and gender differences. Leta Hollingworth is still recognized today as a leading researcher and advocate for gifted and talented education, despite her alignment with the Eugenics Movement. As Selden states: ‘‘Educational policy, in Hollingworth’s (1924) view, disregarded gifted children due to a misguided social philosophy that denied ‘innate permanent, hereditary superiority’’’ (p. 101). Dr. Helen Putnam’s eugenical ideas linked the National Education Association (NEA) with biological determinism. Dr. Putnam’s report at the 1916 NEA conference, entitled ‘‘The New Ideal in Education—Better Parents of Better Children,’’ advocated for the rationale that there was in fact a ‘‘superior’’ race: ‘‘‘If humanity is to survive,’ Putnam informed her audience of teachers and administrators, ‘individualism and nationalism must conform to the laws of racial wellbeing’’’ (Putnam, quoted in Selden, p. 57). Putnam also expanded her platform of eugenical ideas to include programs of teacher education. Interestingly, knowledge about the existence of the notion of eugenics and the Eugenics Movement in America is not widely known by most modern educators, or by the general public for that matter. Unfortunately, not having this knowledge allows similar ideas to reappear in contemporary society in more covert forms, for example, in the form of tracking students, having differential expectations based on gender, socioeconomic class, and so on. More shocking is when such racist notions appear quite overtly in society. For example, the racism justified by biological determinism emerged again recently with the publication of The Bell Curve (1994) by Charles Murray and Richard J. Hernstein. The Bell Curve presents pseudoscientific ‘‘evidence’’ of the genetic inferiority of blacks. As Macedo and Bartolome state: This book has not only activated what had appeared to be a dormancy of racism in the United States after the enactment of the civil rights laws, but it also has resurrected an old form of intellectual lynching that, unfortunately, has been embraced by ever more powerful representatives of the far right and, with some exception, by liberals through a form of silence. (1999, p. 85)
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Despite the fact that knowledge of the Eugenics Movement in America is not well known by most modern educators, it is easy to trace eugenical ideas in public education through science textbooks used during the period between 1914 and 1948. There was little scientific evidence to support eugenics in its infancy, but even when research suggested that there was absolutely no scientific basis for eugenical conclusions textbooks continued to promote individual differences based on hierarchical notions of race and biological determinism. In essence, textbook authors and publishers, such as George William Hunter, believed what they wanted to believe, despite evidence to the contrary. They used their beliefs to promote their own sociopolitical agendas: agendas of exclusion that promoted the continued privilege of whites. As Selden states: Programs of selective breeding were most frequently recommended to the high school reader: Positive eugenics, which called for the selective matings of those judged as society’s best, was cited in 64.4% of the texts, and negative eugenics, which demanded the restriction of child-bearing by those judged socially inferior, appeared in 46.3% of the volumes. In addition, 19.5% of the texts recommended immigration restriction and 14.6% suggested policies of segregation and sterilization. (p. 68)
The influence of the Eugenics Movement on American education shows itself most clearly today in the form of the hierarchical system of tracking students by ability. As Selden states: ‘‘Eugenics promoted a concept of schooling as an open market in which individuals competed by means of their inherited traits for high scores—a scarce commodity indeed’’ (p. 37). ‘‘Compensatory education’’ has been a common practice in American public schools to deal with inequities in education. Proponents of this philosophy argue that educational inequity results from the failure of underachieving linguistic and ethnic minorities. Compensatory education programs rely on remediation in an attempt to get underachieving students up to the levels of their peers. The curriculum in compensatory education programs is reduced in content and in scope and is delivered at a slower pace. However, students placed in remedial tracks, for the most part, do not catch up to their peers. As Hugh Mehan states (1997): ‘‘Research has shown, however, that the schools’ practices of tracking, ability grouping and testing contribute to inequality (Rosenbaum, 1978; Cicourel & Mehan, 1983; Oakes, 1985; Page & Valli, 1991; Mehan, 1992; Oakes et al., 1992)’’ (p. 116). Despite this research, the practice of tracking still continues, in one form or another, in the majority of schools in America. It is alarming to recognize the degree to which science has been misused in the past and even today to justify existing social prejudices or as Tavris states: ‘‘to confirm the prejudice that some groups are
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assigned to their subordinate roles ‘by the harsh dictates of nature’’’ (p. 24). Supposed biological differences between the races were used throughout history to justify oppression and maintain white privilege. Perhaps more alarming, is the fact that many do not question such studies because they are reported in academic publications and through the media as ‘‘science.’’ Our sin is great, again as Darwin suggests, for our institutions perpetuate the misery of the disenfranchised and, to make matters worse, often pass this misery off as being caused by the laws of nature—and thus our responsibility is (or should be) greater. As educators we must promote awareness about our own past and present in order to create a better future for all. We must look with a questioning eye at policies and programs for their hidden biases and agendas. Perhaps then Margaret Mead’s often quoted phrase would be cause for celebration: ‘‘Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.’’ REFERENCES Macedo, D., & Bartolome, L. I. (1999). Dancing with bigotry: Beyond the politics of tolerance. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Mehan, H. (1997). Tracking untracking: The consequences of placing low-track students in high-track classes. Race, ethnicity, and multiculturalism: Policy and practice (pp. 115–150). New York: Garland Publishing, Inc. Selden, S. (1999). Inheriting shame: The story of eugenics and racism in America. New York: Teachers College, Columbia University. Tavris, C. (1992). The mismeasure of woman. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Chapter 13
Discrimination, Harassment, and Women’s Physical and Mental Health Krystle C. Woods NiCole T. Buchanan
Women’s health is inextricably linked to their status in society. It benefits from equality and suffers from discrimination. —World Health Report (World Health Organization, 1988, p. 6)
Women across the world bear the burdens of discrimination, harassment, poverty, and maltreatment (United Nations Population Fund [UNFPA], 2005). Unequal pay, lower workforce participation, and disparate access to health care place women at a disadvantage relative to men (Pratt, 1997; UNFPA, 2002), and contribute to women representing more than 75 percent of the world’s poor (United Nations, 2005). Society’s (mis)treatment of women contributes to their higher rates of certain forms of mental illness (e.g., depression, anxiety, and eating disorders) and their increased incidence of physical disability relative to men (Landrine & Klonoff, 1997; Nosek, Howland, Rintala, Young, & Chanpong, 2004). Women’s participation in paid employment determines their ability to combat both poverty and financial dependence, both of which put them at risk of being abused. Yet, for many women, the workplace is fraught with additional hazards that can place their financial, physical, and psychological well-being in peril. Specifically, gender discrimination and harassment are reported by approximately half of all working women in the United States (Ilies, Hauserman, Schwochau, & Stibal, 2003), with damaging effects on their mental and physical health (Willness, Steel, & Lee, 2007). Given the high toll women pay as a
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result of work-related gender discrimination and harassment, the specific negative mental and physical health outcomes associated with this mistreatment should be well understood. DEFINING GENDER DISCRIMINATION AND HARASSMENT Title VII of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1991 prohibits employment discrimination based on gender, race, color, religion, and national origin. Gender discrimination is divided into two forms: disparate treatment and disparate impact (Cleveland, Vescio, & Barnes-Farrell, 2005). Disparate treatment occurs when individuals are deliberately treated differently because of their gender. Examples include offering women lower starting salaries, posing different interview questions to male and female applicants (e.g., querying their intent to have children), or refusing to hire female applicants. Disparate impact, also referred to as adverse impact, occurs when ostensibly neutral workplace practices have an unnecessary negative effect on members of a protected class (e.g., women), thereby limiting the opportunities of that group. Gender-related examples of disparate impact frequently include the use of height, weight, or strength requirements for physically demanding jobs. For example, the Dial Corporation required a preemployment test of physical strength that rendered 60 percent of female applicants, but only 3 percent of male applicants, ineligible for employment, including women who had already been successfully employed in the position. The ruling in EEOC v. The Dial Corporation asserted that a fair test should not screen out employees who successfully worked in the same position, therefore, the strength test had an unnecessary adverse effect on women. Originally, the law protected against gender-based discrimination, but did not address sexual harassment until 1976 when the ruling in Williams v. Saxby legally recognized it as a form of sex discrimination in violation of Title VII (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission [EEOC], 1980). The legal definition of sexual harassment separates it into two categories: quid pro quo and hostile environment. Quid pro quo includes any attempt to coerce sexual interactions via job-related threats or promises of benefits based on one’s sexual compliance (e.g., threatening termination or promising a promotion). A hostile work environment is created when an employee perceives the general workplace milieu as hostile as a result of unwanted gender-based comments or behaviors. Similarly, a hostile environment can be created when these behaviors negatively affect an employee’s job performance, regardless of whether or not there are tangible or economic job consequences (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission [EEOC], 1980). As a psychological construct, sexual harassment is defined as unwanted gender-based or sexual comments and behavior that an individual
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appraises as offensive and a threat to her/his well-being (Fitzgerald, Swan, & Magley, 1997). There are three primary subtypes of sexual harassment (Fitzgerald et al., 1988; Fitzgerald, Gelfand, & Drasgow, 1995): gender harassment (negative non-sexual, gender-based comments and behaviors, such as sex-stratifying jobs as ‘‘men’s work’’); unwanted sexual attention (verbal and nonverbal sexual comments, gestures, or attempts at physical contact, such as asking someone on a date repeatedly or touching someone sexually); and sexual coercion (which is equivalent to the legal construct of quid pro quo). HOW DISCRIMINATION AND HARASSMENT HARM PSYCHOLOGICAL WELL-BEING AND PHYSICAL HEALTH Gender-based discrimination and sexual harassment exact a heavy toll on the psychological and physical health of women targeted for harassment.1 According to the Transactional Model of Stress (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984), an experience becomes stressful when the individual appraises a situation as ‘‘exceeding his or her resources and endangering his or her well-being’’ (p. 21). Both sexual harassment and gender discrimination are frequently interpreted as such by targets and are likely to result in psychological and physical sequelae common to trauma (Avina & O’Donohue, 2002; Fitzgerald, Drasgow, Hulin, Gelfand, & Magley, 1997). The transactional model of stress also outlines several different factors that increase the extent to which an event will be perceived as stressful: the amount of harm done to the individual, the threat of negative outcomes in the future, the inability to predict and control the situation, the pervasiveness and frequency of the stressor, and its occurrence in settings where mastery was previously achieved. Gender discrimination and sexual harassment frequently include these characteristics that increase the likelihood that they will be stressful (Huerta, Cortina, Pang, Torges, & Magley, 2006; Langhout, Bergman, Cortina, Fitzgerald, Drasgow, & Hunter Williams, 2005). For example, gender discrimination and sexual harassment are often chronic stressors defined by their insidious onsets and their extended, unpredictable endpoint (Wheaton, 1997), which result in greater detriment to one’s mental and physical health than single traumatic events (Green et al., 2000; Krupnick, Green, Stockton, Goodman, Corcoran, & Petty, 2004; McGonagle & Kessler, 1990). As these acts are perpetrated against women in their place of work, school, or residence, targeted women rarely feel that they have control over their occurrence, pervasiveness, or frequency. Further, discrimination and harassment often harm the individual’s well-being at the present and have the potential for future negative consequences (e.g., being fired for refusing to comply or creating a hostile work environment that inhibits professional growth and learning). All of these factors increase the likelihood that
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gender discrimination and sexual harassment will be traumatic events that damage women’s mental and physical health. In addition to the nature of the experiences themselves, some theorize that experiences of gender-based discrimination and harassment can be more stressful than generic stressors (e.g., moving or starting a new job) because they are inherently personal and attack a social identity tied to an immutable personal characteristic (e.g., biological sex) (Landrine & Klonoff, 1997; Zucker & Landry, 2007). Compared to privileged group members, members of disadvantaged groups are more likely to experience discrimination, view prejudice against their group as pervasive and systemic, and perceive discrimination as uncontrollable, unavoidable, and a devaluation of a core social identity (Major & Crocker, 1993; Schmitt et al., 2002). Such experiences negatively impact one’s perceptions of the views others have about their social group (i.e., public regard; Allport, 1979; Cartwright, 1950), which results in poorer physical and mental health. Further, these relationships are stronger when one holds a meritocracy worldview—that people are appropriately rewarded for their efforts and thus, can determine their own success (Major, Kaiser, O’Brian, & McCoy, 2007)—perhaps because recognition of maltreatment independent of one’s personal efforts and abilities challenges one’s basic understanding of the world and one’s opportunity structure. MENTAL HEALTH OUTCOMES RELATED TO DISCRIMINATION AND HARASSMENT Meta-analytic reviews have found significant associations between gender discrimination, sexual harassment, and indicators of psychological well-being, such as depression, anxiety, posttraumatic stress disorder, disordered eating, nicotine use, and alcohol use (Cantisano, Dominguez, & Depolo, 2008; Chan, Lam, Chow, & Cheung, 2008; Willness et al., 2007). Moreover, studies have found that the negative effects of harassment can persist for more than ten years after the harassment has ended (Glomb, Munson, Hulin, Bergman, & Drasgow, 1999; Street, Gradus, Stafford, & Kelly, 2007). These relationships have been supported across a wide variety of populations, including former military reservists (Street et al., 2007), women in the U.S. (Bergman & Drasgow, 2003) and the Swedish (Estrada & Berggren, 2009) Armed Forces, female employees of the U.S. federal judicial circuit (Lim & Cortina, 2005), physicians (Shrier et al., 2007), police officers (Dowler & Arai, 2008), college women (Schmitt et al., 2002), women seeking counseling (Moradi & Funderburk, 2006), lesbian/bisexual women (Szymanski, 2005), and Latina (Cortina, 2004), Asian (Patel, 2008), and black women (Buchanan & Fitzgerald, 2008). Thus, the negative effects of gender discrimination and sexual harassment appear to be universal.
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The strength of the relationship between discrimination and psychological well-being is affected by several factors (Fineran & Gruber, 2008) reflecting individual (e.g., age, self-esteem, and feminist identity) and experiential differences (e.g., appraisal, multiple forms of harassment occurring simultaneously). For example, younger working women appear to be more negatively impacted by harassment than their older counterparts, perhaps because they do not have the same job stability, seniority, and security (Chan et al., 2008). Collective selfesteem or perceptions of women in general and personal self-esteem both appear to moderate the relationship between discrimination, sexual harassment, and psychological distress (Fischer & Holz, 2007). For example, women with a strong and positive view of themselves may be better equipped to dismiss discrimination experiences than women who are unsure of their personal worth (Moradi & Subich, 2004) and those with more positive views of women in general (higher collective self-esteem) reported less depression and anxiety following harassment (Fischer & Holz, 2007). Feminist consciousness is theorized to provide a framework for understanding gender discrimination, which can reduce self-blame associated with these experiences (Landrine & Klonoff, 1997). Feminist attitudes have been found to be protective against the negative effects of gender discrimination and harassment (Moradi & Subich, 2002), suggesting that women who endorse a more feminist consciousness may avoid internalizing blame by recognizing harassment as a manifestation of larger social injustices. Furthermore, feminist-identified women may feel more empowered to actively cope with discrimination, making them less vulnerable to negative outcomes (Sabik & Tylka, 2006). Notably, a feminist identity does not appear to be equally protective for all women. Whereas a feminist identity may help white women label their harassment experience as a social injustice instead of internalizing blame, Rederstorff, Buchanan, and Settles (2007) found that a higher feminist identity exacerbated the negative effects of harassment for black women. The authors attributed these findings to the double consciousness found among many multiply oppressed people where an increased awareness of oppression based on one salient identity increases awareness of one’s vulnerability based on other salient identities. As a result, black women who endorsed more feminist attitudes were more likely to report higher levels of posttraumatic stress in the face of sexual harassment and discrimination. Another study of predominantly white lesbian and bisexual women found that participation in feminist activities (e.g., membership in feminist organizations, participation in feminist boycotts, marches, or rallies) buffered against psychological distress at low levels of harassment, but more severe sexual harassment was associated with significant psychological distress, regardless of feminist affiliation (Szymanski & Owens, 2009).
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Women’s subjective appraisal of the harassment (e.g., how disturbing, embarrassing, threatening, frightening, or offensive they perceived it to be) and the coping strategies they use to deal with it can buffer or exacerbate distress. According to cognitive theories of stress, the target’s subjective appraisal of a potentially stressful situation impacts the level of distress they experience following a traumatic event (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984). Consistent with this theory, appraisal has been shown to mediate the relationship between sexual harassment and mental health outcomes (Langhout et al., 2005). Similarly, women who perceive harassment as pervasive in society or believe it is directed at them personally experience heightened psychological distress as compared to women who believed harassment was a relatively rare phenomenon and directed at women as a group rather than a personal attack (Dambrun, 2007; Foster & Dion, 2003; Schmitt, Branscombe, & Postmes, 2003). Women are frequently told they should respond directly and assertively in the face of harassment, but such responses may run counter to their well-being. Women who utilize direct forms of coping, such as confronting the perpetrator or filing a complaint against the harasser often find that the work environment worsens and their social support from co-workers and peers wanes (Bergman, Langhout, Cortina, Palmieri, & Fitzgerald, 2002; Cortina & Magley, 2003). For example, sexual harassed black women in the U.S. Armed Forces who used contemplative strategies to cope with harassment (e.g., thinking about the event) reported significantly higher psychological well-being compared to women who filed a formal complaint (Buchanan, Settles, & Langhout, 2007). Finally, the race of the target and the perpetrator can significantly influence the harassment experience and the extent to which it harms a woman’s well-being. For example, being sexually harassed while separately experiencing racial harassment or experiencing racialized sexual harassment has been associated with increased psychological distress (Thomas, Witherspoon, & Speight, 2008). Black women report experiencing sexual racism and racialized sexual harassment (Buchanan, 2005; Texeira, 2002) as attacks that target their race and gender simultaneously (Buchanan & Ormerod, 2002; Mecca & Rubin, 1999; Yoder & Aniakudo, 1995, 1996, 1997). These behaviors call upon sexualized stereotypes of the black woman (i.e., being called a ‘‘black whore’’) and physical features thought to vary by race (i.e., commenting on her ‘‘large black behind’’). Harassment that simultaneously attacks one’s gender and race is perceived as more severe by victims (King, 2003) and may exacerbate harm because it targets two central and salient identities (Settles, 2006). The relationship between racialized sexual harassment and psychological well-being is also mediated by avoidant coping, whereby black
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women who try to avoid and distract themselves from the negative harassment experience report worse psychological outcomes (Thomas et al., 2008). The use of an avoidant coping style is very prevalent among black women (Utsey, Ponterotto, Reynolds, & Cancelli, 2000), perhaps because of the pressure to uphold a facade of strength proscripted by gender role norms of black women (e.g., the Strong Black Woman archetype; Thomas et al., 2008). In addition, the race of the perpetrator mediates the relationship between sexual harassment and resulting distress. Among black college and working women, sexual harassment from an out-group (e.g., non-black) male was associated with more symptoms of posttraumatic stress than harassment from an in-group (i.e., black) male, because it was appraised more negatively by victims (Woods, Buchanan, & Settles, 2009). DISCRIMINATION, HARASSMENT AND SPECIFIC FORMS OF MENTAL ILLNESS Both daily records of sexist experiences and retrospective reports from harassed women indicate that depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and substance abuse are common sequelae following gender discrimination and sexual harassment (see Avina & O’Donohue, 2002; DeSouza & Fansler, 2003; Harned, 2000; Richman, Rospenda, Flaherty, Freels, & Zlatoper, 2004; Swim, Hyers, Cohen, & Ferguson, 2001; Zucker & Landry, 2007). In fact, some researchers suggest that the gender differences in conditions such as depression (women’s rates are twice those of men; Kessler, 2003) are due in part to women’s higher rates of discrimination and harassment (Klonoff, Landrine, & Campbell, 2000; Swim et al., 2001). Some have also argued that because gender discrimination and harassment are often pervasive, chronic stressors, they can be categorized as traumatic events that result in posttraumatic stress (PTS) symptoms (Avina & O’Donohue, 2002; Berg, 2006; Fitzgerald, Buchanan, Collinsworth, Magley, & Ramos, 1999). Both lifetime accounts and recent events of sexist discrimination perpetrated at work, school, and by strangers on the street are associated with posttraumatic stress (Berg, 2006). Researchers have argued that sexual harassment meets the criteria for a diagnosable trauma as defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV; American Psychiatric Association, 1994; Avina & O’Donohue, 2002; Murdoch, Polusny, Hodges, & Cowper, 2006). As evidence for this argument, sexual harassment experiences are associated with symptoms of posttraumatic stress in college women (Rederstorff et al., 2007), women in the U.S. Marines (Shipherd, Pineles, Gradus, & Resick, 2009), military reservists (Street et al., 2007), and female veterans of the Gulf War (Vogt, Pless, King, & King, 2005) and posttraumatic stress symptom severity increases as sexual harassment severity increases (Murdoch et al., 2006).
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Sexual harassment is associated with eating pathology and distorted body image as a result of multiple processes. First, sexual harassment is associated with decreased self-esteem, particularly body-based selfesteem, which concomitantly increases the likelihood that the target will develop pathological eating behaviors (sexual harassment syndrome; Backhouse & Cohen, 1978; Larkin, Rice, & Russell, 1996). Another model proposes that sexual harassment increases anxiety, heightens bodily discomfort and scrutiny, and distorts one’s body image, culminating in a heightened risk for disordered eating (Barker & Galambos, 2003; Frederickson & Roberts, 1997; Hofschire & Greenberg, 2002; Larkin & Rice, 2005; Larkin, Rice, & Russell, 1996). Finally, selfobjectification theory proposes that when women’s bodies are looked at, evaluated, and potentially objectified through experiences like sexual harassment, women may internalize these images (self-objectification), and engage in increased body monitoring (Frederickson & Roberts, 1997). Excessive body scrutiny can lead to shame, anxiety, and body image distortion, all of which negatively affect psychological well-being (Frederickson & Roberts, 1997). Further, research has demonstrated a direct relationship between self-objectification and restrictive eating, bulimic, and depressive symptoms (Fredrickson, Roberts, Noll, Quinn, & Twenge, 1998; Noll & Fredrickson, 1998; Joiner, Wonderlich, Metalsky, & Schmidt, 1995; McKinley, 1998; Stice, Hayward, Cameron, Killen, & Taylor, 2000). Health-damaging behaviors, such as drug and alcohol use, take a significant toll on one’s health (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2004; National Institute on Drug Abuse, 2002). Sexual harassment has been associated with the use of alcohol and prescription drugs (e.g., sedatives, antidepressants; Zucker & Landry, 2005) and cigarettes (Richman et al., 1999). This may indicate that some women may use these substances to reduce stress, depression, anxiety, hostility, and a perceived lack of control associated with experiences of discrimination and harassment (Grunberg, Moore, & Greenber, 1998; Ragland & Ames, 1996; Richman & Rospenda, 2005). Longitudinal analyses and national samples of working adults (Rospenda, Richman, & Shannon, 2009) and female college students (Zucker & Landry, 2007) also demonstrated a relationship between harassment and alcohol misuse (Freels, Richman, & Rospenda, 2005; Rospenda, Richman, Wislar, & Flaherty, 2000). PHYSICAL HEALTH OUTCOMES RELATED TO DISCRIMINATION AND HARASSMENT In addition to psychological distress, gender discrimination and sexual harassment are sufficiently stressful to result in detriment to one’s physical health, such as stress-induced physiological changes,
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suppressed immune system functioning, inflammation, gastrointestinal problems, fatigue, headaches, sleep problems, and back pain (Cleary, Schmieler, Parscenzo, & Ambrosio, 1994; Dansky & Kilpatrick, 1997; Smith, 2006; van Roosmalen & McDaniel, 1998). Meta-analyses indicate that a perceived lack of control, chronic stress, and threats tied to social identity are important in increasing levels of cortisol, which is an indication of stress (Dickerson & Kemeny, 2004; Michaud, Matheson, Kelly, & Anisman, 2008; Miller, Chen, & Zhou, 2007). Bodily systems that usually serve to adaptively cope with isolated stressors, like the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis and the sympathetic arousal system (Goldstein & McEwen, 2002; Sapolsky, Romero, & Munck, 2000), may become overtaxed with chronic stressors like discrimination, resulting in negative health outcomes (McEwen, 2000, 2003). In addition, pervasive discrimination and harassment may also lead one to engage in behaviors that are counter to positive health outcomes, such as neglecting self-care and health sustaining behaviors (e.g., exercise, healthy eating, and regular sleeping patterns), which may result in a plethora of health problems (Zucker & Landry, 2007). Meta-analyses specific to harassment outcomes also support the association between harassment and negative physical health indicators (Cantisano et al., 2008; Chan et al., 2008). Similar to mental health, the relationship between sexual harassment and physical health is mediated by one’s appraisal of the event and general psychological well-being (Langhout et al., 2005). Namely, sexual harassment and gender discrimination are associated with medical symptoms like gastrointestinal (stomach-ache, flatulence, diarrhea, heartburn, stomach pains), musculoskeletal (headaches, pain in joints, muscles, back, and neck), irritability, sleeping problems (fatigue, restlessness, sleep disturbances), cardiovascular symptoms (chest pain, tachycardia), headache, eye strain, skin problems, itching, and worry about health hazards (Bergman, 2003; Bildt, 2005; Estrada & Berggren, 2009; Langhout et al., 2005; Shipherd et al., 2009). These experiences are also associate with persistent and chronic diseases, such as hypertension, neurological disorders, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, gastritis, cataracts, etc. (Keskinoglu, Ucuncu, Yildirim, Gurbuz, Ur, & Ergor, 2007). Discrimination experiences and mood also influence stress-reactive physiological systems. As an example, women primed to feel angry or sad during a lab-induced discrimination event experienced changes in salivary cortisol levels (Matheson, Gill, Kelly, & Anisman, 2008). In particular, when primed to feel angry, they experienced sustained arousal levels throughout the discrimination experience and increases in systolic and diastolic blood pressure and heart rate persisted after the discrimination event ended. Extrapolating these findings to real world harassment and discrimination would suggest that negative, repeated and unpredictable discrimination events raise cortisol levels
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and arousal for extended periods of time, leading to negative health consequences (McEwen, 2003). Particularly, those discrimination events that evoke anger are associated with increases in heart rate and cardiovascular problems over time (Matheson et al., 2008). Thus, women’s experiences of discrimination and harassment can result in significant detriment to their overall physical health and well-being over time. CONCLUSION Across the globe, working women are subjected to gender discrimination and sexual harassment at work, and an abundance of evidence supports that such experiences result in significant negative consequences for a woman’s psychological well-being and physical health. With more than 40 percent of women reporting at least one such experience annually (DeSouza & Solberg, 2003), gender discrimination and sexual harassment may be the most common occupational hazard faced by working women today. The focus of this chapter has been on the negative effects of gender discrimination and sexual harassment on targeted women; however, the financial toll on companies is also extensive (Sims, Drasgow, & Fitzgerald, 2005). Increased awareness of these negative outcomes is necessary to encourage organizations to improve prevention efforts and promote anti-discrimination legislation, resulting in a more equitable work environment for all employees. NOTE 1. Gender-based discrimination and sexual harassment are both perpetrated against men and women, however behavioral assessments of harassment and formal reports alleging both forms of discrimination and harassment are more commonly reported by women than by men (EEOC, 2009); as such, we will commonly refer to targets of harassment as women.
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Appendix: Feminist and Women’s Rights Organizations Worldwide Susan Strauss Michelle Strand Michele A. Paludi
We have compiled a listing of resources dealing with feminism and women’s rights internationally. We believe this listing is a good starting point for seeking additional information about women’s issues and support groups on issues including women and mental health, physical health, employed women, legal rights, political advocacy groups, reproductive health and rights, violence against women, and women and education. Please recognize that this listing is neither complete nor exhaustive. GENERAL ORGANIZATIONS African Feminist Forum http://www.africanfeministforum.org Association for Women’s Rights in Development http://www.awid.org Center for Global Justice http://www.globaljusticecenter.org Centre for Development and Population Activities http://www.cedpa.org Equality Now http://www.equalitynow.org
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Feminist Activist Resources on the Net http://www.women.it Feminist Majority Foundation: Global Feminism http://feminist.org/global Global Fund for Women http://www.globalfundforwomen.org Global List of Women’s Organizations http://www.distel.ca/womlist/womlist.html International Alliance of Women http://www.womenalliance.org/ International Women’s Organizations http://www.africa/upenn.edu/burundiwomen/international.htm MADRE http://www.madre.org Ms. Foundation for Women http://www.ms.foundation.org National Council for Research on Women http://www.ncrw.org National Council of Women’s Organizations http://www.womensorganizations.org National Organization for Women http://www.now.org PDHRE http://www.pdhre.org/rights/women.html Regional Network on Arab Women http://www.aucegypt.edu/src Sudan Women’s Alliance http://
[email protected] Third Wave Foundation http://www.thirdwavefoundation.org United Nations Commission on the Status of Women http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/csw United Nations Division for the Advancement of Women http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/ United Nations Population Fund; Gender Equality http://www.unfpa.org/public/publications/pubs_gender
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Women and Gender Studies Web Sites http://libr.org/wss/wsslinks/ Women for Women International http://www.womenforwomen.org Women Peace and Security Network, Africa http://www.ajws.org Women’s Human Rights Resources Programme http://www.law-lib.utoronto.ca/diana EMPLOYED WOMEN All Business Network http://www.all-biz.com Association for Women in Science http://www.awis.org Business and Professional Women’s Organization http://www.bpwusa.org Center for Leadership and Change Management http://leadership.wharton.upenn.edu Center for Women and Work, Rutgers University http://www.cww.rutgers.edu Center for Women and Work, University of Massachusetts, Lowell http://www.uml.edu/centers/women-work Centre for Families, Work and Well-Being http://www.worklifecanada.ca Center for Stress Management http://www.managingstress.com Employee Assistance Professional Association http://www.eapassn.org Equal Employment Opportunity Commission http://www.eeoc.gov Families and Work Institute http://www.familiesandwork.org Feminist Majority Foundation http://www.feminist.org International Network of Women Engineers and Scientists http://www.inwes.org
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National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health http://www.cdc.gov/niosh National Institute of Mental Health http://www.nimh.nih.gov National Partnership for Women and Families http://www.nationalpartnership.org Occupational Safety and Health Administration http://www.osha.gov Office Politics http://www.officepolitics.co.uk/frame.html The Coaching and Mentoring Network http://www.coachingnetwork.org.uk/ Third World Organization for Women in Science http://www.twows.org Work and Family Connection http://www.workfamily.com HEALTH American Association of People with Disabilities http://www.aapd-dc/org American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities http://www.aamr.org American Psychological Association http://www.apa.org Black Women’s Health http://www.blackwomenshealth.com Breast Cancer Information Network http://www.cancernetwork.com Canadian Women’s Health Network http://www.cwhn.ca Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund http://www.dredf.org Disabled Peoples’ International http://v1.dpi.org EngenderHealth http://www.engenderhealth.org
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Feminist Women’s Health Center http://www.fwhc.org International Women’s Health Coalition http://www.iwhc.org World Association of Persons with Disabilities http://www.wapd.org World Health Organization http://www.who.int World Institute on Disability http://www.wid.org LEGAL RIGHTS The Legal Research and Resource Center for Human Rights
[email protected] Women in International Law http://www2lib.uchicago.edu/llou/women.html POLITICAL ADVOCACY GROUPS Center for American Women and Politics http://www.cawp.rutgers.edu Center for Asia-Pacific Women in Politics http://www.capwip.org Centre for Advancement of Women in Politics http://www.qub.ac.uk/cawp/ Council of Women World Leaders http://www.womenworldleaders.org Emily’s List http://www.emilyslist.org European Women’s Lobby http://www.womenlobby.org International Women’s Democracy Center http://www.lwdc.org League of Women Voters http://www.lwv.org National Foundation for Women Legislators http://www.womenlegislators.org
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National Women’s Council of Ireland http://www.nwci.ie National Women’s Political Caucus http://www.nwpc.org Political Parties in Africa http://www.idea.int/africa/pp.cfm Women in Politics http://www.ipu.org
REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH AND RIGHTS American Pregnancy Association http://www.americanpregnancy.org Australian Reproductive Health Alliance http://www.arha.org.au Center for Reproductive Rights http://www.reproductiverights.org EC/UNFPA Initiative for Reproductive Rights in Asia http://www.asia-initiative.org Family Care International http://www.familycareitl.org Federation of Family Planning Associations Malaysia http://www.ffpam.org.my Fertility Awareness and Natural Family Planning http://www.FertilityUK.org Global Action Network http://www.globalactionnetwork.org Health Action Information Network http://www.hain.org Interact Worldwide http://www.interactworldwide.org International Women’s Health Coalition http://www.iwhc.org MySistahs http://www.mysistahs.org National Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies Coalition http://www.hmhb.org
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National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health http://www.latinainstitute.org National Organization for Women http://www.now.org Pathfinder International http://www.pathfind.org World Health Organization http://www.who.int/reproductive-health/ VIOLENCE American Bar Association Commission on Domestic Violence http://www.abanet.org/domviol/home.html American Domestic Violence Crisis Line http://www.awoscentral.com Antistalking Web Site http://www.antistalking.com A Safe Passage http://www.asafepassage.info Asian and Pacific Islander Institute on Domestic Violence http://www.apiahf.org/apidvinstitute Battered Women’s Justice Project http://www.bwjp.org British Columbia Institute Against Family Violence http://www.bcifv.org Canadian Association of Rape Crisis Centres http://www.casac.ca/english/avcentres/avcentres.htm Canadian National Clearinghouse on Family Violence http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/hpb/family violence Clearinghouse on Abuse and Neglect of the Elderly http://db.rdms.udel.edu:8080/CANE/index.jsp Coalition Against Trafficking of Women http://www.catwinternational.org College Violence http://youthviolence.edschool.virginia.edu/violence-in-schools/college campus.html Communities Against Violence Network http://www.cavnet2.org
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Domestic Violence Clearinghouse and Legal Hotline http://www.stoptheviolence.org Family Violence Prevention Fund http://www.endabuse.org HPP Earth: International Domestic Violence Information http://www.hotpeachpages.net International Society for Research on Aggression http://www.israsociety.com Management of Imminent Violence http://www.psychiatry.ox.ac.uk/cebmh/guidelines/violence/violence_ full.html Men Can Stop Rape http://www.mencanstoprape.org Nation to Nation: Promoting the Safety of Native Women http://toolkit.ncjrs.org/default.htm National Center for Missing and Exploited Children http://www.missingkids.com National Center for Victims of Crime http://www.ncvc.org/ncvc/Main.aspx National Center on Domestic and Sexual Violence http://www.ncdsv.org National Center on Elder Abuse http://www.elderabusecenter.org National Coalition Against Domestic Violence http://www.ncadv.org National Domestic Violence Hotline http://www.ndvh.org National Latino Alliance for the Elimination of Domestic Violence http://www.dvalianza.org National Network to End Domestic Violence http://www.nnedv.org National Organization for Men Against Sexism http://www.nomas.org National Organization for Women http://www.now.org/index.html
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National Resource Center on Domestic Violence http://www.nrcdv.org National Sexual Violence Resource Center http://www.nsvrc.org New York Model for Batterer Programs http://www.nymbp.org Nursing Network on Violence Against Women International http://www.nnvawi.org Office of Violence Against Women, U.S. Department of Justice http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/vawo Partnerships Against Violence Network http://www.pavnet.org Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network http://www.rainn.org Security on Campus http://www.securityoncampus.org Stop Family Violence http://www.stopfamilyviolence.org Tibet Justice Center http://www.tibetjustice.org U.S. Department of Health and Human Services http://www.4women.gov/violence/index.cfm U.S. Department of Justice’s Victims of Crime http://www.usdoj.gov/crimevictims.htm Violence Against Women http://www.vaw.umn.edu Violence Against Women in American Indian/Native American and Alaska Native Communities http://www.vawn.edu Womenslaw http://www.womenslaw.org WOMEN AND EDUCATION American Association of University Women http://www.aauw.org
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Canadian Congress for Learning Opportunities for Women http://www.nald.ca/litweb/other/cclow Central European Centre for Women and Youth in Science http://www.cec-wys.org International Federation of University Women http://www.ifuw.org/index.shtml
About the Editor and Contributors
Michele A. Paludi, PhD, is the Series Editor for Women’s Psychology for Praeger Publishers. She is the author/editor of 33 college textbooks and more than 160 scholarly articles and conference presentations on sexual harassment, campus violence, psychology of women, gender, and sexual harassment and victimization. Her book, Ivory Power: Sexual Harassment on Campus (1990) received the 1992 Myers Center Award for Outstanding Book on Human Rights in the United States. Dr. Paludi served as Chair of the U.S. Department of Education’s Subpanel on the Prevention of Violence, Sexual Harassment, and Alcohol and Other Drug Problems in Higher Education. She was one of six scholars in the United States to be selected for this Subpanel. She also was a consultant to and a member of former New York State Governor Mario Cuomo’s Task Force on Sexual Harassment. Dr. Paludi serves as an expert witness for court proceedings and administrative hearings on sexual harassment. She has had extensive experience in conducting training programs and investigations of sexual harassment and other EEO issues for businesses and educational institutions. In addition, Dr. Paludi has held faculty positions at Franklin & Marshall College, Kent State University, Hunter College, Union College, and Union Graduate College, where she directs the human resource management certificate program. She teaches in the School of Management. Janet Boyce graduated from Adirondack Community College in August 2006 with an Associate in Applied Science Degree in Business Administration. In May 2008 she graduated from SUNY Plattsburgh State University with a Bachelor of Science Degree in Management. She is currently enrolled in the MBA and Human Resource Management Certificate programs at Union Graduate College, with an anticipated graduation date of spring 2010.
264
About the Editor and Contributors
NiCole T. Buchanan, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Michigan State University (MSU) and a core faculty affiliate in MSU’s Center for Multicultural Psychology Research, Center for Gender in Global Context, and the Violence against Women Research & Outreach Initiative. Her research examines the intersection of race and gender in harassment, racialized sexual harassment, health, coping, and resilience among women of color. Dr. Buchanan received the 2008 International Coalition Against Sexual Harassment Researcher Award; the 2008 Carolyn Payton Early Career Award for research making ‘‘a significant contribution to the understanding of the role of gender in the lives of black women;’’ the Association of Women in Psychology’s 2007 Women of Color Award for empirical research contributions; Michigan State University’s 2007 Excellence in Diversity Award in the category of ‘‘Individual Emerging Progress’’ for outstanding research and teaching accomplishments in the areas of diversity, pluralism, and social justice; and two Clinical Faculty Awards from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Representative publications include: The effects of racial and sexual harassment on work and the psychological well-being of African American women, Journal of Occupational Health Psychology; Comparing sexual harassment subtypes for Black and White women: Double jeopardy, the Jezebel, and the cult of true womanhood, Psychology of Women Quarterly; Sexual harassment across the color line: Experiences and outcomes of cross- vs. intra-racial sexual harassment among Black women, Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology; and Racialized sexual harassment in the lives of African American Women, Women & Therapy. Elder Cerqueira-Santos, PhD, received his PhD in psychology from Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. He is currently adjunct professor at the Federal University of Sergipe, Brazil; consultant for the World Childhood Foundation; and a member of the Center for at Risk Children in Brazil. His main research interest is the relationship between risk-taking behavior and religiosity among youth in Brazil. He is also interested in sexual harassment and sexual development (gender and sexual orientation identity). As of August 2009, he has written six book chapters and 13 scholarly articles; he has also co-authored 72 papers presented at conferences. Joy Chien received her Bachelor of Science degree from Illinois State University. Lillian Comas-Diaz, PhD, is the Executive Director of the Transcultural Mental Health Institute, a clinical psychologist in private practice in Washington, DC, and a Clinical Professor at George Washington University School of Medicine. The former director of the American Psychological Association’s Office of Ethnic Minority Affairs, Dr. Comas-Diaz also
About the Editor and Contributors
265
directed the Yale University Department of Psychiatry Hispanic Clinic. The author of more than a hundred publications, Dr. Comas-Diaz’s writings focus on women’s issues, culture, ethnicity, social class, spirituality, and creativity. She is the co-editor of the textbooks Clinical Guidelines in Cross Cultural Mental Health; Women of Color: Integrating Ethnic and Gender Identities in Psychotherapy; and WomanSoul: The Inner Life of Women’s Spirituality. She currently serves as an Associate Editor of the American Psychologist. Eros DeSouza, PhD, is currently a professor of psychology at Illinois State University. He earned his PhD in community psychology from the University of Missouri at Kansas City. He has carried out qualitative and quantitative research on sexuality and gender issues, including sexual orientation and sexual harassment from a cross-cultural perspective. As of August 2009, he has written nine book chapters and more than 40 scholarly articles; he has also co-authored 115 papers presented at conferences. Nancy Felipe Russo, PhD, is Regents Professor of Psychology and Women’s Studies at Arizona State University. Founding director of the Women’s Programs office of the American Psychological Association, she is author or editor of more than 200 publications related to the psychology of women and women’s issues; current editor of the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry; and a former editor of the Psychology of Women Quarterly. Dr. Russo is a Fellow of the New York Academy of Sciences, the American Psychological Association (including divisions: 1-General, 9-Social Issues, 26-History, 34-Population and Environment, 35-Psychology of Women, 38-Health, 45-Ethnic Minority Issues, and 52-International Psychology), and the American Psychological Society. Dr. Russo’s involvement in international issues as a leader, researcher, and policy advocate has spanned four decades. In these roles she has worked to increase and apply psychological knowledge related to women’s lives and circumstances, and to forge links between scientists, policy makers, and the public concerned with diverse women’s mental health. In doing so she has been a pioneer in the development of a multicultural feminist psychology of women. She has been awarded the Distinguished International Psychologist Award by APA’s Division of International Psychology, the DenmarkGunvald Award for significant contributions to the psychology of women and gender by the International Council of Psychologists, and the American Psychological Association’s Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychology in the Public Interest. Other honors include a Carolyn Wood Sherif Award and a Heritage Award for Contributions to Public Policy from APA’s Division 35. She has been identified among ‘‘Trailblazing Women in Community Psychology’’ by APA Division 27’s Committee on Women, received a Distinguished Career Award from the Association for Women in Psychology, and was recognized by APA’s Board of Ethnic Minority Affairs for contributions to ethnic minority issues.
266
About the Editor and Contributors
Susan Fineran, PhD, is an associate professor at the University of Southern Maine School of Social Work and Women and Gender Studies. Her professional career includes clinical experience in the areas of aging, substance abuse, child and family treatment, sex discrimination, and women’s issues. Her research interests include peer sexual harassment and bullying in schools and the mental health implications for children and adolescents. Dr. Fineran joined the University of Southern Maine School of Social Work in 2002 after teaching on the social work faculties of Boston University and the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her education includes an MSW (1981) from the Catholic University of America, and a PhD (1996) from the University of Illinois at Chicago. James Gruber, PhD, has published research on sexual harassment for 25 years. He was among the first researchers to conduct studies of workplace sexual harassment in the early 1980s and cross-national studies in the 1990s. His work on the experiences of women in male-dominated occupations resulted in a recent book, In The Company of Men: Male Dominance and Sexual Harassment (2005), co-edited with Phoebe Morgan. Since 2002, Drs. Gruber and Susan Fineran have presented conference papers and published journal articles on bullying and sexual harassment among adolescents in schools. Two recent publications with Dr. Fineran studied that the effects of bullying and sexual harassment at school: ‘‘The Impact of Bullying and Sexual Harassment on Health Outcomes of Middle and High School Girls,’’ published in Violence Against Women (2007), and ‘‘Comparing the Impact of Bullying and Sexual Harassment Victimization on the Mental and Physical Health of Adolescents’’ (Sex Roles, 2008). He has also co-authored a publication in Child Abuse & Neglect (in press) that examines the effects of workplace sexual harassment on adolescent girls. Paula Lundberg-Love, PhD, is a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Tyler (UTT) and the Ben R. Fisch Endowed Professor in Humanitarian Affairs for 2001–2004. Her undergraduate degree was in chemistry, and she worked as a chemist at a pharmaceutical company for five years prior to earning her doctorate in physiological psychology with an emphasis in psychopharmacology. After a three-year postdoctoral fellowship in nutrition and behavior in the Department of Preventive Medicine at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, she assumed her academic position at UTT where she teaches classes in psychopharmacology, behavioral neuroscience, physiological psychology, sexual victimization, and family violence. Subsequent to her academic appointment, Dr. Lundberg-Love pursued postgraduate training and is a licensed professional counselor. She is a member of Tyler Counseling and Assessment Center, where she provides therapeutic services for victims of sexual assault, child sexual abuse, and domestic violence. She has
About the Editor and Contributors
267
conducted a long-term research study on women who were victims of childhood incestuous abuse, constructed a therapeutic program for their recovery, and documented its effectiveness upon their recovery. She is the author of nearly 100 publications and presentations and is co-editor of Violence and Sexual Abuse at Home: Current Issues in Spousal Battering and Child Maltreatment as well as Intimate Violence Against Women: When Spouses, Partners, or Lovers Attack. As a result of her training in psychopharmacology and child maltreatment, her expertise has been sought as a consultant on various death penalty appellate cases in the state of Texas. Jennifer L. Martin is the department head of English at a public alternative high school for at-risk students in Michigan and a lecturer at Oakland University where she teaches graduate research methods in the department of Educational Leadership, Feminist Methods and Introduction to Women and Gender Studies in the Department of Women and Gender Studies. She is not only a feminist teacher, but a feminist activist. She has volunteered as an assault responder and engaged in political action for feminist causes. Currently, she is the Title IX Education Task Force Chair for the Michigan National Organization for Women to advocate for Title IX compliance in Michigan’s schools. She has conducted research and written articles on the topics of peer sexual harassment, teaching for social justice, service learning, and the at-risk student. Avigail Moor, PhD, is a feminist clinical psychologist who specializes in the treatment of women in general and survivors of sexual violence in particular. She heads the Women Studies program at Tel Hai College in Israel and is also on the faculty of the Psychology and Social Work programs. In addition, she serves as a psychological consultant to several rape crisis centers in Northern Israel. Her past and present research focuses primarily on the social context of sexual violence against women and its psychological sequelae. She has also written articles on treatment issues with survivors of this type of violence. Other research interests concern the psychology of women and the effects of gender-based power imbalances on women’s mental health. Kevin L. Nadal, PhD, is a professor, psychologist, performer, activist, and author, who received his doctorate in counseling psychology from Columbia University in 2008. As an assistant professor of mental health counseling and psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice–City University of New York, he has published several works focusing on Filipino American, ethnic minority, and LGBTQ issues in the fields of psychology and education. He is the author of the book Filipino American Psychology: A Handbook of Theory, Research, and Clinical Practice, and his current research on microaggressions, or subtle forms of discrimination
268
About the Editor and Contributors
towards oppressed groups, has been published in the American Psychologist and other journals. He was named one of People Magazine’s hottest bachelors in 2006, he was a guest on Fox News Channel’s ‘‘The O’Reilly Factor,’’ and he has been featured on The Filipino Channel, the History Channel, Philippine News, and Filipinas Magazine Dorota Wnuk Novitskie is a third-year doctoral student in the Clinical PhD program at Fairleigh Dickinson University. Her research interests include cross-cultural studies, domestic violence/interpersonal violence, and family violence. Joy Rice, PhD, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Emerita professor of Educational Policy Studies and Women Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, received the Woman of the Year Award from the American Psychological Association (APA), Section for the Advancement of Women in Counseling Psychology at the annual APA meeting in Boston in August 2008, for ‘‘significant contributions and promotion of the status of women in psychology, leadership and activism on behalf of women, and research that has significantly advanced knowledge of women’s concerns in counseling psychology.’’ Dr. Rice’s pioneering work on gender issues in psychotherapy dates from the early 1970s when she began the first women’s studies course on women and therapy at the University of Wisconsin. Her 1973 paper in the American Journal of Psychiatry was one of the first articles to address key issues of gender discrimination in psychotherapeutic theory and practice. She was co-chair of the task force that worked for seven years in developing the APA Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Girls and Women. It was passed by APA and published in the American Psychologist in 2007. Dr. Rice also co-chaired the APA Resolution on Gender and Cultural Awareness in International Psychology passed by APA in 2004. Active in state, federal, and international advocacy for mental health parity, she currently serves as co-chair of the Wisconsin Lieutenant Governor’s Task Force on Women and Depression and is the International Council of Psychologists representative to the World Federation of Mental Health. Her most recent book, Women and Leadership: Transforming Visions and Diverse Voices (John Wiley, 2007), explores feminist models of leadership that embrace collaboration, inclusion, and social action. Dr. Rice is a recipient of the Educational Press Association Distinguished Achievement Award and an APA Fellow of four divisions. Janet Sigal, PhD, is a Professor of Psychology at Fairleigh Dickinson University. She received her PhD in Social Psychology from Northwestern University. She has more than 100 presentations, and several articles and chapters primarily in the area of women’s issues, including intimate partner violence and sexual harassment. She is currently conducting a
About the Editor and Contributors
269
12-country study on perceptions of intimate partner violence (IPV). She is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and a member of the APA UN Team. Lindsey Speach graduated from Siena College in May 2007 with a BS in Marketing Management and a minor in Sociology. She is enrolled in the Certificate of Human Resources program at Union Graduate College and plans to join the MBA program. Lindsey is currently the Recruiting Coordinator for the Northeast region of KeyBank N.A. Michelle Strand received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology and Criminology in 2006 from Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. While at Wilkes, she also minored in Business Administration and Sociology. Michelle was a student in Union Graduate College’s Masters in Business Administration program and graduated in June 2009. Her specialization being Human Resources (HR), Michelle has been a co-op at General Electric in the HR department since November 2007. It was there that she was able to put her studies to real life situations, and became more acquainted with a variety of aspects in the field of business. Michelle’s co-op experience takes place within GE’s manufacturing plant for steam turbines and generators in Schenectady, New York. While there, she has planned, designed, and implemented a salaried new hire orientation, assisted in interviewing and on-boarding 300þ production positions, coordinated work/life balance on-site seminars, along with many other experiences in Human Resources. Michelle is a member of the Society for Human Resources Management and the Capital Region Human Resources Association. She has attended several conferences around the country to improve her business knowledge, including the National Association for Women in MBA, and the International Coalition Against Sexual Harassment. She also took a 10-day tour of Shanghai, China, in December 2008 to learn about the country’s distinctive business strategies and developments. Michelle is also an avid volunteer in her local community. She has helped build a house for the Habitat for Humanity, taught at an elementary school for Junior Achievement, and walked dogs at the Society for the Prevention and Cruelty of Animals, including several other volunteering activities. Susan Strauss, RN, EdD, is a national and international speaker, trainer, and consultant. Her specialty areas include harassment and workplace bullying, organization development, and management/leadership development. Her clients are from business, education, health care, law, and government organizations from both the public and private sector. Dr. Strauss has authored book chapters, articles in professional journals, written curriculum and training manuals, as well as authored the book, Sexual
270
About the Editor and Contributors
Harassment and Teens: A Program for Positive Change. Susan has been featured on The Donahue Show, CBS Evening News, and other television and radio programs as well as interviewed for newspaper and journal articles such as the Times of London, Lawyers Weekly, and Harvard Education Newsletter. Susan has presented at international conferences in Botswana, Egypt, Thailand, Israel, and the United States, and conducted sex discrimination research in Poland. She has consulted with professionals from other countries such as England, Australia, Canada, and St. Maarten. Bethany Waits is a graduate student in clinical psychology at the University of Texas at Tyler. She anticipates graduation in May of 2010 and plans to pursue the Licensed Professional Counselor designation upon completion of her degree. Ultimately, she would like to work as a therapist for a nonprofit community organization, such as a crisis center. In May 2007, she obtained her BA in psychology from UT-Tyler, graduating Summa Cum Laude. She was accepted as a lifetime member of Psi Chi, the national honor society in psychology, and Alpha Chi, a national college honor society. While an undergraduate, she participated in a student panel addressing issues related to sexual assault on campus. In addition, she has worked with several professors on various research projects. Jessica Wilmot earned her BS in Business Administration from Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York, in 2007. Afterward she took some time away from school and traveled to Europe to spend a few months volunteering in England at a Surrey Women’s Aid, a not-for-profit women’s shelter. She then returned home to continue her education and is currently a MBA student at Union Graduate College in Schenectady, New York. As well as her MBA, she is working on her HR Certificate with Dr. Paludi and will be graduating June 2010. Currently Jessica is an intern at General Electric on the Pension Team and has enjoyed learning about corporate America. Krystle C. Woods’s research examines the influence of perpetrator race on sexual harassment outcomes, racialized sexual harassment, and depression in African American women. Ms. Woods is a clinical doctoral candidate in the Department of Psychology at Michigan State University. She was the 2005 recipient of the Michigan State University Enrichment Fellowship ‘‘recognizing academic achievement, research goals, contribution to a diverse educational community and a record of overcoming obstacles.’’
Index
Abusive behavior, 67 Acquaintance rape, 144 ‘‘Act’’ scales, 68 Ambivalent Sexism Inventory (ASI), 78 American Association of University Women (AAUW), 195–96, 213, 217, 220 American Bar Association Commission on Domestic Violence, 124 American Institute on Domestic Violence, 111 American Psychological Association (APA), 2, 155, 186; guidelines for psychological practice with women, 12–13, diversity, social context and power, 12–13, practice applications, 13, professional responsibility, 13 American public education system, 231; compensatory education in, 233; influence of the Eugenics Movement, 232–33 APA Resolution on Cultural and Gender Awareness in International Psychology, 10–12, 14; awareness and analysis of power, 11; critical analysis of western perspective, 11–12; experience of individuals in diverse cultures, 11;
interdisciplinary social–cultural perspective, 12; respect for pluralism based on differences, 11 Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, 67 Assessment, ethnocultural, 31; heritage stage, 29; niche stage, 30; saga stage, 29; self-adjustment stage, 30; women’s relations and, 30 Association for Women in Psychology, 2 Atividade (activity), 180, 181 Baby boomers, 209 Ban Ki Moon, 65, 66–67, 94 Beijing Conference, 2 Behavioral responses of sexual violence, 55–57 The Bell Curve, 232 Benevolent sexism, 162–63, 188 Bicha, 180 Bofe, 181 Boyce, Janet view’s on feminism, 209–10 Brazil, 177; homosexuality in, 178, 180–83; laws and resolution against sexual harassment in, 186–88; sexism in, 188–89; sexual harassment in, 199; sexual script in, 180; stereotypes about transsexuals,
272
Index
185–86; violence against sexual minorities in, 183–86 Brazilian Federal Association of Medicine, 186 Brazilian Federal Association of Psychology, 186 Brazilian Health Ministry, 187–88 Bullying, 224–5; definition, 211; differences between sexual harassment and, 212; global prevalence of, 215–17; perpetration of, 217; in U.S. schools, 213–15 Bullying: victimization and peer sexual harassment: children with disabilities, 219–20; gender, 217–18; health and school outcomes, 221–2; race and ethnicity, 220–1; sexual orientation, 218–19 Bureau of Justice Special Report on Intimate Partner Violence, 67 Burlington Industries, Inc. v. Ellerth, 111 Canada, IPV in, 89–90 Canadian Psychological Association (CPA), 13–14 Cardoso, Fernando Henrique, 182, 187 Center for Epidemiological Studies-Depression Scale (CES-D), 90, 91 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 111, 112–13 Child sexual abuse (CSA), 46 Chile, IPV in, 89 China, IPV in, 81–83 Civil Rights Act of 1964, 209, 236 Cognitive empathy, 31 Cognitive theories of stress, 240 Collective self-esteem, 239 Comer, 180 Commission on the Status of Women, 65 Comorbidity of mental disorders, 6 Conflict Tactics Scale, 89 Consensual relationship policy, 121–3 Continuous Performance Test (CPT), 53
Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), 77 Covert sexism, 159 Critical consciousness, 27 Cultural empathy, 32 Cultural genogram, 35 Dar, 180 Dating violence, 65, 66; anger response, 75; classic models of teen, 68–69; comparison between IPV and, 96–98; definitions, 67–68; ethic enforcement, 75–76; factors affecting, 69, gender power differential, 69–70, influence of peers, 70–71, lack of experience, 70; first-time aggression response, 75, 76; international studies on, 71–73; outcomes, 74, effect of abusive and neglectful childhood, 74–75, mental health effects, 74; patriarchal terrorism, 75; perpetrators of, 75; recommendations and programs for, 76–77; theoretical model of, 69; in United States, 67 Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women, 77 Department of Labor, 210 Depression and women, 7–9 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (1973), 44, 186, 241 Dial Corporation, 236 Discrimination and harassment, 244; harming psychological and physical health, 237–38; mental health outcomes related to, 238–41; physical health outcomes related to, 242–44; specific forms of mental illness, 241–42 Disparate impact, 236 Disparate treatment, 236 EEOC v. Pand Enterprises, Inc., 222 EEOC v. The Dial Corporation, 236 Empathy, 31 Employees Assistance Program (EAP): intimate partner violence
Index and, 123–4; recommendations for, 109 Empowerment and ethnocultural psychotherapy, 27–8 Engaged couples, violence in, 73–74 Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), 111, 161, 222, 223 Ethnocultural consciousness, 36–37 Ethnocultural occupational inventory, 35–36 Ethnocultural psychotherapy, 25, 38; applications, 28–9; assessment, 29–31; case studies, 25–6; concepts, 26–7; empowerment as aim of, 27–8; ethnogender consciousness and, 36–37; identity reformulation and, 28; phases in process of, 33–34; therapeutic relationship and, 31–32; tools, 34–36; transference and countertransference, 32–33 Ethnocultural transference, 32 Eugenics Movement, 232, 233 Everyday sexism, 159 Family Crisis Services, 107 Faragher v. City of Boca Raton, 111 Feminist consciousness, 239 Feminist movement, 2 Feminist psychotherapy, 14–17; APA guidelines and, 16–17; CPA principle and, 16–17; empowerment and language of empowerment, 15; goals of psychotherapy for women, 15; principles of feminist therapy, 141–42; psychological practice for women, 15 Feminist therapy, 3, 140; definition, 141; tenets of, 141–42; for treating survivors of rape and sexual assault, 143–44 Feminization of poverty, 9 Filipina domestic female worker, sexual harassment and, 199 ‘‘Floare de Colt,’’ 95 Frutinha, 181 Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), 218
273
Gender: definition, 4, 178; discrimination, 236–37, 238; international perspective of, 4–5; versus sex, 178 Gendered ethnicity, 26 Gender Equity Index, 78, 97 Gender harassment, 161, 198, 237 Gender microaggressions, 163–65; age and, 169; awareness of, 172; in clinical practice, 169–73; definition, 158; examples of, 166–67; forms of, 165–68, assumptions of inferiority, 165, 166, denial of individual sexism, 165, 167, denial of reality of sexism, 165, 167, environmental gender microaggressions, 165, 167, invisibility, 165, 166, sexual objectification, 165, 166, traditional gender roles, assumptions of, 165, 167, use of sexist language, 165, 167; intersections of, 168–69; research on, 173; sexual harassment and, 160–62; sexism in everyday life and, 158–60; understanding types of, 165 Grupo Gay da Bahia, 183 Guidelines for Ethical Psychological practice with Women, 13–14 Guidelines on multicultural education, training, research, practice, and organizational change for psychologists, 155 Hall, Stanley G., 232 Hernstein, Richard J., 232 Hollingworth, Leta, 232 Homicide, 104 Homosexuality in Brazil, 180–83 Hong Kong, IPV in, 81–83 Hostile environment sexual harassment, 197, 212, 236 Hostile sexism, 162, 163, 188 Hunter, George William, 233 Hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA), 52, 54 Identity reformulation and ethnocultural psychotherapy, 28
274
Index
India, IPV in, 83–84 Inheriting Shame: The Story of Eugenics and Racism in America, 231–32 International Consensus Statement on Women’s Mental Health, 2 International Counseling Psychology Conference, 14 International Dating Violence Study, 72, 74 international studies on IPV, 80; in Canada, 89–90; in China, 81–83; in Hong Kong, 81–83; in India, 83–84; in Japan, 83; in Kenya, 86–87; in Middle East, 87–88; in Nigeria, 85–86; in Peru, 88–89; in Turkey, 84–85; in Zambia, 86–87 International women’s movement, 3 Interpersonal physical violence, 71 Interpersonal Sexual Objectification Scale (ISOS), 162 Interpersonal violence, 211 Intimate partner violence (IPV), 41, 54, 65, 66; comparison between dating violence and, 96–98; definition, 42, 77–78, 127; EAP assisting women victims of, 109–10; employers notice of, 112; examples of, 103–4; impact of, abuse on children, 108, on employees, 106–8, on the workplace, 110–11; international studies on, 80–81; models of, 78–80, culture of honor, 79–80, feminist power, 78, hypermasculinity, 78, patriarchal culture, 79; myths and realities, 127–8; outcomes for victims of, 90–91; perpetrators of, 91–92; prevalence of, 105; primary prevention strategies: additional human resource responsibilities, 121–3, EAP and, 123–4, employees, training program for, 117, intimate partner violence in workplace, 113–14, managers, training program for, 114–16, needs assessment, 119, pedagogical techniques, 117–19, policies and procedures, 112–13, posttraining
evaluations, 119–1, threat assessment plan, training program for, 116–17; recommendations to eliminate, 92–95, efforts to stop violence against women, 94–95, international agreements for rights of women, 92–93, safe environment for women, creating, 93; resources on, 131–32; secondary and tertiary prevention, 124–5; women fear of leaving violent relationship, 108–9; in workplace, 105–6 Intra-ethnic transference, 32–33 IPV. See intimate partner violence (IPV) Japan, IPV in, 83 Jordan, IPV in, 87–88 Kenya, IPV in, 86–87, 91 Kirkpatrick Model, 120 Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (LGBTQ), 177, 179; prejudice and determination, 179–80; violence against, 183–86 Machismo, 184 MacKinnon, Catharine (Katherine McKinnon), 143, 212 Maine Department of Labor, 107 Massachusetts Youth Risk Behavior Survey, 218 Mental health: definition, 2; issues and women, 5–7; outcomes related to discrimination and harassment, 238–41 Mental Health Index (MHI), 201 Microagressions: definitions of, 156; racial, 156–58; research on, 156 Microassaults, 156–57, 161, 166, 168 Microinsults, 156, 157, 158, 161, 168 Microinvalidations, 156, 157–58, 161, 168 Middle East, IPV in, 87–88 Mujerismo, 37 Murray, Charles, 232
Index National Co-morbidity Survey, 6, 51 National Crime Survey of the Department of Justice, 109 National Crime Victimization Survey, 213, 214 National Education Association (NEA), 232 National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 213, 221 Nationality/citizenship as cause for sexual harassment, 199–200 National Women Study, 49, 56 Neurological responses of sexual violence, 52–55 ‘‘The New Ideal in Education—Better Parents of Better Children,’’ 232 Nigeria, IPV in, 85–86 Objectification theory, 162 Obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), 45 Occupational Safety and Health Association (OSHA), 113, 116–17 Olweus, Dan, 211 Oorganizational responses of sexual violence, 58, 61; legal system, 58–59; medical services, 59–60; mental health services, 60 Overt sexism, 159 Paced Auditory Serial Addition Task (PASAT), 53 Partnership for Prevention, 125 Passividade (passivity), 180, 181 Peer sexual harassment, 217; bullying victimization and: children with disabilities, 219–20, gender, 217–18, health and school outcomes, 221–2, race and ethnicity, 220–1, sexual orientation, 218–19; definition, 197; in international students and U.S.-born students, study on, 200–201; conclusion from the study, 204; hostile sexual harassment, 202; limitations and future directions, 204–5; psychological well-being of students, 201–2; results and discussion, 203
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Peer victimization and disabled children, 219–20 Perceived past control, 48 Personalized Safety Plan for victims of IPV, 113–14, 129 Peru, IPV in, 88–89 Physical responses of sexual violence, 49; gastro intestinal problems, 50; gynecological disorders, 50; physical injuries, 49; sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), 49; sleep disorders, 50–51 Possuir, 180 Post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 43, 44, 47, 52, 53, 139, 140 Psychological responses of sexual violence, 42, 48; child sexual abuse (CSA), 46; coping strategies, 46–47; depressive disorder, 43–44; fear and anxiety, 43; mental pollution and, 44–45; negative social reactions and, 47 Putnam, Helen, 232 Quid pro quo sexual harassment, 196–97, 212, 236 Racial microggressions, 156; microassaults, 156–57; microinsults, 156, 157, 158; microinvalidations, 156, 157–58 Rape, social context of, 143; psychological sequelae of, 145–46; survivors: cognitive restructuring, 151, egalitarian therapeutic relationship, 147–49, empowerment, 149–51, treatment principles, 146–47 Rape crisis centers, 42 ‘‘Rape Culture,’’ 143 Rape myths, 143–44 Revised Conflict Tactics Scale, 82 Rio de Janeiro, 182, 184, 187, 189 Rosenberg Self-esteem Scale (RSES), 201–2
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Sample personalized safety plan, 129 Sample policy on intimate partner violence as a workplace concern, 127–8 Sample training program for managers, 129–31 S~ao Paulo, 182, 189 Schedule of Sexist Events (SSE), 160 School bullies, 211 Secondary victimization rape, 144 Selden, Steven, 231–32 Self-blame, 139–40 Self-objectification theory, 242 Sex, definition, 178 Sexism in brazil, 188–89 Sexual coercion, 161, 198, 237 Sexual Experiences Questionnaire (SEQ), 161, 197–98, 202 Sexual harassment, 224–5; of adolescent at work, 222–4; definition, 160–61, 196, 211, 212, 236–37; demographics related to incidence of, 198–200; differences between bullying and, 212; dimensions of, 198; eating pathology and, 242; gender microaggressions and, 161–62; global prevalence of, 215–17; hostile environment, 197; negative effects of, 238; peer, 197; quid pro quo, 196–97; substance abuse and, 242; types of, 196–97; in U.S. schools, 213–15 Sexual identity, 178 Sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), 49 Sexual orientation, 178–79 Sexual violence: definition, 41; feminist analysis of, 143; social context of rape, 143–44; women and, 41, behavioral responses, 55–57, neurological responses, 52–55, organizational responses, 57–60, physical responses, 49–52, psychological responses, 42–48 Social Dysfunction Rating Scale, 57 Social economic status as cause for sexual harassment, 198, 199
Society for Human Resource Management, 112–13 Sodomy, 186 Substance abuse and sexual violence, 56 Subtle sexism, 159 Suicidal ideation, 74 Teen dating violence, 68–69 Title IX, 209 Trail Making Test, 53 Training programs, to prevent intimate partner violence: for employees, 117; human resource responsibilities, 121–3; for managers, 114–16, 129; needs assessment in, 119; pedagogical techniques, 117–18; for threat assessment team, 116–17 Transactional Model of Stress, 237 Transsexualism, 179 Transvestism, 179 Traumatic brain injury (TBI), 52–53, 55 Turkey, IPV in, 84–85, 93 Uganda, mental illness in, 18 United Arab Emirates, mental health care in, 18 United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women, 1 United Nations International Conference on Women, 105 United States: dating abuse in, 67; feminist psychologists in, 2–3; peer sexual harassment in, 197, 200; prevalence of bullying in schools of, 213–15; prevalence of sexual harassment in schools of, 213–15; sexual harassment in, 195 Unwanted sexual attention, 161, 198, 237 U.S. Armed Forces, 240 U.S. Department of Education: Office for Civil Rights, 196 U.S. Department of Education School Crime Supplement, 213
Index Vencer, 180 Victim precipitation as rape myth, 144 Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-III (WAIS-III), 53 Where there is no psychiatrist: A mental health care manual, 18 ‘‘White Ribbon Campaign,’’ 94 Williams v. Saxby, 236 Women: depression and, 7–9; mental disorder and, 5–7; psychological practice guidelines for, 9–14; psychological risk factors for, 8, 9;
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sexual violence and, 41, 61, behavioral responses, 55–57, neurological responses, 52–55, organizational responses, 57–60, physical responses, 49–52, psychological responses, 42–48 World Federation of Mental Health, 2 World Health Organization (WHO), 1, 6, 66, 78, 92, 94 World Psychiatric Association (WPA), 2 Zambia, IPV in, 86–87
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Feminism and Women’s Rights Worldwide
Recent Titles in Women’s Psychology ‘‘Intimate’’ Violence against Women: When Spouses, Partners, or Lovers Attack Paula K. Lundberg-Love and Shelly L. Marmion, editors Daughters of Madness: Growing Up and Older with a Mentally Ill Mother Susan Nathiel Psychology of Women: Handbook of Issues and Theories, Second Edition Florence L. Denmark and Michele Paludi, editors WomanSoul: The Inner Life of Women’s Spirituality Carole A. Rayburn and Lillian Comas-Diaz, editors The Psychology of Women at Work: Challenges and Solutions for Our Female Workforce Michele A. Paludi, editor
Feminism and Women’s Rights Worldwide Volume 3 Feminism as Human Rights
MICHELE A. PALUDI, EDITOR Praeger Perspectives Women’s Psychology Michele A. Paludi, Series Editor
PRAEGER An Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC
Copyright 2010 by Michele A. Paludi All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Feminism and women’s rights worldwide / Michele A. Paludi, editor. v. ; cm. — (Women’s psychology) Includes bibliographical references and index. Contents: The myth of the man-hating feminist / Melinda Kanner and Kristin J. Anderson — Gender differences : the arguments regarding abilities / Jennifer L. Martin — Women in education : students and professors worldwide / Susan Basow — In women’s voices / Samantha Smith — Working life as a house : a tale of floors, walls, and ceilings / Leanne Faraday-Brash — Women as religious leaders : advances and stalemates / J. Harold Ellens — The feminine political persona : Queen Victoria, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and Michelle Bachelet / Emily A. Haddad and William Schweinle — Women in the military : is it time to un-gender combat roles? / Breena E. Coates — Sexual minority women : sources and outcomes of stigmatization / Rhonda M. Schultz, and Kristin P. Beals — Special issues for women with disabilities / Martha E. Banks — Body dissatisfaction and disordered eating : the globalization of western appearance ideals / Jaehee Jung and Gordon B. Forbes — Sexual violence to girls and women in schools around the world / Susan Strauss. ISBN 978-0-313-37596-5 (set : hard copy : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-31337597-2 (set : ebook) — ISBN 978-0-313-37598-9 (v.1 : hard copy : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-313-37599-6 (v.1 : ebook) — ISBN 978-0-313-37600-9 (v.2 : hard copy : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-313-37601-6 (v.2 : ebook) — ISBN 978-0-31337602-3 (v.3 : hard copy : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-313-37603-0 (v.3 : ebook) 1. Feminism. 2. Women’s rights. 3. Sexual harassment of women. 4. Abused women—Psychology. 5. Women—Psychology. I. Paludi, Michele Antoinette HQ1180.F424 2010 305.42—dc22 2009035343 ISBN: 978-0-313-37596-5 EISBN: 978-0-313-37597-2 14 13 12
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2 3 4 5
This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an eBook. Visit www.abc-clio.com for details. Praeger An Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC ABC-CLIO, LLC 130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911 Santa Barbara, California 93116-1911 This book is printed on acid-free paper Manufactured in the United States of America
For Rosa and Lucia, my maternal and paternal grandmothers and for Antoinette, my mother: ‘‘Remember, our heritage is our power; we can know ourselves and our capacities by seeing that other women have been strong.’’ —Judy Chicago
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Contents
Series Introduction
ix
Acknowledgments
xi
Introduction Michele A. Paludi Chapter 1: Chapter 2:
Global Feminism Anne Sisson Runyan Women’s Human Rights and Empowerment in a Transnational, Globalized Context: What’s Psychology Got To Do with It? Shelly Grabe
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Chapter 3: Missing Children and Child Abductions: An International Human Rights Issue Michele A. Paludi and Katie L. Kelly
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Chapter 4: Women and Sexuality: An International Perspective Donna Castaneda and Monica Ulibarri
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Chapter 5: Arranged and Forced Marriage Noorfarah Merali
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Chapter 6: Women’s Reproductive Rights: An International Perspective Joan C. Chrisler and Cynthia Garrett
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Chapter 7: Pay Equity as Justice: United States and International Perspectives Michele A. Paludi, Jennifer L. Martin, Carmen Paludi, Jr., Sarah Metzgar Boggess, Kristina Hicks, and Lindsey Speach
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viii Chapter 8: Chapter 9:
Contents
Rape: A Global Perspective Michelle McKenzie and Patricia Rozee
177
Sexual Harassment Laws’ Impact on Women Joseph Solberg
209
Chapter 10: Preventing Abuse of Young Girls and Women Ayelet Giladi
239
Chapter 11: In Women’s Voices Lindsay Baker
251
About the Editor and Contributors
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Index
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Series Introduction
Because women’s work is never done and is underpaid or unpaid or boring or repetitious and we’re the first to get fired and what we look like is more important than what we do and if we get raped it’s our fault and if we get beaten we must have provoked it and if we raise our voices we’re nagging bitches and if we enjoy sex we’re nymphos and if we don’t we’re frigid and if we love women it’s because we can’t get a ‘‘real’’ man and if we ask our doctor too many questions we’re neurotic and/or pushy and if we expect childcare we’re selfish and if we stand up for our rights we’re aggressive and ‘‘unfeminine’’ and if we don’t we’re typical weak females and if we want to get married we’re out to trap a man and if we don’t we’re unnatural and because we still can’t get an adequate safe contraceptive but men can walk on the moon and if we can’t cope or don’t want a pregnancy we’re made to feel guilty about abortion and . . . for lots of other reasons we are part of the women’s liberation movement. —Author unknown, quoted in The Torch, September 14, 1987
These sentiments underlie the major goals of the Praeger Perspectives book series, Women’s Psychology. The goals are as follows: Value women: The books in this series value women by valuing children and working for affordable child care; value women by respecting all physiques, not just by placing value on slender women; value women by acknowledging older women’s wisdom, beauty, aging; value women who have been sexually victimized and view them as survivors; value women who work inside and outside of the home; and value women by respecting their choices of careers, of whom they mentor, of their reproductive rights, their spirituality, and their sexuality. Treat women as the norm. Thus the books in this series make up for women’s issues typically being omitted, trivialized, or dismissed from other books on psychology.
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Take a non-Eurocentric view of women’s experiences. The books in this series integrate the scholarship on race and ethnicity into women’s psychology, thus providing a psychology of all women. Women typically have been described collectively; but we are diverse. Facilitate connections between readers’ experiences and psychological theories and empirical research. The books in this series offer readers opportunities to challenge their views about women, feminism, sexual victimization, gender role socialization, education, and equal rights. These texts thus encourage women readers to value themselves and others. The accounts of women’s experiences as reflected through research and personal stories in the texts in this series have been included for readers to derive strength from the efforts of others who have worked for social change on the interpersonal, organizational, and societal levels. A student in one of my courses on the psychology of women once stated: I learned so much about women. Women face many issues: discrimination, sexism, prejudices . . . by society. Women need to work together to change how society views us. I learned so much and talked about much of the issues brought up in class to my friends and family. My attitudes have changed toward a lot of things. I got to look at myself, my life, and what I see for the future. (Paludi, 2002)
It is my hope that readers of the books in this series will also reflect on the topics and look at themselves, their own lives, and what they see for the future. This three-volume book set on Feminism and Women’s Rights Worldwide provides readers with the opportunity to accomplish this goal and offers suggestions for all of us working for gender justice within our friendships and romantic relationships, in guiding institutional and social policy change in workplace and educational institutions, and in lobbying state and federal legislators on issues related to reproductive rights, pay equity, education, sexual violence, and childcare. Michele A. Paludi Series Editor REFERENCE Paludi, M. (2002). The psychology of women. 2nd ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Acknowledgments
Teaching and writing are separate, but serve/feed one another in so many ways. Writing travels the road inward, teaching, the road out—helping OTHERS move inward—it is an honor to be with others in the spirit of writing and encouragement. —Naomi Shihab Nye
Nye’s sentiment is echoed throughout this three-volume set on feminism and women’s rights. Most of the contributors have taught courses in women’s studies and feminism as well as conducted research and written about feminist issues. Many contributors have been advocates on behalf of feminist principles through working with local, state and federal agencies, legislators, and the United Nations. And many of us have collaborated with students in our classes in writing chapters for this book set. These students have made us believe that all of them, in their individual ways, will continue to do what this book set intends: value feminism and work toward equality. It has been exhilarating for me to see a new generation of feminists collaborating with mentors and colleagues on the chapters for this book set. I have been honored to have collaborated with the contributors to these volumes. Several friendships with contributors have been rekindled and strengthened, and I have met many new colleagues from around the world who taught me about their disciplines through their writing. You have all shown me the great accomplishments of feminists as well as the work we have yet to do. Thank you. I wish to thank my sisters, Rosalie Paludi and Lucille Paludi, for their support during the preparation of this book set. I also thank Carmen Paludi, Jr. for his guidance and encouragement. Our discussions about feminism brought back wonderful memories of my mother,
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Antoinette, and my father, Michael, about whom I continue to learn and continue to cherish the time I had with them. I acknowledge several friends who encouraged me during the preparation of this set of books. Thank you to Paula Lundberg Love, Jennifer Martin, Billie Wright Dziech, Darlene C. DeFour, and Florence Denmark. I have been fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with students throughout my career, now at Union Graduate College. I have thoroughly enjoyed learning from them. Thank you to students in the Human Resource Management Certificate Program and Management and Leadership Certificate Program. I especially acknowledge Michelle Strand, Carrie Turco, Haimanot Kelbessa, Sarah Bennett, Sarah Boggess, Kristina Hicks, James Luciano, Sarah Henderson Maneely, Abbey Massoud-Tastor, Marie Fuda, Jessica Wilmot, Katie Kelly, and Nick Salvatoriello. I am honored you have called me your professor. I also thank Debbie Carvalko for supporting my visions for books and helping them become realities. I have enjoyed working with Debbie and her colleagues at Praeger. They are a wonderful team of caring people. They appreciate my love of writing and editing books. Debbie somehow knew that, after the publication of the three-volume set on the Psychology of Women and Work (2008, Praeger), which I edited, and the political climate of the 2008 presidential campaign, especially regarding women, I had to follow up those texts with books on feminism. She knows I share Sheila Bender’s sentiment: We write because something inside says we must and we can no longer ignore that voice.
Introduction Michele A. Paludi And how do you look backward? By looking forward. And what do you see? As they look forward, they see what they had to do before they could look backward. And there we have it all. —Gertrude Stein
Alyssa Zucker and Abigail Stewart (2007) reported in their study of 333 university alumnae that feminism is internalized quite differently depending on the developmental stage in our lives. This research led me to consider my own feminist socialization and feminist identity development as I began writing and editing these three volumes on feminism and women’s rights. I was introduced to feminism by my parents, Antoinette and Michael, at a very young age, even though the label feminism was not used by them. Yet, as I came to realize much later, their behavior was very much in keeping with feminist principles. They valued my sisters and me unconditionally; wanted to give us educational opportunities that were denied to them because of the generation into which they were born and because they were first generation Americans whose parents had other values to instill in them; they worked for equality in relationships, politics, and health care. I was 18 the year individuals became eligible to vote at age 18, and both my parents took me to cast my votes that year. They believed that, like them, I had a responsibility to make things better for the next generation. They valued voting; I was told what the Suffragists had endured in order to win this right for us and to remember this each year I vote. I took my first course in feminism as an undergraduate in the early 1970s: ‘‘Sex Roles in American Society’’ with Nancy Walbek. I would share the class discussions with my mother, telling her about the experiences of students in class that were different from my own—for example, being denied the use of certain
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toys considered ‘‘sex inappropriate’’ for them; being tracked into different high school and college programs because of being women or men; women being told by family and friends to hide their achievements from potential dates and mates. I was unable to relate to these experiences and realized for the first time that my parents were feminists, a term to which I was introduced formally in this class and then subsequently as a graduate student when I took courses with Dee Graham and Edna Rawlings. I also learned that I had been exposed to nonstereotyped role models, and because there were all girls in our family, we were not raised to conform to stereotyped behavior. It was in graduate school that I decided to pursue research in feminist psychology, especially in women’s career development. I was fortunate to have a mentor, William Dember, who encouraged me to pursue this research, even though it was not in his area of specialization (i.e., visual perception). Bill encouraged me to take courses with faculty in departments in addition to psychology: educational leadership and family development. He told me this would help put pieces together in understanding the research I was conducting. I thank Kathy Borman and Judy Frankel for their roles in my feminist identity development. A few years later when my father died, Charlie, who attended my father’s wake, came to my mother, my sisters, and me and told us how my father had impacted his life. Charlie, an African American man, told us my father was the only coworker (both were skilled workers at General Electric) who treated him fairly, didn’t talk with him in a derogatory manner, and stopped others from making racial slurs and epithets. I learned for another time what it meant to be a feminist. I dedicated the three-volume set on the Psychology of Women at Work to my parents: ‘‘For Antoinette and Michael Paludi, who encouraged me to define what women’s work is for myself.’’ They wanted all their daughters to be independent thinkers and doers and to help others. They gave us no templates to follow but encouraged us to navigate our own paths. And, especially in my case, encouraged me to leave home to attend graduate school in a city that seemed, to my parents, to be very far away—but they never said ‘‘no.’’ My parents thus taught me that not only did they believe in the economic, educational, social, and political equality of women and men, but they favored the social and legal changes necessary to achieve equality between the sexes and among races, and they were committed to implementing these principles. Perhaps they could not effect change at the national level, but they did do so in personal relationships with their family and friends and on the local level. This is the legacy they left my sisters and me. This book set is a tribute to Antoinette and Michael. I have been reminded of Antoinette and Michael throughout the writing and editing of these volumes on feminism and women’s rights.
Introduction
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I am especially reminded of what my mother used to tell me: ‘‘You are there before you get there.’’ She knew I wanted equality to happen fast and that I grew concerned when feminists didn’t win political elections, when younger women didn’t know the heritage of how they came to be accepted in graduate programs and in certain jobs, how the glass ceiling for women and people of color is still strong, and that worldwide, women constitute 64 percent of all adults who are illiterate (see Susan Basow’s chapter in Volume 1). I have learned that she was right; that change takes time, and to measure change differently, i.e., in increments. As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stated as she suspended her campaign for president of the United States in 2008: ‘‘Although we weren’t able to shatter this highest, hardest glass ceiling this time, thanks to you, it’s got about 18 million cracks in it, and the light is shining through like never before.’’ The chapters in these volumes show us where the light is shining through on feminism. All three volumes represent what Judith Lorber (1998) and Snelling (1999) identified: several types of feminism and feminists. Lorber (1998) categorized feminism into three major areas: gender reform, gender resistance, and gender rebellion. Genderreform feminism emphasizes similarities between women and men rather than focusing on differences between them. Gender-resistance feminism holds that formal legal rights alone will not end gender inequality; male dominance is too ingrained into social relations. Gender-resistance feminism focuses on how men and women are different—cognitively, emotionally, and socially—and urges women to form women-centered organizations and communities. Genderrebellion feminism looks at the interrelationships among inequalities of sex, race, ethnicity, social class, and sexual orientation. A number of years ago my text on the psychology of women displayed a quilt on its cover (Paludi, 2002). I asked for this design to highlight Gentry’s (1989) image of quilt making for understanding feminism. These three volumes on feminism and women’s rights also represent quilt making in understanding feminism. Each contributor has made one piece of the quilt that has been joined with pieces by other contributors. Each of the contributors has used different stitching on their piece of the quilt. No one chapter is more important than the other. We need all pieces if we are to complete the quilt that is feminism. According to Gentry (1989): Feminist psychology and feminism in general seem to be at the point of trying to piece together the individual parts of a quilt. The overall pattern of the quilt that we want is still emerging. No one knows what equality in a post-patriarchal world will look like. We are beginning to piece the separate parts together—to explore the kinds of stitching to use in connecting the pieces and how to place the separate pieces into the
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In Volume 1, Heritage, Roles, and Issues, contributors have discussed efforts to integrate feminist scholarship into several disciplines, including education, work, science, military, religion, and politics. As Catherine Stimpson (1971) noted, there have been three kinds of problems in the disciplines and curriculum with respect to women: omission, distortions, and trivializations. Each of the contributors to Volume 1 notes where the sexism in the disciplines has existed and where feminist correctives have restructured the disciplines. Jennifer Martin, in her chapter concerning gender differences in abilities, noted: Women have made significant social, academic, and occupational gains in the past 50 years; for example, women are entering nontraditional fields with more frequency, participating in high school and college sports more than ever before, and carving out more egalitarian roles for themselves within the family. However, women have still not ultimately achieved true equity with their male counterparts. . . . The idea that women somehow possess different or inferior aptitudes when compared to their male counterparts can lead to diminished expectations for women—in terms of how they view themselves and how others view them.
In Volume 2, Mental and Physical Health, contributors deal with violence and discrimination against girls and women and the resulting impact on women’s emotional and physical well being, interpersonal relationships, career development, and self-concept. Types of discrimination and victimization addressed are sexual harassment, sexual violence, harassment of sexual minorities, and rape and violence in the context of women’s HIV risk. Contributors have addressed these issues globally. Bethany Waits and Paula Lundberg-Love offer new cutting edge evidence on neurological responses in women victims of sexual violence. Therapeutic support for women victims of violence is also addressed in this volume, including feminist therapy and ethnocultural psychotherapy. All contributors note that sexual victimization is prevalent in the United States and globally, as is sexual harassment and sexual orientation discrimination. As Waits and Lundberg-Love note: Female survivors of sexual violence are everywhere. They are in universities, religious institutions, court rooms, hospitals, and the military. They are daughters, mothers, spouses, sisters, friends, next-door neighbors, and co-workers. Many differ in age, education, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. . . . However, their lives are connected by the violence that they have experienced.
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The international focus on feminism and women’s rights is continued in Volume 3, Feminism as Human Rights. In this volume, contributors address laws on sexual harassment, pay equity, and rape. Furthermore, contributors speak to the injustices to women with disabilities. Human rights issues such as arranged and forced marriage for women, pornography, and the globalization of western appearance ideals are also presented in this volume. All contributors to this volume call for further advocacy on behalf of women. As Noorfarah Merali stated: It is only if arranged marriages are understood in light of their intentions, diverse forms, actual outcomes, and local or international contexts that laws, policies, and human rights advocacy can be appropriately channeled to protect and preserve women’s well-being.
In addition to the scholarly reviews of research on feminism and women’s rights, I have included women’s personal accounts of their own feminist identity development. They are at different stages in life, in their career, and in relationships and yet they are bound by shared stories. It is my hope that these volumes encourage individuals to self identify as feminists. Research has suggested for some time that most people reject the term ‘‘feminist’’ when describing themselves but support feminist principles—equal pay for equal work, for example (see Paludi et al., Volume 3). Goldner’s (1994) study noted that when women who hold feminist beliefs anticipate a negative reaction from their peers to the label ‘‘feminist,’’ they will avoid using the term to describe themselves. Goldner indicated that media is a primary source of negative images of feminists. It is common to see photos of women identified as feminists having clenched fists. These images are not representative of feminists. More recent research by Rudman and Fairchild (2007) found that the stereotype that feminists are unattractive still persists. However, these images are rejected by individuals, especially during adolescence and young adulthood, when maintaining gender role stereotypic behavior is reinforced and is central to their self-esteem and self-concept. Paludi, Paludi, and DeFour (2004) noted that individuals reject the label feminist because they view themselves as in control, as powerful rather than as victims of gender inequality. Thus, they perceive the term ‘‘feminist’’ to imply a powerless position, which they reject (Rhode, 1977). The contributors to each of the three volumes of Feminism and Women’s Rights Worldwide encourage us to think critically about feminism, to value cultural experiences and to integrate our knowledge of theories and research about feminism with our own life experiences. The chapters encouraged me to do this in remembering my own feminist
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socialization. I encourage you to do the same. It is my hope these three volumes serve as a ‘‘life raft’’ (Klonis, Endo, Crosby, and Worell, 1997) for feminists, especially those in the millennial generation. REFERENCES Gentry, M. (1989). Introduction: Feminist perspectives on gender and thought: Paradox and potential. In M. Crawford & M. Gentry (Eds.), Gender and thought. New York: Springer-Verlag. Goldner, M. (1994). Accounting for race and class variation in the disjuncture between feminist identity and feminist beliefs: The place of negative labels and social movements. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, Los Angeles. Klonis, S., Endo, J., Crosby, F., & Worell, J. (1997). Feminism as life raft. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 21, 333–345. Lorber, J. (1998). Gender inequality: Feminist theories and politics. Los Angeles: Roxbury. Paludi, M. (2002). The psychology of women. 2nd ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Paludi, M., ed. (2008). The psychology of women at work: Challenges and solutions for our female workforce. Westport, CT: Praeger. Paludi, M., Paludi, C., & DeFour, D. (2004). Introduction: The more things change, the more they stay the same. In M. Paludi (Ed.), Praeger guide to the psychology of gender. xi–xxxi. Westport, CT: Praeger. Rhode, D. (1997). Speaking of sex. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rudman, L., & Fairchild, K. (2007). The F word: Is feminism incompatible with beauty and romance? Psychology of Women Quarterly, 31, 125–136. Snelling, S. (1999). Women’s perspectives on feminism. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 23, 247–266. Stimpson, C. (1971). Thy neighbor’s wife, thy neighbor’s servants: Women’s liberation and black civil rights. In V. Gornick & B. Moran (Eds.), Woman in sexist society: Studies in power and powerlessness. New York: Basic Books. Zucker, A., & Stewart, A. (2007). Growing up and growing older: Feminism as a context for women’s lives. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 31, 137–145.
Chapter 1
Global Feminism Anne Sisson Runyan
‘‘Global feminism’’ has increasingly been associated with contemporary international feminist nongovernmental (NGO) campaigns to make gender policymaking inroads into intergovernmental organization (IGO) policymaking with impacts on national policymaking. Although the United Nations (UN) Decade for Women (1975–1985) laid the groundwork for these initiatives, they have accelerated since the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995 that produced the Beijing Platform for Action (BPA). Also responsible for the increase in gender policymaking at international and national levels is the rise of ‘‘global governance,’’ particularly in the post-Cold War era at a time when economic globalization, or the spread of global capital, was surging. Global governance has come to refer to a constellation of global actors including states; IGOs such as the UN bodies and agencies and such international financial institutions (IFIs) as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Trade Organization (WTO); regional governments such as the European Union (EU) and regional IGOs such as organizations of African, American, and Asian states and free-trade regimes like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA); global market actors such as transnational corporations (TNCs); and global civil society actors such as transnational NGOs (Rai, 2008). States make up IGOs, and the wealthiest and most militarily powerful states hold primacy in them. At the same time, states are variously subordinated to IGO rules made by state representatives with increasing input by NGO and other non-state actors, which range from international laws and regulations to agreed-upon norms. The greater openings for nonstate actors and the seeming diffusion of power that global governance signifies has created a political opportunity structure that ‘‘seems open
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for feminism, particularly as it takes up the discourses of human rights and development’’ (Ferree, 2006, p. 10). However, the rise of global governance that has engendered global feminist campaigns for gender policymaking is also associated with the rise of neoliberalism, a ‘‘free market’’ ideology that subsumes all life activities and life forms under the dictates of market efficiency. It has also provided openings for a variety of neoconservative non-state actors hostile to feminism, particularly in relation to reproduction and sexuality issues, but also in relation to feminist critiques of racism, neocolonialism, militarism, and capitalism. The twin forces of neoliberalism and neoconservativism have produced significant concerns about global feminism’s entanglement with and cooptation by these forces among those who have developed and/or identified with the alternative conceptualization of ‘‘transnational feminism,’’ which refers to feminisms resistant to the colonizing and imperializing moves of neoliberal and neoconservative forces, including those feminisms co-opted by or allied with them. Thus, this treatment of global feminism not only provides a discussion of the some of the impact it has had on global policymaking, which, in turn, has affected national policymaking, but also raises some transnational feminist critiques of the relationship between global feminism and the imperialist priorities of neoliberal and neoconservative forces. It will conclude with some thoughts on how this relationship is being resisted and how it can be minimized. GLOBAL FEMINISM AND GENDER POLICYMAKING Although the 2008–2009 report of on the world’s women issued by the UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) shows only modest gains on most measures of women’s status worldwide, as well as serious setbacks in some regions of the world in terms of women’s well-being due to war, economic policies and instabilities, and neo- or religiously conservative regimes, setbacks that are no doubt being exacerbated and spread more widely by the current worldwide financial and economic crisis, much has changed in terms of the attention brought to the issue of gender in the international community, especially over the past two decades. As IGOs became more significant actors in terms of affecting state behavior with the rise of global governance, global feminist attention began to focus on women’s representation in these bodies. In 1990, the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) supported the goal lobbied for by women’s movements to have 30 percent of world decision-making positions held by women by 1995 (Dahlerup, 2006). In 1995, the UN committed itself to increasing the number of women on its professional staff to 30 percent by 1990, which it achieved in 1991. In 1998, the General Assembly further
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committed to the 50/50 goal of gender parity in all posts in the UN system (UN, 2000), but this is far from being achieved, despite a global 50/50 campaign launched by a U.S.-based, global NGO, Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO), to gain gender parity in national and international decision-making bodies by 2020. According to UNIFEM, as of 2006, women remain concentrated in the lowest levels of the UN professional staff (2008), and it is primarily UN agencies with social welfare portfolios and/or that have been headed by women that have reached the ‘‘parity zone’’ of 40 percent women on professional staffs (UNIFEM, 2008, p. 105). Although progress toward gender decision-making parity, especially at the highest levels of IGOs, is slow and uneven, the UN has developed a substantial gender equality architecture, which includes the Office of the Special Adviser on Gender Issues (OSAGI), the UNIFEM, the United Nations Division for the Advancement of Women (UNDAW), and the International Institute for Research and Training of Women (UN-INSTRAW) along with gender units within many UN agencies. However, these tend to be comparatively weak in terms of staff and resources. For example, in 2003, UNIFEM had only 47 core staff compared with UNICEF with 2,794 (UNIFEM, 2008). To attempt to remedy this, WEDO and the U.S.-based Center for Women’s Global Leadership, in conjunction with 90 other global and regional feminist NGOs headquartered in the global North and global South, spearheaded the Gender Equality Architecture Reform or GEAR campaign to call for a consolidated UN agency for women that would combine the OSAGI, UNDAW, and UNIFEM offices, be headed by a new under-secretary general, and garner significantly more resources in terms of staff and budget as a result of the increased status of such an agency. In September 2008, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution instructing the UN secretary-general to develop a paper outlining the options and making recommendations for best enhancing the UN gender equality architecture. Such IGO norm-setting in terms of women’s formal and structural representation brought about by global feminist NGO campaigns has also influenced member states in terms of the adoption of gender quotas (to get more women into elective office) and gender mainstreaming (designed to avoid building gender discrimination into any government policy). Various forms of gender quotas to get women into national public office have been instituted in at least 90 countries (Dahlerup, 2006). As of 2005, only 16 percent of the world’s parliamentarians were women; however, 17 countries had reached or exceeded the 30 percent target, with post-genocide Rwanda topping the list at 48.5 percent (and in 2008 becoming the first country with more female than male legislators), followed by the Nordic countries, and a mix of Latin American and other northern European and African states
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(Dahlerup, 2006). Almost all of these had legal or party gender quota systems in combination with proportional representation systems. Although quota systems vary in form and efficacy, they were specifically promoted in the BPA, which was unanimously supported by the world’s governments, as the fast-track way to increase women’s political representation. Following that conference, in Latin America alone, 11 out of 19 governments had adopted either constitutional or legal gender quotas by 2000 (Ara ujo and Garcia, 2006). According to UNIFEM’s Progress of the World’s Women Report 2008/2009, ‘‘the proportion of women in national assemblies has accelerated over the past decade from 11.6 percent in 1995 to 18.4 percent as of May 2008,’’ compared with only a one percentage point gain between 1975 and 1995 (2008, p. 21). UNIFEM accounts for this relatively dramatic rise by pointing primarily to the increased use of legally required or voluntary quota systems and proportional representation electoral systems, practices which in some cases were stimulated by gender equality advocates working at international and national levels who have used the BPA for leverage and by the adoption in 2000 of the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which include Goal 3 that promotes gender equality and women’s empowerment (UNIFEM, 2008). There are many reasons for this recent ‘‘contagion’’ of gender quotas, but among them is a growing international consensus or norm, advocated by women’s movements worldwide and supported by feminist scholarship, that gender equality in the form of women’s greater political representation, ideally to the point of parity with men, is necessary for policies claiming or aspiring to be modern and democratic. Gender mainstreaming also gained momentum and increasing acceptance during the same period that gender quotas were advancing. Although definitions vary somewhat, gender mainstreaming refers generally to integrating the principle of gender equality into any (inter) governmental policy (not just those associated with so-called women’s issues, such as family and violence against women) to ensure that in practice it does not, wittingly or unwittingly, increase or sustain inequalities between women and men (Squires, 2007). It was first advocated in the context of economic development policies where it was found by feminist research from the 1970s onward that approaches taken by bodies like the World Bank, such as the promotion of capitalintensive agriculture for export, tended to privilege men who had or were given more access to capital, agricultural inputs and machinery, and land ownership. Women, although heavily involved in subsistence agriculture that is the main source of family food consumption, were not seen as farmers or landowners and, thus, did not benefit from this kind of World Bank funding. This disparity not only increased men’s power over women in agricultural work and families, but also
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contributed to producing more hunger and malnutrition when women’s work of subsistence farming was increasingly so devalued and unsupported. The World Bank and a number of other supranational institutions, ranging from the UN and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to the European Union (EU), as well as many development agencies within states in the North, have been convinced by such findings to adopt gender mainstreaming, also called for in the BPA, to try to avoid such outcomes (Squires, 2007). There have been numerous downsides to this approach, but its institutionalization represents a sea change in its recognition that gender is infused in all (world) political issues and legitimizes the need for ‘‘gender experts’’ in global governance and in national governments, often taking the form of ‘‘femocrats’’ who have headed up women’s policy agencies that sprang up during the UN Decade for Women in many countries and who are often charged with implementing gender mainstreaming at national and international levels. No less than the UN Security Council has also been pressured by global feminists to give some attention to gender. For example, Security Council Resolution 1325, passed in 2000, calls for women to be present at peace negotiating tables, a goal long advocated by women’s peace movements that have claimed women have greater interests and different stakes in ending war. It is not that women are inherently more peaceful, but rather their predominantly civilian status means that they are increasingly bearing the high structural costs of modern warfare. With the rise of ‘‘total’’ wars in the twentieth century, wherein there is little separation between the battlefront and the home front, civilians are an increasing proportion of those left homeless, diseased, and hungry, turned into refugees, and made victims of sexual and domestic assault (by enemy and ‘‘friendly’’ combatants). Although combatants still die in greater numbers from direct violence, civilian deaths from direct violence and more often indirect violence continue to rise (Goldstein, 2001). The majority of civilians are women and children (both female and male), despite some increases in women in state and non-state militaries and in child soldiers (both male and female) pressed into combat. Women, as can be seen in the case of post-genocide Rwanda, also are critical to the mending of post-conflict societies, as they tend to be the backbone of civil society, most centrally recreating households and communities. Although part of a longer and wider struggle for women’s security from militarized violence, an NGO Working Group on Women and International Peace and Security, consisting of the century-old Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), the Women’s Caucus for Gender Justice, Amnesty International, International Alert, the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children, and the Hague Appeal for Peace in collaboration with UNIFEM, is
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credited with the final push to have the UN Security Council pass Resolution 1325 in 2000 (Cohn, 2008). Although nonbinding, 1325 ‘‘calls on’’ the UN and member countries to do the following: protect women from gender-based violence in war zones and include women (and gender perspectives) in peace negotiations, support their peacemaking initiatives in addition to providing gender-sensitive training to peacekeepers, and engage in gender mainstreaming through UN monitoring of and reporting on the gender dimensions of conflict and conflict resolution, including the impact of armed conflict on women and girls and the roles of women in peacemaking. Although 1325 was hailed as a breakthrough document, its effects were muted at best. Widespread rapes, such as in the Democratic Republic of Congo conflict as well as in the Darfur genocide in Sudan, and increased reports of rape by peacekeeping forces were featured in subsequent UN secretary-general studies and reports on women, peace, and security that were mandated by 1325. This acknowledgment of worsening gender violence in war led to the passage of UN Security Council Resolution 1820 in 2008. Although also nonbinding, the text of 1820 reaffirms the principles of 1325, but ‘‘stresses’’ sexual violence as a war crime, ‘‘demands’’ its cessation and no amnesty for its perpetrators, ‘‘requests’’ a policy of ‘‘zero tolerance’’ for sexual violence by UN peacekeepers and in UN refugee camps, and ‘‘requests’’ consultation with women and women’s organizations to find solutions to sexual violence. Predating these Security Council resolutions was a significant recognition and prosecution of rape as a war crime and crime against humanity, now codified in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, following the highly visible use of systematic rape in the early 1990s in the wars in the former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda. Systematic wartime rape not only neutralizes women as threats, but also seeks to weaken men’s resolve to fight by ‘‘soiling their women’’ while also trying to wipe out an enemy culture or ethnicity by impregnating women with ‘‘alien’’ seed or keeping them from reproducing altogether. The assumption that rape was merely a natural ‘‘spoil of war’’ (for men) had kept it from being fully recognized as an international war crime until feminist activists and events in Bosnia and Rwanda made it clear that rape was a direct violation of women’s human rights, rising to the level of torture as an instrument of warfare. The ideas that women have human rights and that women’s human rights expand traditional definitions of human rights were significantly advanced by the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), initially adopted in 1979 following the UN Decade for Women and going into force in 1981. By 2000, only 25 countries (including most glaringly the United States, as well as a smattering of Muslim and least-developed countries) had
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failed to ratify CEDAW, making it the second most widely ratified human rights convention (UN, 2000). As of 2009, only eight countries, including the United States, remain non-signatories, although the Obama administration supports CEDAW and is seeking Congressional approval for it. Through CEDAW and subsequent UN conferences on human rights, particularly throughout the 1990s, women’s movements and NGOs made the case that ‘‘women’s rights are human rights,’’ achieving international recognition that reproductive and, to some degree, sexual rights were just as important as and connected to political and economic rights. As long as women are denied choices about if, when, and under what conditions they bear children or terminate pregnancies; are subject to sexual and domestic abuse; and are limited in their sexual expressions and orientations, they will not be able to exercise their political and economic rights. Although women’s and other human rights continue to be violated on a massive scale, the widespread ratification of CEDAW has given women’s movements throughout much of the world a major tool through which to hold their governments accountable for continued abuses.
TRANSNATIONAL FEMINIST CRITIQUES OF GLOBAL FEMINISM Although these global feminist gains are significant and even astonishing given the relative speed with which they have been taken up over the past few decades by powerful institutions, global feminism is not without problem. Postcolonial feminist cultural theorists, in particular, have critiqued ‘‘global’’ feminism for what, they argue, is its implication in a Western radical feminist notion of shared, worldwide gender oppression, mostly in the form of assaults on women’s bodies, as its basis. This is productive of a ‘‘missionary’’ model of feminism, with its emphasis on cataloguing violence against women’s bodies and situating the most ‘‘barbaric’’ forms of it in the ‘‘Third World’’ from which women, particularly there, must be saved. Grewal and Kaplan (1994) posited instead the idea of ‘‘transnational feminist practices’’ that resist ‘‘scattered hegemonies,’’ which are not reducible to an overarching conception of gender oppression and take multiple forms at multiple levels and in multiple contexts, and result from multiple sources. Most importantly, transnational practices, they argue, should resist imperializing forces that sustain ‘‘center and periphery’’ relations of any kind, and recommend, for example, that a truly transnational feminist practice for Western feminists would be to protest their own governments’ imperial actions that sustain repressive political regimes in the global South rather than seeking to save ‘‘Third World’’ women from ‘‘their’’ patriarchal cultures.
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They further use the term, ‘‘transnational,’’ to signal that there has been a shift from ‘‘international’’ relations between states and between social movements when national boundaries were assumed to be less permeable to an environment in which transnational capital and institutions and their global hegemonies are ascendant. In this sense, they argue, transnational feminism is different from earlier forms of international feminism as relations among national feminisms in that it seeks to counter these global hegemonies while at the same time seeking not to reproduce exclusivist national or other identities in resistance to them. While they and others (see, for example, Hesford and Kozol, 2005) recognize that the moniker ‘‘transnational’’ also carries baggage to the degree that it, too, is associated with transnational corporations and capital, they and others have also distinguished transnational feminism from global feminism. A flashpoint that particularly set up a debate structured as transnational feminism versus global feminism was the Women’s Rights are Human Rights campaign. As Hesford and Kozol (2005, p. 19) frame the debate, it is between the ‘‘political efficacy’’ of claiming, codifying, and enforcing the observance of the universality of women’s human rights as advocated by global feminists and the political costs of feeding into imperial moves and re-colonizing processes under the banner of women’s human rights as argued by transnational feminists. Originally promulgated, primarily by feminists in the West, as a concept and strategy to create a more inclusive notion of rights that would particularly take into account both public and private forms of violence against women engaged in not just by the state, but actors below and above the state, women’s human rights was assumed to be a mechanism that had leverage in international law and could have universal appeal to women, cutting across their differing social locations and priorities through an ever-expanding ‘‘list’’ of rights. However, the most common critiques of women’s human rights practices and discourses (and global feminisms more generally) focus on the following: the eliteness of globe-trotting NGO actors in both the North and South who can attend a bevy of international conferences and forums and lobby IGOs, thereby separating them from more grassroots, ‘‘local’’ actors; the dependence on IGO, and particularly Western, funding that makes NGOs more beholden to funders than to social movements, thereby de-radicalizing their demands; the Western liberal-inscribed notion of ‘‘rights’’ that privileges individualism and civil and political rights over social and economic rights; the appropriation by the West of the universal that is set up against the particular outside the West; and the tendency to single out a reductive notion of Third World ‘‘cultural’’ oppression of women as the target for women’s human rights enforcement, re-instating discourses of rescue and
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deflecting attention away from the ongoing violence of neoliberal capitalism and militarism purveyed by the West. Nevertheless, critiques of women’s human rights have been taken further by arguing that human rights generally, far from being antistatist, actually are used to enhance the disciplinary power of neocolonial and postcolonial states who claim they are ‘‘friendly’’ to them by providing the cover of progressivism and modernity to engage in selective punitive action at home and abroad against proscribed ‘‘enemies’’ of the state in the name of protecting (women’s) human rights (Grewal, 2005). While critics and proponents of realpolitik in international relations have long observed that human rights have always been used selectively for the deployment of state power, women’s human rights has particularly constituted an instrument of U.S. foreign policy in the post-9/11 period, making it particularly contested territory among feminists. One reading of this is the cooptation of women’s human rights discourse by U.S. neoconservatives and their ‘‘front’’ women ranging from Laura Bush and Karen Hughes to Condoleezza Rice. Feminist political theorist Zillah Eisenstein (2007) referred to women as the seemingly ‘‘diverse’’ ‘‘sexual decoys’’ of the Bush Administration ‘‘who embrace militarism and its masculinist constructions while supposedly constructing a compassionate female face for their conservativism’’ to ‘‘camouflage war’’ (p. 98). Another even more critical reading of this is that not just far-from-feminist right wing women, but the women’s human rights regime itself, particularly as embodied by the U.S. Feminist Majority’s campaign to ‘‘free’’ women from the Taliban itself goaded Gulf War II, constitute imperial feminism. As Amy Farrell and Patrice MacDermott (2005) argue, the mainstream U.S. women’s movement’s turn to ‘‘international activism’’ served ‘‘a strategic function,’’ namely ‘‘to mobilize their constituencies, attract new and younger members, gain resources, and, perhaps most importantly, legitimate their existence in the United States in a ‘postfeminist’ era’’ marked by anti-feminist conservative backlashes and rise of ‘‘commercial’’ feminism, or ‘‘the claiming of feminism by corporations and ad agencies’’ that ‘‘overpowered the work of feminists engaged in prison reform, economic justice, and anti-racist activism’’ (pp. 46–47). In this climate, ‘‘the activism and emphasis on the victim status of Third World women’’ were not only ‘‘key to keeping the U.S. movement alive,’’ but also ‘‘central to the very construction of American feminism in the late twentieth century’’ (Farrell & MacDermott, 2005, p. 47). While postcolonial feminists would argue that this has always been central to the construction of mainstream Western, white feminism, Farrell and MacDermott also point out that the Feminist Majority was further motivated by a desire ‘‘to be recognized as a ‘player’ in foreign policy’’ (2005, p. 47), an arena in which feminists, and women more
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generally, have been historically denied any legitimacy, as long argued by feminist international relations scholars. As Susan Faludi chronicles in her recent book, The Terror Dream (2007), women were completely disappeared as commentators in the U.S. national press post-9/11 and feminism was declared dead in that press for its soft-headedness that endangered national security through either its anti-militarist stance or its gender equity in the military stance, both of which emasculated the state in a dangerous world. Not surprisingly, the net effect of pursuing a feminist legitimation project under a neoconservative regime and without recognition of how central racism and colonization have been to the construction of the U.S. state and how these are reproduced in mainstream social movements that act as its agents even as they may contest it in some ways, the ‘‘female voice which gained most attention after September 11 was not Robin Morgan’s or Eleanor Smeal’s but that of First Lady Laura Bush’’ (Faludi, 2007, p. 49). Indeed, as Faludi notes, the Feminist Majority remained vilified by U.S. neoconservative commentators who claimed to be the true saviors of Afghan women, while particularly postcolonial feminists of color (including some outside the United States), who dared to question the value of going to war to ‘‘save’’ women, were subjected to death threats from members of ‘‘civil society.’’
GLOBAL FEMINISM AND NEOLIBERAL GOVERNMENTALITY Although the women’s human rights movement is more varied and cannot be reduced to this particular case of its extreme dangers, perhaps the most serious critique of it, and indeed all gender mainstreaming efforts associated with global feminism, is the charge of feminism becoming ‘‘governmentalized’’ under neoliberalism (see, for example, Grewal, 2005). Just as women were gaining voice and ground in international forums and policymaking arenas, particularly in the first decade of the post–Cold War period, a series of political, economic, cultural, and environmental shocks heightened both direct and structural violence in world politics. Undergirding globalization is the economic philosophy or ideology of neoliberalism that was developed by economists in the global North and imposed there and on the global South. Critics refer to this as a form of economic or market ‘‘fundamentalism’’ (Klein, 2007), as it represents a total faith in the market, unfettered by state regulation and protections for citizens, and a total belief in the dismantling of the welfare state through the privatization for profit of public services, leaving no accountability or universal access to satisfaction of basic needs. The ensuing economic insecurities have also unleashed a variety of other fundamentalisms, including political, religious, ethnic, and other cultural ones. Neoconservativism combines
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a neoliberal faith in the market with the view that the only role for the state is a coercive one: first, to control other states through strong national defense and offense (which is part and parcel of a militarist ideology), and second, to control populations through the imposition of laws that limit civil liberties and human rights, insisting that people conform to a particular set of behaviors deemed ‘‘moral.’’ Long before the current economic crisis, evidence had been piling up that most women were bearing the brunt of the new global economy (Marchand & Runyan, 2000). For example, as reproductive workers in the voluntaristic economy, or household members given by gender ideology the most responsibility for the creation and care of family and community members on an unpaid basis, women—who are also the largest consumers and providers of social services because of their reproductive roles—have lost the most with the reduction or privatization of social services. The retreat of the welfare state has meant that women have had to take on additional roles in the private or domestic sphere that used to be public services for which women also used to be paid or paid better. As productive workers in the cash economy, women, who have been rendered as ‘‘cheap’’ labor by gender ideology, became the preferred labor force in low-wage service and light-industrial assembly work created by offshore production. Some women have benefited to a degree from this newfound employment, but their working conditions—including low wages, lack of union protections, poor health and safety regulations, sexual harassment, and polluted and dangerous workplaces and living spaces— have kept them in subordinate and precarious positions. Subordinate men, such as those in the working classes, have suffered as well, having their skills, wages, and jobs ‘‘feminized’’ (devalued or eliminated). But this effect, too, boomerangs on women in such forms as enduring higher incidences of domestic violence, taking full responsibility for both wage and reproductive work, and/or being left behind to sustain the household alone when men migrate for jobs elsewhere or having to migrate themselves to find work, thus leaving their families behind. The generalized response by IGOs to these gendered downsides of neoliberal globalization that feminist academics and NGOs have documented can be characterized as neoliberal governmentality, in which global feminist NGOs have also been implicated. Postmodern theorist Michel Foucault (1991) coined the term ‘‘governmentality’’ to refer to how individuals and populations ‘‘could now be controlled, administrated, empowered, or disciplined through certain governmental techniques’’ (Woehl, 2008, p. 69). Governmentality pertains not only to state and suprastate bureaucratic apparatuses and policies but also to civil society institutions (including NGOs) that enable governing on the basis of rational, scientific, and statistical calculations and produce
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subjectivities that are amenable to being managed or regulated and even participate in self-management or self-regulation in conformance with rationalized approaches to ‘‘problem-solving’’ (Woehl, 2008, pp. 65–66), now associated with ‘‘good governance.’’ Power in this sense is more diffuse and both repressive and enabling, but rests upon hegemony, or the inculcation of ‘‘the right order’’ that brooks no deviation. Neoliberal governmentality refers to the ascendance of the global capitalist economy and ‘‘economic rationality’’ as ‘‘the sole criteria for governance’’ (Woehl, 2008, p. 69). Under neoliberal governmentality, the state is reduced primarily to the promotion of the ‘‘free market,’’ leading to the privatization of social welfare and the marketization of political and social life, whereby populations are to be ‘‘free, self-managing, and self-enterprising individuals in different spheres of life— health, education, bureaucracy, the professions, and so on. The neoliberal subject is therefore not a citizen with claims on the state but a self-enterprising citizen-subject who is obligated to become an ‘entrepreneur of himself or herself’ ’’ (Ong, 2006, p. 14). In this scenario, gender equality becomes the technique to ‘‘free’’ women to be these free market actors, taking care of their own needs without resort to the state for their welfare. The male (and class-based) norm of ‘‘free market’’ actors, devoid of dependents and interdependencies, and an androcentric construction of states as not responsible for the welfare of their citizenries are strengthened by this reduction of gender equality to the production of ‘‘economic woman’’ in the form of ‘‘economic man.’’ The UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), largely the product of IGOs, and especially IFIs, but which are often touted as central to achieving gender equality, are particularly visible features of neoliberal governmentality. The eight MDGs include (1) eradicate extreme poverty and hunger; (2) achieve universal primary education; (3) promote gender equality and empower women: (4) reduce child mortality; (5) improve maternal health; (6) combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases; (7) ensure environmental sustainability; and (8) create a global partnership for development (UNIFEM, 2008). Progress on these goals is measured and monitored by the UN (based on statistics provided by states) in relation to particular quantitative targets set over time within each of the goals, such as cutting in half by 2015 the proportion of people with incomes of less than one dollar per day and suffering from hunger, as well as the more recent target of achieving full employment in decent work for all people by that date to reach Goal 1 (UNIFEM, 2008). Various indicators are used and periodically added to measure these targets, such as the proportions of the population living on one dollar per day, dietary consumption rates of the poor, and numbers of underweight children (UNIFEM, 2008). Goal 3 is the one goal that specifically targets women in general (not just mothers as in
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the case of maternal health) and promotes gender equality even though all the other goals relate to the multiple conditions that (dis)empower women. On the face of it, the MDGs do represent a seeming shift in global priorities. The dominant approach to development since World War II and through most of the twentieth century was one focused on economic development to the exclusion of social or human development. Large scale, capital-intensive, and high-technology projects that privileged male actors, from decision-makers to workers, were systematically promoted and funded by the World Bank to ‘‘modernize’’ (read, Westernize) the infrastructure and economies of the so-called developing countries. Gross Domestic Product (GDP)—a measurement of the output of domestic goods and services by a nation—does not measure human well-being and in fact externalizes (or does not take into account) the costs of human misery and environmental destruction, yet it became the central indicator of ‘‘growth’’ and economic growth was to be pursued at any human and environmental cost. The shift to development initiatives with a more human, and even female, face, however, is accomplished through neoliberal ‘‘problem-solving’’ techniques that frame human immiseration and gender inequality not as products of unjust global capitalism, but rather as drags on it that must be addressed to enhance market efficiency through the production of more market ready actors. Moreover, aside from the weaknesses of Goal 3 in terms of its singular target to end educational disparities between males and females at all levels of education by 2015 (which is far from being reached in the case of higher education), it shares with all the other goals the technique of using bureaucratic methods and quantitative indicators as reductionist tools to manage populations in order to depoliticize social justice issues and demobilize social movements critical of neoliberal globalization. Thus, the traction that gender equality has gained in the context of global governance can be read more critically and most cynically as just another neoliberal strategy, with global feminist NGOs and femocrats being turned into agents of neoliberal governmentality. Indeed, the very proliferation of global feminist NGOs can be seen as a feature of neoliberal governmentality, taking on roles of states to ‘‘manage’’ (depoliticize) populations and their problems and even providing services, albeit in far more under-resourced ways, that states used to provide. This has implications as well for women gaining public office in states, for if the reigning ideology is that states are to withhold public service in favor of privatization that makes individuals solely responsible for their own welfare, then it is difficult to mount more expansive public commitments and garner more public resources for changing negative conditions for women (as well as children, nonelite men, and even the planet).
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GLOBAL FEMINIST POLITICS VERSUS NEOLIBERAL GOVERNMENTALITY There is little question that IGOs, and especially the more powerful IFIs, frame gender equality as a matter of modern economic efficiency. States have been most responsive to this framing, and global feminist NGOs have often made their own arguments in relation to it. However, it is also the case that local, grassroots, and national women’s movements have drawn on these instruments of neoliberal governmentality to make claims on states, although NGOs and femocrats, to varying degrees, continue to critique the insufficiencies of governmental responses. Thus, there are contradictions in this process that open up opportunities for resistance to neoliberal governmentality and for more radical demands than it typically allows. However, just as neoliberal governmentality circumscribes how (global) gender issues are framed, the presence of women in global governance is no guarantee that they will be acted upon or reframed in social justice terms. Still, as Mary Hawkesworth (2006, p. 148) argues, even though global feminism and ‘‘neoliberal globalism’’ have pursued similar avenues ‘‘to leverage change’’ through global policymaking to impact state behavior, global feminism, particularly as transnational feminist critiques and perspectives are brought to bear on NGO work and campaigns, retains and cultivates a still oppositional stance to neoliberal globalism. As she puts it, global feminism ‘‘envisions an expanded state provision to create adequate health care, education, welfare, employment, personal security, and a range of equity policies that redress gender- and race-based injustices,’’ whereas neoliberal globalism ‘‘seeks to cut back the very aspects of the state that feminist activists seek to build up’’ (p. 149). At the same time, global feminism ‘‘envisions transformations in consciousness that would make visible, actionable, and intolerable gender- and race-based inequities that permeate interpersonal relations, social organizations, economic and political structures, and symbol systems,’’ whereas neoliberal globalism seeks a ‘‘transformation of consciousness’’ that produces an ‘‘‘export mentality’ and ‘market mentality,’ while whittling away ‘protest mentalities’’’ (p. 149). Similarly, as Val Moghadam (2006) points out, ‘‘if globalization is understood as a complex process of economic, political, and cultural change on a world scale that entails integration, marginalization, exploitation, and resistance, then global feminism may be seen as both an outcome of global integration and a form of resistance to domination’’ constituting ‘‘the specter that haunts the global economy and its imperial center’’ (p. 71). True, Moghadam argues, the discourse of women’s human rights can be and is co-opted, but it still can retain its meaning when used by feminists ‘‘who fight to end sexual violence, poverty,
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militarism, and all inequalities and call for state provisioning, democratic participation, and an end to discriminations, exploitations, and violence’’ (p. 71). To better actualize these oppositional politics, however, Aili Tripp (2006) insists that global feminists, particularly from privileged spaces in the North (and South), must engage far better in the following transnational feminist practices: first, ‘‘paying attention to what has already been done by local actors and taking cues from them’’ is a necessity for devising any global solidarity campaign; second, global campaigns ‘‘should reflect local priorities’’ and not expropriate the issues of women in particular parts of the world to aggrandize and sensationalize the campaigns of global or other national NGOs; third, Northern feminist NGOs should use their greater influence to pressure their own most powerful governments and the IGOs those governments control to redirect policies away from militarism and neoliberal globalization; and fourth, Northern feminists should engage in global feminist actions not just to help change the conditions of women elsewhere, but to change their own oppressive conditions by both learning from activists elsewhere and making use of the global gender instruments that they have worked to institute. Only through such noncolonizing practices can global feminism not be haunted itself by imperialist forces and motivations. REFERENCES Ara ujo, C., & Garcia, A. I. (2006). The experience and the impact of quotas in Latin America. In D. Dahlerup (Ed.), Women, quotas, and politics (pp. 83–111). New York: Routledge. Cohn, C. (2008). Mainstreaming gender in UN security policy: A path to political transformation? In S. Rai & G. Waylen (Eds.), Global governance: Feminist perspectives (pp. 185–206). New York: Palgrave McMillan. Dahlerup, D. (2006). Women, quotas, and politics. New York: Routledge. Eisenstein, Z. (2007). Sexual decoys: Gender, race, and war in imperial democracy. New York: Palgrave. Faludi, S. (2007). The terror dream: Fear and fantasy in post-9/11 America. New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Co. Farrell, A., & McDermott, P. (2005). Claiming Afghan women: The challenge of human rights discourse for transnational feminism. In W.S. Hesford & W. Kozol (Eds.), Just advocacy? Women’s human rights, transnational feminisms, and the politics of representation (pp. 33–55). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Ferree, M. M. (2006). Globalization and feminism: Opportunities and obstacles for activism in the global arena. In M. M. Ferree & A. M. Tripp (Eds.), Global feminism: Transnational women’s activism, organizing, and human rights (pp. 3–23). New York: New York University Press.
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Foucault, M. (1991). Governmentality. In G. Burchell, C. Gordon, & P. Miller (Eds.), The Foucault effect: Studies in governmentality (pp. 87–104). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Goldstein, J. S. (2001). War and gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grewal, I. (2005). Transnational America: Feminisms, diasporas, neoliberalisms. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Grewal, I., & Kaplan, C. (Eds.). (1994). Scattered hegemonies: Postmodernity and transnational feminist practices. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hawkesworth, M. E. (2006). Globalization and feminist activism. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. Hesford, W. S., & Kozol, W. (Eds.). (2005). Just advocacy? Women’s human rights, transnational feminisms, and the politics of representation. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Klein, N. (2007). The shock doctrine: The rise of disaster capitalism. New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Co. Marchand, M. H., & Runyan, A. S. (Eds.). (2000). Gender and global restructuring: Sightings, sites and resistances. New York: Routledge. Moghadam, V. (2006). Feminism and the global economy. Women’s Studies Quarterly, 34, 69–71. Ong, A. (2006). Neoliberalism as exception: Mutations of citizenship and sovereignty. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rai, S. (2008). Analyzing global governance. In S. Rai & G. Waylen (Eds.), Global governance: Feminist perspectives (pp. 19–42). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Squires, J. (2007). The new politics of gender equality. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Tripp, A. M. (2006). Challenges in transnational feminist mobilization. In M. M. Ferree & A. M. Tripp (Eds.), Global feminism: Transnational women’s activism, organizing, and human rights (pp. 296–312), New York: New York University Press. United Nations (UN). (2000). The world’s women 2000: Trends and statistics. New York: Author. United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM). (2008). Progress of the world’s women 2008/2009: Who answers to women? New York: UNIFEM. Retrieved on June 1, 2009, from http://www.unifem.org/progress/2008/ media/POWW08_Report_Full_Text.pdf Woehl, S. (2008). Global governance as neoliberal govenmentality: Gender mainstreaming in the European employment strategy. In S. Rai & G. Waylen (Eds.), Gender and global governance: Feminist perspectives (pp. 64–83). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Chapter 2
Women’s Human Rights and Empowerment in a Transnational, Globalized Context: What’s Psychology Got To Do with It? Shelly Grabe
As the field of transnational feminism grows in response to globalization, the discussion of women’s human rights becomes ever more relevant. However, the very premise of transnational feminism that distinguishes it from international feminism or global sisterhood—that is, favoring a diversity of women’s agency rather than universalized notions of Western feminism (Naples & Desai, 2002)—makes it seemingly impossible to advocate for universal recommendations regarding women’s human rights that can cross borders in the same manner that the resources and labor that define the modern globalized economy cross borders. Nevertheless, the development field has begun a concerted effort to broadly address women’s human rights and empowerment with organizations ranging from the World Bank, to grassroots nongovernmental organizations, to the United Nations (UN), all advocating for women’s human rights and empowerment in an effort to address UN Millennium Development Goal 3—‘‘to promote gender equality and empower women’’ (UN, 2000). This chapter will discuss why women’s human rights warrant increased focus in the context of globalization and how psychology can provide the currently missing, but necessary, links between transnational feminism, the discourse on women’s human rights and globalization, and the international attention given to women’s empowerment, to effectively fill in gaps in our
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understanding, and to contribute to systematic change in women’s well-being worldwide. As such, this chapter integrates theories of women’s human rights and capabilities with current understandings of empowerment from both academic and development approaches and concludes with a case example that draws together theory, intervention, and assessment to evaluate a program that has enormous implications for women’s well-being in a globalized, international context. GLOBALIZATION AND ITS IMPACTS ON WOMEN’S RIGHTS One major consequence of the restructuring of the world economy of the 1980s and 1990s—or globalization—is that it exacerbates or maintains violations of human rights. As such, several transnational social movements and advocacy networks have emerged in response to globalization to highlight its impact on human rights and justice (Moghadam, 2005). Transnational feminism, in particular, is one movement that argues that women bear a disproportionate burden of the economic and social dislocation that result from the neoliberal economic policies that characterize the global economy (Naples & Desai, 2002). For example, it is well documented that the structural adjustment of social welfare policies, the increased international activity by multinational corporations, and the deregulation of markets and free trade agreements that characterized the 1980s and ’90s has had unique outcomes for women (Naples & Desai, 2002; Moghadam, 2005). Some of the consequences of this economic and social restructuring include the following: (1) the feminization of labor and/or poverty whereby women have expanded their unpaid labor in the home and community to compensate for the increase in poverty and loss of local resources, (2) biases in economic policies favoring men, (3) an increase in the number of women trafficked for what is often involuntary sex work, and (4) an exacerbated sexual division of labor (e.g., Acosta-Belen, & Bose, 1990; Moghadam, 2005). Such trends continue unabated, despite widespread international commitments to draw increased attention to women’s rights. For example, at a UN conference in 1995, 189 governments adopted the Beijing Platform for Action, an international agenda for women’s empowerment and a statement of women’s rights as human rights (UN, 1995). Importantly, the mission statement of the Beijing Platform for Action explicitly states: The Platform for Action is an agenda for women’s empowerment. It aims at accelerating the implementation of the Nairobi Forward-looking Strategies for the Advancement of Women and at removing all the obstacles to women’s active participation in all spheres of public and private life through a full and equal share in economic, social, cultural and political
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decision-making. This means that the principle of shared power and responsibility should be established between women and men at home, in the workplace and in the wider national and international communities. Equality between women and men is a matter of human rights and a condition for social justice and is also a necessary and fundamental prerequisite for equality, development and peace. A transformed partnership based on equality between women and men is a condition for people-centered sustainable development. A sustained and long-term commitment is essential, so that women and men can work together for themselves, for their children and for society to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century.
Indeed, the 1990s was a period of monumental political transformation that witnessed a growing international women’s movement linked through subregional, regional, and international networks to collaborate on efforts calling attention to unequal rights and mechanisms through which female subordination is sustained and reproduced (Kabeer, 1994; Razavi, 2003). Therefore, not surprisingly, in the midst of international attention to women’s rights from advocacy groups and the United Nations alike, there has been growing awareness and interest in the empowerment of women among development programs and policies (Narayan, 2005). Yet, what remains unclear in this growing global awareness is whether or not a universal set of human rights exists and, if they do, how empowerment is related to them. Furthermore, what does the development community—and the economists who have staked a claim in this area of research—mean by women’s empowerment? Stronger conceptualization and assessment of empowerment, which I will demonstrate is an inarguably psychological process, as well as how it relates to human rights, can greatly contribute to and fuel efforts aimed at enhancing women’s well-being. This chapter aims to establish that if we are to have a better understanding of women’s psychological empowerment, contributions from psychology are necessary to integrate feminist scholarship, debates regarding human rights, and the increasing attention given by the development community to women’s rights.
HUMAN RIGHTS AND EMPOWERMENT IN DEVELOPMENT Discussions of human rights often imply a universal language of rights and equality, suggesting that norms of justice can be applied across societies. However, such simple notions of universalism raise concern. First, in many countries, ‘‘universal’’ discourse is taken to mean that defined by the West. As such, even when universal categories are introduced by women who live and work within the country in question, they are commonly accused of pandering to a Western
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political agenda (Nussbaum, 2000; Tripp, 2002). This area is therefore fraught with intellectual and political complexity. For example, one could argue that holding standards of human rights is another example of colonial domination—an imposition on people who are capable of determining their own definitions of justice (Phillips, 2002). Certainly this is consistent with the tenants of Transnational Feminism, which argue precisely against universal definitions of feminism in favor of a feminism that is relative to the society in which it was formed reflecting the values and practices unique to the culture. In contrast to universalism, a culturally relativistic approach argues that norms of justice are always relative to the society in which they are formed, reflecting values and practices that vary enormously from one society to another, and that it is therefore inappropriate to take the norms that emerge within one society as the standard against which to assess the norms of another (Phillips, 2002). The value of this position is that it captures the situated nature of any principles of justice. However, while cultural relativism addresses the contextual nature of justice, it carries its own set of concerns. For example, cultural relativism does not take into consideration that norms of justice are not constructed under the principles of gender equity. Those who defend practices that are harmful to women, in the name of preserving ‘‘culture,’’ are often the same individuals or leaders who make decisions and allow change that serves to protect their own political and/or economic interests (Phillips, 2002; Tripp, 2002). Indeed, many of the structural adjustments and development interventions stemming from neoliberal policies have produced substantial cultural changes; however, because these changes are often advantageous to those already in positions of power, concerns of cultural relativism are not often invoked. What this suggests is that cultural practices and change are tied to broader political and economic contexts that extend beyond gender and, in this way, the suppression of women’s rights is not essential to the uniqueness of any particular culture (Tripp, 2002). It therefore seems that when evaluating women’s rights, both approaches (i.e., universal principles that fail to adequately address differences, and those ignoring women’s rights for fear of cultural imperialism) should be suspect in the context of this discussion. If one follows the principles of universalism, strict equality in rights may perpetuate inequality if no attention to differences in background or demographics is paid. In other words, ignoring differences in gender tends to equate equality with sameness, thereby leaving untouched systematic differences in power (Phillips, 2002). For example, equal rights to hold property or to have access to clean water are not realized when traditional gender roles prevent many women from ownership or control over these resources, despite their legal rights (Deere & Leon, 2001; Lastarria, 2001, 2008; Molyneux & Razavi, 2002). This concern is
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becomingly increasingly relevant, as many countries have revised their constitutions or laws to legalize women’s rights in the past several decades. However, although legal rights are an important first step, customary law or cultural practices still largely prohibit women from taking advantage of their rights and essentially render women incapable of realizing rights they might otherwise choose. As a result, universalism, in extending equal rights to everyone regardless of background, may have the unintended consequence of perpetuating or exaggerating inequalities. The political implication here is that some groups may need different interventions to achieve the same kind of outcomes. Therefore, it appears that some combination of universalism and relativism is needed. In other words, it must be possible to be both equal and different. In an approximate combination of these approaches, Martha Nussbaum proposes a universal approach to human capabilities, rather than human rights (2000). She suggests that there are central elements of truly human functioning that are particularly essential to human worth and dignity, and that each person should be capable of having these basic elements in their lives. She proposes a list of basic elements and suggests that they might serve as the moral basis of constitutional guarantees cross-culturally. Among the eight proposed capabilities or essential human elements, ‘‘having control over one’s environment’’ is most relevant to the current discussion. She defines this capability in two primary ways: (a) political: being able to participate effectively in political choices that govern one’s life; having the right to political participation, protections of free speech and association, and (b) material: being able to hold property (both land and movable goods), not just formally but in terms of real opportunity; having property rights on an equal basis with others; and having the right to seek employment on an equal basis with others. In this way, being capable means that in addition to having the legal right to, for example, political participation, a person should be free to pursue the right, presumably without consequence or undue obstacle. Thus, capabilities may require not only material and institutional resources, but legal and social acceptance of the legitimacy of women’s claims or participation. Importantly, and consistent with the aims of this chapter, Nussbaum also argues that the structure of social and political institutions should be established, in part, to promote at least a threshold level of these human capabilities, that basic rights become institutionalized such that everyone has the opportunity—or is capable—of realizing their rights. In the past two decades, this view has become incorporated into the development community, and it has become accepted to evaluate development in terms of human capabilities and enhanced well-being (Nussbaum & Sen, 1993; Sen, 1999). In particular, the increasing recognition in the development discourse regarding women’s rights has led
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to a proliferation of programs aimed at women’s empowerment. However, the inclusion of women in development programs has largely come through the focus of income-generating programs—most notably microcredit loaning (Goetz & Sen Gupta, 1996). However, while income generation that stems from microcredit loans may improve a household’s economic status, women’s receipt of the loan, or the labor associated with the loan, does not contest gender relations in the same manner that structural or institutional interventions might. Although research suggests that loans may increase women’s economic activity, they do little to diversify women’s labor, resulting in an adherence to a traditional occupational structure that sustains male dominance (Kabeer, 2001). For example, it is not uncommon that a woman’s labor does not belong to the woman, but falls under the control of her male partner (Bartky, 1990). Thus, male control of the economic or material output that may stem from women’s microcredit borrowing may maintain and support the domination and control of women and their work. Indeed, in a review of credit programs in Bangladesh, 63 percent of female loan holders reported having only partial, very limited, or no control over the loans they had procured (Goetz & Sen Gupta, 1996). In support of the argument that economic activity does not increase women’s power and control, Panda and Agarwal (2005) found that levels of employment status (unemployed, seasonally employed, and regularly employed) did not affect women’s receipt of physical violence, whereas land ownership did, suggesting that economic activity did little to alter the gender dynamics that predict patterns of violence against women. Effectively targeting poverty may ensure that short-term, material needs are met but may not alter women’s status or effectively give them voice in their relationships or their community. In sum, although there has been a proliferation of gender-focused programs among development organizations, there is limited investigation into the role of structural interventions in addressing women’s rights, capabilities, or empowerment. The influence of the capabilities approach on the development community is also witnessed through assessments such as the Human Development Reports of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), which now includes quality of life in assessments for governments and international agencies in addition to the previously narrow focus on gross domestic product. Moreover, two gender measures were introduced in the 1990s to assess the status of women in human development (UNDP, 1995). However, neither assesses empowerment in ways that will be conceptualized in this chapter. Specifically, the Gender Related Development Index was created to assess inequalities between women and men on factors such as life expectancy, educational attainment, and income. The Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM) was introduced to address the noted gap in assessment
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measures and is widely acknowledged as a measure of women’s agency. However, it assesses gender equality in economic and political participation and decision making, reporting factors such as the percentage of women in governmental positions and the ratio of female- to male-earned income. Thus, while the GEM is currently held as a model for assessing levels of women’s empowerment, I argue that it does not adequately measure empowerment or agency; rather, it measures the outcomes of women’s empowerment. Thus, while there has been considerable theoretical interest within the development community regarding questions of empowerment, agency, and well-being, there has been little empirical investigation into these exact processes. What has resulted is a full-fledged, albeit much needed, internationally coordinated effort to enhance women’s empowerment in the absence of a sound understanding of what disempowers—or subordinates— women, a clear conceptualization of women’s psychological empowerment, and virtually no adequate assessment or evaluation of progress aimed at enhancing women’s well-being. In other words, despite the proliferation of empowerment rhetoric in championing of social interventions, the explicit connections between policy or program development and empowerment theory and research are in most cases tenuous (Perkins, 1995). The empirical gap in the literature surrounding how women’s empowerment processes operate may largely reflect a lack of clear-cut definitions and appropriate assessment tools (Goetz & Sen Gupta, 1996; Holvoet, 2005). Psychology can substantially contribute to this area of investigation by (a) conceptualizing and defining women’s empowerment as it relates to women’s human rights, and (b) assessing and analyzing the processes of empowerment in a development context. CONCEPTUALIZING EMPOWERMENT In an attempt to address development’s shortcomings, many have turned to an ‘‘empowerment’’ approach, which has become popular, and largely unquestioned, in part because the lack of a clear definition lends to a ‘‘common sense’’ acceptance of it (Sharp, Briggs, Yacoub, & Hamed, 2003). Therefore, it is not quite clear what practitioners or scholars mean by using the term empowerment, nor how it is achieved. Yet, empowerment has become a vital construct for understanding women’s well-being and a central focus across disciplines and fields, despite that it remains loosely defined and inadequately conceptualized (Hill, 2003; Narayan, 2005; Perkins, 1995). To date, empowerment has been discussed by economists as a process of ‘‘undoing internalized oppression,’’ and therefore, when focused on women, it involves changing the social and cultural norms inherent in patriarchy that sustain women’s subordination (e.g., Agarwal, 1994). It has been similarly argued that empowerment increases women’s sense of agency
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or what has been termed ‘‘power within’’ (Deere & Leon, 2001; Kabeer, 1994). Kabeer (1994) argues that while agency has been operationalized in the social science literature as decision making or negotiation, it is a broader construct reflecting one’s ability to define goals and act upon them. She defines empowerment as a process related to resources, agency, and achievement (Kabeer, 2005). In this way, agency is central to empowerment because through agency choices are made and put into effect. Sen (1985, 1999) similarly defines agency as freedom to achieve whatever goals or values a person regards as important. He argues that traditional gender roles curtail women’s agency by assuming their interests lie within the home and not within their person (Sen, 1995). As related to empowerment, agency includes not only exercising choice, but doing so in a way that challenges existing power relations. Importantly, it also has been highlighted that issues of empowerment are distinct from psychological well-being but that each are important when assessing change (Sen, 1985). While collectively there appears to emerge a working understanding of empowerment, there are notable limitations present in this literature. First, the authors addressing women’s empowerment in the context of development are largely economists and, while they have pioneered this field and great strides have been made with tremendous attention being paid to women’s rights, because empowerment is an inherently psychological process, understanding in this area can only be advanced by the conceptual and methodological tools offered from within the discipline of psychology. Second, despite increasing attention to issues of empowerment and capabilities in the development literature, current evaluative assessments do not adequately reflect the processes surrounding women’s empowerment (Hill, 2003). Finally, limitations posed by multiple nonoverlapping disciplines have not adequately connected human rights or capabilities to empowerment. Thus, as it stands, there is a divide between the theoretical or philosophical approaches to human rights and capabilities and the interventions evaluated by development practitioners and scholars. The discipline of psychology is well positioned to address these gaps with both theoretical and methodological contributions. Psychologists define empowerment as a process by which people gain control and mastery over issues of concern to them (Rappaport, 1987; Zimmerman, 1995). Within psychology, empowerment theory links subjective (personal) well-being with larger social and political contexts (Perkins & Zimmerman, 1995; Zimmerman, 1995). Importantly, empowerment research focuses on identifying capabilities and exploring environmental influences on social problems such that empowerment-oriented interventions enhance well-being, while they also aim to ameliorate problems (Perkins & Zimmerman, 1995). In fact, within psychology, empowerment has been described as a process ‘‘through which people lacking an equal share of valued resources gain
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greater access to and control over those resources’’ (Cornell Empowerment Group, 1989). Psychological empowerment, in particular, refers to empowerment at the individual level of analysis and integrates perceptions of personal control, a proactive approach to life, and a critical understanding of the sociopolitical environment. Although the study of empowerment among psychologists has focused on U.S. community groups, organizations, and neighborhood associations (e.g., Perkins, 1995; Zimmerman, 1990), and there has been very little attention internationally despite that empowerment has become the premier paradigm for development programs and policies, there are some obvious and important applications for the understanding and study of women’s international rights and well-being. First, the overlap between Nussbuam’s definition of capabilities (i.e., having control over one’s environment) and psychology’s definition of empowerment (i.e., a process by which people gain mastery over issues that concern them) is striking. Both articulate that a sense of personal control and freedom for self-chosen activity is fundamentally linked to well-being, and that individuals’ capabilities can be supported by access to and control over resources. With these clear and overlapping definitions, we can begin to more adequately conceptualize empowerment in the context of human rights. Given the complexity involved in empowerment processes, accurate conceptualization cannot be captured by a single operationalization or measurement, nor divorced from context (Zimmerman, 1995). For example, because powerlessness is embedded in cultural practices and unequal institutional relations, adequate conceptualization and assessment involves investigation of the formal and informal institutional barriers that prevent women from taking effective action to improve their well-being within the household and society at large. Similarly, notions of self-efficacy, competency, and control are key to measuring empowerment, as are processes by which people engage in democratic participation and shared leadership within communities (Perkins & Zimmerman, 1995). Furthermore, because conceptualizations may differ across levels of analysis, measurement of empowerment must assess when individuals believe they have the capability to influence a given context (e.g., perceived agency), have perceived control in various situations (e.g., marital power/control, individual mastery over environment), have an understanding of their sociopolitical environment (e.g., gender ideology), interact with others to successfully master social or political systems (e.g., marital control or power), and engage in actions to directly influence outcomes (e.g., participation in decision making). A thorough assessment would therefore require an interdisciplinary, culturally relevant approach that incorporates individual, relational, and societal aspects of empowerment that are sensitive to sociopolitical contexts.
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While there is a great deal of attention given to empowerment in development policies and interventions, there is little to no empirical investigation into these processes (Perkins, 1995). In fact, despite the complexity involved in empowerment processes, the majority of investigations into women’s empowerment conducted among scholars employ a rather narrow conceptualization by routinely assessing household decision making as the primary indicator of women’s empowerment (Hill, 2003; Holvoet, 2005; Kabeer, 1999). A more thorough and accurate conceptualization and assessment of empowerment would include not only intra-household decision making, but also indicators of status and traditional gender ideology; women’s power and control within the marital relationship; women’s levels of agency, autonomy, and mastery; psychological well-being; and outcomes that may reflect empowerment such as freedom from domestic violence or agency in reproductive health choices. What follows is a focused discussion of structural factors (i.e., the formal and informal institutional barriers), specific to the context of globalization, that contribute to gendered power imbalances and women’s subordination. GENDERED POWER, NATURAL RESOURCES, AND DEVELOPMENT The disruptive consequences of the new economic policies of the 1980s and ’90s introduced or exacerbated several structural factors that have contributed to rising levels of gender inequity and marginalization. This has been particularly visible within the area of natural resources (Razavi, 2003; Rocheleau & Edmunds, 1997). In fact, pervasive gender inequities in access to resources, land in particular, has been recognized by a large body of international work (e.g., Food Agriculture Organization [FAO], UN Convention of the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women [CEDAW]) and postulated as a necessary human right (Ikdahl, 2008). Thus, not surprisingly, feminist scholars in the area of globalization and development argue that women’s empowerment and well-being can be enhanced by expanding women’s management of resources (Deere & Leon, 2001; Razavi, 1999). This is consistent with the tenants of empowerment theory, which argued that control over resources was central to empowerment. However, that lack of secure access to and control over natural resources contributes to a system in which female subordination is sustained and reproduced, prohibiting women from exercising control over their environment—or, in other words, limiting human capability or empowerment. Many scholars argue that most development interventions have been formulated from the ideological and economic interests of the industrialized countries that are promoting projects to ‘‘modernize’’ the ‘‘Third World’’ (e.g., Acosta-Belen & Bose, 1990). Among those interventions
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has been the tendency to shift from customary tenure systems, or cooperative arrangements in which natural resources such as water, forestry, and land that were traditionally viewed as community resources have become privatized systems of individual ownership (Agarwal, 2001; Lastarria-Cornheil, 1997; Zwarteveen, 1997). Therefore, the structural adjustments of privatization have created a context whereby natural resources have become commodities, and markets have developed for rights or titles to these resources (Zwarteveen, 1997). Moreover, in many countries, this is occurring at the same time that population pressures have begun to affect availability of natural resources, resulting in scarcity, even in remote areas where resources were once considered part of the commons (e.g., Lastarria-Cornheil, 1997; Shiva, 2002). As a result, natural resources such as water, firewood, and land for grazing—which are all vital resources necessary to sustain livelihood in rural areas—are being bought up and controlled in private, for-profit scenarios. This has obvious and dangerous implications for poor people worldwide, but it has specific implications for gendered imbalances in power and therefore women’s capabilities and empowerment. As argued earlier, the international focus on interventions such as microcredit lending, which fit perfectly into the globalized, neoliberal market-driven economy, do not adequately address the structural obstacles that determine women’s status and, ultimately, their wellbeing. In the context of addressing violations of women’s rights, it is imperative to distinguish between those programs that seek to reduce poverty or enhance productivity from those that seek to empower women. Although gender scholars have been making a case for using a gender analysis of natural resource management in the context of global changes for nearly a decade (e.g., Rocheleau & Edmunds, 1997), the literature on natural resource control and gender remains scarce. The Theory of Gender and Power (Connell, 1987) postulates that gender-based inequalities are pervasive societal characteristics, which result in men’s disproportionate power in society and control over a number of areas, including women and their bodies. Wingood and DiClemente (2000) extended this theory to the areas of public health and psychology. They argued that unequal control over resources leads to power imbalances and gender-based norms that create risk environments that adversely influence women’s health and safety. There are clear structural components that contribute to the construction of dominance and thereby legitimize and perpetuate women’s subordinate status. Although limited, the following review will demonstrate that in the context of globalization, the unequal gendered distribution of control over natural resources, in particular water, trees, and land, is one structural component that contributes to dominance and therefore places women in a subordinate position within both the household and the larger society. Because violations of women’s human rights often
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reflect a societal problem requiring changes in sex-role ideologies and social structures that perpetuate gender hierarchy (Ozner & Bandura, 1990), examining the structure of resource ownership and control provides a compelling area of investigation into one potential structure by which violations against women are supported and sustained. More specifically, this review will demonstrate that entrenched inequalities in the distribution of power and resources between women and men create a risk environment that perpetuates women’s disempowerment and that a redirection in the development approach to a more inclusive position on gender would greatly facilitate the empowerment agenda that is promoted by international agencies. WATER The 1990s witnessed large changes in water policy generated by a number of different development trends driven largely by the neoliberal economic agenda of large donors (Coles & Wallace, 2005; Shiva, 2002; World Bank, 1993). Among these trends was the tremendous shift toward irrigation to support large monocropped commodities grown for export. Water development projects in line with export agriculture often involve privatization of water sources and massive damming to accommodate newly irrigated agricultural landscapes (Khagram, 2004). Importantly, rights to water use in irrigation systems are granted to farmers or landowners, with the assumption that women will indirectly benefit from their husband’s access to water. As such, water rights are intimately linked to the existing social and cultural organization and relations of authority and power (Shiva, 2002). Within this new economic structure, access to water has taken on a new meaning—one that involves gender (Zwarteveen, 1997). However, the limited attention to gender and water in the literature and development discourse may be due to the notion that women’s involvement with water mainly occurs in the domestic sphere, in implicit opposition to men’s water use, which is assumed to be mainly market-oriented (Zwarteveen, 1997). Additionally, it has been argued that women’s involvement in water development projects has been promoted for largely economic reasons assuming that women’s participation improves efficiency of water projects because of their interest in responsibly managing reliable supplies of water (Coles & Wallace, 2005). The limited analysis of gender in the management of water effectively hides that the most important aspect concerning water resources lies not so much in gender differences of water use but in differences with respect to access and control of water sources. Recently, geographers have highlighted how changes in water use and control over water resources can alter gender relations and further divide men and women’s power balance by exacerbating the
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marginalization of women. For example, in a study of water irrigation and gender in the Anatolia region of southeastern Turkey, Harris (2006) documented how water management became important in the maintenance and exacerbation of gender inequalities. First, among the consequences of irrigation projects are the construction of water management committees that create new patterns of inequality in relation to access and power associated with the management of water as a vital resource. Specifically, in the sample studied in Anatolia, membership in water committees or organizations is often restricted to heads of household, which, in most countries, are traditionally husbands or fathers. Similarly, the formal procedures for identification and selection of water beneficiaries implicitly or explicitly exclude women. For example, common mechanisms for obtaining water rights in the large or newly developed irrigation systems in southeastern Turkey include the following: (1) through owning land in the area being serviced, (2) through participation in construction of the dams, and (3) by being a member of the water management committee. In most countries throughout the world, those with the most power have the most possibility to own land and be part of committees that allow access to water (i.e., men; Lastarria-Cornheil, 1997). Therefore, women are effectively excluded from realizing their own right to water and instead obtain access to water by making use of the water rights of their husbands, or other male relatives. In this manner, unequal control of water resources exacerbates women’s subordinate status. In addition to the exclusion of women from access to water or participation in the decision-making water committees, Harris (2006) documents how daily practices of water use and water management further widened the gender division of labor among men and women in southeastern Turkey. For example, prior to irrigation, women were the predominant actors in animal husbandry and sold products from animals that had been herded on open fields to earn income and provide sustenance for their families. Women were also able to meet many subsistence needs by growing and consuming food directly from the land. However, the introduction of large, irrigated export crops into the area resulted in land scarcity, and the lack of land largely extinguished the practice of animal husbandry. As such, families in many places now purchase the produce and animal products that once determined women’s limited livelihood. Thus, in effect, women’s work roles were usurped by the need to engage in unpaid, labor-intensive tasks such as weeding and picking in their husbands’ crops. In contrast, their husbands were engaged in decision making regarding the uses of water and products of the land. These changes enhanced men’s relative contributions to the household and further divided the gendered power imbalance. In this context, irrigation and control of water—regardless of domestic use—has meant an increased work burden for women,
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greater difficulty meeting the family’s subsistence needs, and an exclusion from decision making. Moreover, this new labor economy has led to a higher desirability for wives’ unpaid labor, and therefore, has altered the politics of bride prices in the Anatolia region, leaving young women dreading the heavy work burdens that come with their inevitable marriage. Finally, the changing conditions of market consumption, driven by the introduction of irrigated export crops, have also meant that men now travel to the market (for purchase and sale of food commodities their wives once produced) and develop social networks, whereas, in contrast, women remain largely prohibited from traveling to urban areas. This further exacerbates the social differences between women and men by increasing both women’s isolation and men’s socializing. The example of water use and management and gender offered by Harris demonstrates that new water-management institutions in line with globalization serve to ‘‘solidify, cement, and rigidify social-power differentials’’ (2006, p. 194). A stronger security of women’s water tenure could significantly alter women’s participation in the new economy and serve to empower rather than disempower them in the context of the increasingly limited availability of water. FORESTRY Similarly to the development practices in water resource management, several countries (e.g., Mexico, Nepal) have privatized forests or, more recently, organized Community Forestry Groups (CFGs) to manage forest resources in response to diminishing availability of fallen timber for firewood collection due, in part, to conversion of forestland for agricultural purposes (Taylor & Zabin, 2000; Varughese & Ostrom, 2001). Interestingly, the formation of CFGs was a focused attempt to move toward establishing greater local participation and community control among citizens in the promotion of sustainable forests (McCarthy, 2001). However, similar to water management, while major donor agencies give token gestures to participation, a large focus remains on economic aspects of resource management that include rigid exclusion of nonmembers from resource use (e.g., Magrath, Grandalski, Stuckey, Vikanes, & Wilkinson, 2007). Although gender is typically excluded from community forestry discussions, based on extensive fieldwork among CFGs in India and Nepal, Agarwal (2001) documents how gender constrains participation in CFGs and how participatory exclusion over control of timber products has implications for gender inequity. First, not unlike water committees, both formal and informal rules for CFGs membership exclude women. Specifically, only one member per household, the head of household (i.e., typically the male), is allowed membership. Moreover, long-standing conventions in South Asia exclude women from public
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decision making forums and, thereby, deny women access to CFGs, despite that women are predominately responsible for gathering their households’ firewood. Among the additional obstacles for women’s participation in the CFGs is included the fact that women’s responsibility for housework restricts them from attending meetings held at inconvenient times, aggressive male behavior prohibits women who can and do attend from speaking at meetings, and social hierarchies position women on the floor at meetings where men are seated in chairs. As such, women’s voices were not considered in the decision making regarding the use of forest products or the discussions surrounding the use of the community funds raised from the management of the forest. Moreover, because many CFGs invest access rights to single ‘‘owners,’’ women’s access to firewood timber, a once communal resource, is severely restricted. Therefore, the customary exclusion of women from village decision making bodies regarding the management of forestry perpetuates or exacerbates gendered imbalances in power. In the same study conducted in South Asia, Agarwal (2001) also demonstrated how these imbalances in power are evidenced in increased gendered divisions in labor. First, simply restricting/privatizing forestry areas means that women, who could previously meet some of their timber collection needs in that area, are now forced to travel to neighboring sites adding sometimes between several hours or as much as a day’s time to the chore. In some areas, women’s collection time and distances traveled for a headload of firewood increased sevenfold (from 0.5 hours to 3–4 hours in Vena; from 0.5 km to 8–9 km in Karapara; Agarwal, 2001). In addition, women substitute fuel sources and burn twigs or agricultural waste with detrimental consequences. For example, the fumes from inferior fuels have negative health affects and the additional time it takes to keep them lit prevents women from doing simultaneous work. In sum, limiting women’s access to and control over forest resources has resulted in a substantial increase in women’s workload. By excluding women from control and decision making regarding timber, the community forestry efforts are perpetuating status differences and further marginalizing women and thereby prohibiting women’s capabilities and empowerment. LAND Issues of agrarian change and land tenure systems also have been impacted by the imposition of a neoliberal agenda and donor agencies that have influenced developing countries to move from customary (often communal) systems toward private land ownership (LastarriaCornheil, 1997; Razavi, 2003). In many countries, structural adjustment came with land reform guided by policies that favored large-scale export agriculture, and male control over land became the dominant
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discourse supplanting previously customary laws that had provisions regarding women’s interests in land (e.g., Tsikata, 2003). Thus, one of the imposed difficulties in the transfer to privatized systems in regard to women’s rights is that there has been an erosion of the few rights that were previously held under customary systems. In many countries, social constructions of gender, combined with cultural practices of restricting women’s access to land, have contributed to the continued abuse of women’s rights to land ownership (Lastaria-Cornheil, 2001). Therefore, although many countries have legislation that declares that men and women have equal rights to hold property, in most places customary law dictates that men are owners of land and that women have access to land through a male relative (Lastarria-Cornheil, 1997). Feminist scholars suggest that restrictions on women to land ownership share core ideologies that are embedded within constructions of masculinity and femininity and the ‘‘proper’’ roles that men and women should assume in public spheres (Deere & Leon, 2001). For example, women are not only marginalized from ownership of and access to what was previously communal land, but their ability to benefit fully or equitably from their labor on the land is threatened because the landowner determines not only how the land will be used, but also manages the products and labor of the land (LastarriaCornheil, 1997). As a result, there has been an intensification of women’s unpaid agricultural labor (Razavi, 2003). In addition, property ownership affords the landowner the opportunity to participate in a market-based system by renting the land, using it as collateral to borrow money, and/or selling it or giving it as an inheritance to children (Deere & Leon, 2001; Lastarria-Cornheil, 2001). As such, privatization of land and exclusion of women as owners in patriarchal societies has enforced and strengthened male’s dominant position while exacerbating women’s dependent position on their husbands. Despite slow progress, women’s property rights in some countries have improved, with land titling efforts in several Latin American and Asian countries recognizing women’s rights as beneficiaries (FAO, 2004). Moreover, since the structural adjustments of the 1980s and ’90s in the agricultural sector, there has been a great deal of attention to women’s property rights from scholars in developing regions across Africa (Lastarria-Cornheil, 1997), Latin America (Deere & Leon, 2001), and South Asia (Agarwal, 1994). Nevertheless, global data on women’s land ownership is lacking. For example, halfway through the timeframe for achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDG), a progress report reviewing the security of women’s property rights concluded that, despite the international call for attention to these rights, there was insufficient data to track progress on women’s property ownership (Grown, Rao Gupta, & Kes, 2008). Data collected regarding assets and property ownership continue to be gathered at
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the household level, rather than at the individual level, prohibiting an accurate understanding of women’s position as owners. In summary, the limited review on natural resource management, in particular water, forestry, and land suggests that strong gender biases, and assumptions based on gender roles (e.g., decisions should fall largely to male community leaders), exclude women, for the most part, from decision making processes when it comes to access to and control over vital resources. This suggests that unequal abilities to exercise control over resources may lay the foundation for power imbalances. In the context of development, this is a missed opportunity to restructure gender and alter women’s status. Development should build institutions that manage common resources in a way that empowers all members of the community, as opposed to further dividing existing power structures. Moreover, while there is growing, albeit limited, attention to the role of resource control in further marginalizing women, there is virtually no empirical investigation into how a renegotiation of women’s roles may impact their empowerment. In the context of rising threats to women’s human rights and the continued opportunity for a gender analysis in the expansion of development interventions, this work is imperative. What follows is a detailed discussion and case study of how and why land ownership, in particular, may impact these processes and ultimately lead to women’s empowerment, well-being, and physical safety. LAND OWNERSHIP AND WOMEN’S EMPOWERMENT: A PSYCHOLOGICAL INVESTIGATION Based on the literature reviewed, ownership and control over natural resources among women should substantially challenge traditional gender roles, increase women’s power and influence within the household and, in turn, provide a stronger base for women’s empowerment. In other words, ideologically shifting how women are viewed in the household and on a societal level—through the process of resource management—can reposition women and provide structural or institutional support for human capabilities. I argue that land ownership, in particular, is a material basis, or structural inequality, that contributes to the subordination of women. Central to this argument, however, is that, as landowners, women need to effectively administer control over their property. In other words, it is not merely possessing the title to a plot of land, but the control or administration of it that contributes to change (Agarwal, 1994). Moreover, while benefits to several forms of land use are possible and do exist (e.g., cooperative arrangements), it is important to note that women’s power regarding land occurs when they function independently as decision makers with control over the land. While
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economic security may be attached to property ownership, it is the psychological process that emerges from ownership that empowers a woman to assert control over her life and her body. In other words, the processes involved in owning and controlling land can transform the conditions in which women exercise agency and, in turn, become empowered to confront aspects of their subordination—as reflected, for example, by violence against women. Indeed, violence against women is considered the most pervasive human rights violation in the world and entrenched inequalities in the distribution of power and resources between men and women create environments that support high levels of gender-based violence (UNIFEM, 2006). Because land ownership repositions women, and is a form of political and symbolic status, it puts women in a privileged and empowered position. By empirically examining the processes linking land ownership and control to broader cultural ideologies, and to gender relations, a greater understanding of the relationships between structural inequities, power/dominance, women’s empowerment and well-being can be gained. In 1994, a link between property rights and women’s rights was introduced in the literature with the suggestion that formalizing property in a woman’s name could lead to beneficial transformations in gender relations and, in particular, a decline in violence against women (Agarwal, 1994). However, it was nearly a decade later that the first and only published survey in this area found that in Kerala, India, as many as 49 percent of women who did not own property suffered long-term physical violence, compared with 18 and 10 percent, respectively, of those who owned either their land or house, and 7 percent of those who owned both assets (Panda & Agarwal, 2005). The authors suggest that owning land provides women with economic security and a tangible exit option to escape violent partners. However, a wealth of research in psychology suggests that a number of factors unrelated to economic status prevent women from leaving violent relationships (e.g., fear of retaliation; Hendy et al., 2003). In fact, the Kerala study reported that levels of violence did not differ between women who were regularly employed, seasonally employed, or unemployed, suggesting that land ownership provided a different kind of empowerment than did employment. These findings support the notion that it was not solely economic freedom that resulted in reduced receipt of domestic violence. On the contrary, the findings suggest that eliminating the practice of violence against women requires structural and ideological changes that extend beyond economic opportunity and are focused, rather, on structural factors such as land ownership. In 2006, the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) expanded on Panda and Agarwal’s (2005) research through qualitative interviews with women landowners in Kerala and West Bengal to examine the role of land in women’s empowerment. They suggested
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that property ownership extended women’s negotiating power within the marital relationships and their ability to confront subordination, thereby decreasing levels of domestic violence. However, a major limitation of these investigations in South Asia is that they were in communities where bilateral property ownership was the norm. Female ownership of land did not necessarily challenge existing gender attitudes and roles. Nevertheless, these studies put forth a framework for investigating the links between land ownership, women’s empowerment, and violence. Despite these groundbreaking findings, this line of inquiry remains underexplored. Moreover, there has been no investigation into this topic in other developing regions, such as Latin America or East Africa where land reform has received a great deal of attention. Furthermore, virtually no attention has been given to these processes by psychologists. However, empirical examination of land ownership among women may contribute to the discussion of women’s empowerment in the context of development, in general, and, in particular, to discussions surrounding property ownership and control. What follows sets the context for replicating the Panda and Agarwal findings and expanding this investigation and examining these processes in another region. NICARAGUA Of the Latin American countries that have implemented genderprogressive agrarian reform policies, Nicaragua stands out in terms of female participation (Deere, 1985). For example, the Agrarian Reform Laws of the 1980s and ’90s that recognized equal rights for both sexes were acknowledged as one of the most forward-looking reforms in Latin America because, in theory, it made it possible for women to become direct beneficiaries of land allocation. Indeed, the womenspecific measures adopted in Nicaragua have benefited a greater proportion of the female population than in countries where the titling programs are gender neutral (Deere, 1985). Although data from the rural titling office indicate that between 1979 and 1989, women accounted for 8 to 10 percent of beneficiaries under the agrarian reform, these low numbers reflect that land was still being allocated primarily to male ‘‘heads of household,’’ whereas titled women were likely widowed or unmarried women living alone. In 1995, a major legislative leap was taken by the Nicaraguan Women’s Institute by introducing provisions in agrarian legislation that encouraged joint titling of land to couples, thereby recognizing married women’s rights to land (Act 209/95, Article 32). Subsequently, joint titling became compulsory for married couples and for those living in stable relationships (Act 278/97). However, as evidence of the
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customary or cultural norms, the term ‘‘joint’’ in the Joint Titling Act was interpreted literally as ‘‘two persons’’ within the family unit. Hence, this act did more to promote joint titling for men (fathers and sons) than for women. Thus, despite considerable legislation that positions Nicaragua as cutting-edge in mainstreaming gender in agricultural policy, the relatively low percentage of women landowners reflects the reality that women’s access remains restricted by cultural practices that prevent the recognition of their role in property ownership and control. Nevertheless, in contrast to many other countries, Nicaragua has the political framework for implementing development interventions aimed at land resource distribution. However, to date, there has been shockingly little data collected to examine the effects of women’s land ownership among women who have benefited from some level of reform or intervention. The following study is aimed at providing the empirical support necessary for state and development interventions to implement more equitable policies aimed at land ownership. THE STUDY1 A two-group study was designed to examine whether owning land was related to women’s status and power within the marital relationship and to their overall empowerment and psychological well-being, each of which was hypothesized to explain how and why owning land contributed to lower levels of domestic violence. As such, a household survey was administered to two different groups of women—one predominantly landowners and the other predominantly non-landowners. The two groups were chosen from the same geographical location within Nicaragua in order to most closely match them on a number of variables. Because customary practices still largely prohibit women from owning land, our research team collaborated with a women’s organization that had a program specifically aimed at facilitating women’s ownership of and titling to land (‘‘intervention’’ group). The second group of women was selected from neighboring communities in the same municipality and was not actively involved in the organization with which we collaborated (‘‘control’’ group). As such, the primary difference between the two groups of women is that the majority of women in the first group own land, whereas the majority in the second group do not. This design allows for direct comparison of women involved in land resource allocation aimed at empowerment and women who were not. Data were collected from 314 women following the guidelines on ethics and safety developed by the World Health Organization for the Multi-Country Study on Women’s Health and Domestic Violence Against Women that were adapted for this study (WHO, 2005). The
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household surveys included the following: (1) demographic characteristics; (2) questions assessing land acquisition and land ownership adapted from assessments used by the ICRW; (3) gender ideology as measured by the Attitudes toward Women Scale (Spence, Helmreich, & Stapp, 1973); (4) power in the marital relationship from the Relationship Control Subscale of the Sexual Relationship Power Scale (Pulerwitz, Gortmaker, & DeJong, 2000); (5) partner control indexed by asking women whether their partners generally prohibited or controlled their possibilities to carry out everyday activities, or exhibited controlling behavior or jealousy using items from the WHO (2005); (6) empowerment as indexed by mastery over one’s environment and individual autonomy from two of the six subscales from Ryff’s Scales of Psychological Well-Being (Ryff, 1989); (7) psychological well-being as assessed by the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (Ba~ nos & Guillen, 2000) and the Center for Epidemiologic Studies–Depression Scale (Grzywacz, Hovey, Seligman, Arcury, & Quandt, 2006); and (8) intrahousehold decision making from two subscales that were designed by ICRW (2004) to measure decision making within the marital relationship. Finally, to assess women’s control over their bodies—an outcome of empowerment—history of women’s violent experiences were measured with the Conflict Tactics Scale (Straus et al., 1996). The average age of the respondents was in the early- to mid-forties (M ¼ 45.33 intervention group, M ¼ 42.13 control group), although the majority of the women fell between 25 and 34 years old. Approximately three-quarters of the sample were in partnered relationships between six and ten years in duration. Most of the women respondents were literate, although approximately a quarter of the sample never received formal schooling. MAIN FINDINGS2 Before proceeding to test the potential links between land ownership, women’s empowerment, and receipt of violence, a series of oneway analyses of variance tests (ANOVAs) were conducted to examine differences in levels of empowerment and violence between the two groups. The intervention and control groups differed on several markers of empowerment in the expected directions, suggesting that women in the intervention group reported higher levels of empowerment and well-being than their counterparts. Specifically, ANOVAs revealed that the two groups were significantly or marginally different on several markers of women’s empowerment: gender ideology F (1, 308) ¼ 69.60, p < 0.00; relationship power F (1, 308) ¼ 14.72, p < 0.00; partner control/mobility F (1, 308) ¼ 2.76, p < 0.10; household decision making F (1, 308) ¼ 5.99, p < 0.02; financial decision making F (1, 308) ¼ 2.79, p < 0.10; autonomy F (1, 308) ¼ 3.62, p < 0.06; and
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self-esteem F (1, 308) ¼ 5.40, p < 0.03—indicating that women in the land-owning group reported higher levels of empowerment than their counterparts. Similarly, women from the intervention group reported marginally less violence in the past 12 months than women in the control group: F (1, 308) ¼ 2.13, p < 0.15. Finally, and importantly, main effects from an ANOVA with employment status (employed vs. nonemployed) predicting receipt of current violence were not significant. A number of sociodemographic variables related to the empowerment outcomes in one or both groups of women—age, education, and partner alcohol use—were controlled in the subsequent analyses examining the relationships between variables. To establish that land ownership was indirectly related to decreases in receipt of violence via women’s empowerment, both the Baron and Kenny (1986) criteria for mediating conditions and a product of coefficients test were used (MacKinnon, 2000; Sobel, 1990). Variables in the proposed model were conceptualized in the following order: ownership status; empowerment and psychological well-being; and violence. Specifically, we hypothesized that land ownership would directly predict levels of empowerment and psychological well-being, which in turn were hypothesized to directly predict women’s receipt of violence in the past 12 months. To test for the first condition, several regressions were run to examine the effect of land ownership on women’s empowerment. As expected, land ownership was marginally or significantly related to gender ideology, relationship power, partner control/mobility, financial decision making, autonomy, mastery, self-esteem, and depression. To test for the second condition, several regressions were run to examine the effects of women’s empowerment on receipt of physical violence in the past 12 months. Relationship power, partner control/ mobility, autonomy, mastery, self-esteem, and depression were all related to violence. Finally, to test whether land ownership was significantly indirectly related to violence via empowerment, we calculated a products of coefficients test for each pathway that met the first two criteria (i.e., that the pathway from the independent variable to the process variable and the pathway from the process variable to the dependent variable were both significant). Results from this test provide marginal to significant support for the indirect relation of land ownership via: relationship power t ¼ 2.78 (p < 0.01); partner control/ mobility t ¼ 1.87 (p < 0.10); autonomy t ¼ 1.33 (p < 0.20); mastery t ¼ 1.88 (p < 0.10); self-esteem t ¼ 1.65 (p < 0.10); and depression t ¼ 1.69 (p < 0.10)—suggesting that land ownership leads to decreased domestic violence via several indicators of women’s empowerment. Given that the current study was the first comprehensive investigation of empowerment processes in the context of natural resource management, I examined the relations between the empowerment indicators, women’s psychological well-being, and the standard indicator
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of empowerment used in the social science literature—decision making (see Table 2.1). In addition, I hypothesized that (a) the empowerment process would effectively alter women’s subordination such that higher levels of empowerment would predict less traditional gender roles, and/or (b) shifts in traditional gender ideology would enhance women’s power within the relationship, which would be reflected in higher levels of empowerment and psychological well-being. Only longitudinal or experimental designs can answer in which order these processes occur; however, data from the current study indicate a pattern of significant findings that support a significant relationship between less traditional gender roles and women’s empowerment. Specifically, the results suggest that less traditional gender ideology is significantly related to greater relationship power, less partner control, and higher levels of autonomy, self-esteem, and household decision making. Furthermore, as expected, psychological well-being (both self-esteem and depression) was significantly related to all of the indicators of empowerment (relationship power, partner control, autonomy, and mastery). Although the data do not allow us to discern the directional nature of these findings, the pattern of results lend support to Sen’s suggestion that well-being is often influenced by agency or autonomy (1985). Finally, the relative lack of significant relations between decision making and the other indicators of empowerment lends evidence to our argument that current assessment strategies do not adequately measure empowerment or agency, and that researchers need to begin to more accurately assess the psychological mechanisms involved in the process of empowerment. The findings from the current study therefore suggest that increasing women’s ownership of and control over land may be an important component in addressing gender inequities, empowering women, and curbing high levels of violence against women. Indeed, the data suggest that land ownership can alter an risk environment that supports high levels of gender-based violence. Thus, at a minimum, state and development policies should alter the structural barriers that prohibit women from owning and controlling vital resources such as land. CONCLUSION Drawing together a very interdisciplinary literature and proposing a novel application of psychology in this chapter allows for several important conclusions and areas of future direction in the investigation of women’s empowerment. First, the preceding review suggests that empowerment, as it has been approached to date, is more vaguely defined and confusing than could be useful for policy and program implementation. Indeed, it appears that if empowerment policies and programs continue with ambiguity and possible ineffectiveness,
Table 2.1 Correlations between empowerment, psychological well-being, and decision making variables Gender Relationship Partner Ideology Power Control/Mobility Autonomy Gender Ideology – Relationship Power Partner Control/ Mobility Autonomy Mastery Self-esteem Depression Household Decisions Financial Decisions
0.24*** –
Mastery
Self-esteem Depression
Household Financial Decisions Decisions
0.12* 0.64***
0.29*** 0.34***
0.09 0.32***
0.21*** 0.37***
0.10t 0.38***
0.23*** 0.12*
0.00 0.18**
–
0.23***
0.29***
0.35***
0.41***
0.04
0.09
–
0.51*** –
0.35*** 0.39*** –
0.41*** 0.49*** 0.55*** –
0.04 0.04 0.06 0.02 –
0.16** 0.22** 0.05 0.16** 0.17**
* ¼ p < 0.05, ** ¼ p < 0.01, *** ¼ p < 0.001, t ¼ p < 0.10.
–
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international development interventions aimed at empowering women should be suspect. Therefore, the need for empowerment researchers who can empirically evaluate empowerment-focused programs is critical in creating political change and influencing organizations and policymakers who address women’s human rights and capabilities especially with regard to globalization. Perhaps more than most, this area is ripe for interdisciplinary efforts and cooperative collaboration between interventionists, activists, and researchers working for women’s human rights and social justice in an increasingly globalized context. The findings have implications for gender and development theory, but more applicably for initiatives that aim to improve women’s wellbeing and lead to more equitable policies for women. In particular, it was suggested that micro-credit loaning in the international development community may be misguided and that an evaluation of natural resource control should move to the forefront of our analysis of women’s empowerment. The limited review suggests that projects and programs aimed at development in areas involving natural resources could better improve women’s rights by guaranteeing women’s rights to use of resources as well as ensuring positions in decision making in regards to natural resource management. Indeed, the findings from the Nicaragua study suggest that ideologically shifting how women are viewed on a societal level—through the process of land ownership and control—repositioned women and led to increased levels of empowerment, thereby reducing their levels of violence. In sum, this review highlights that there is an alarming need to view gender as a variable in policy changes and that projects should ensure that appropriate infrastructures exist to support women’s capabilities to exercise their rights. The findings also shed light on the mechanisms surrounding women’s empowerment. The development literature is replete with attention to women’s empowerment, although this has been in absence of an approach that adequately defines, conceptualizes, or assesses the complexity involved in empowerment processes. The Nicaragua study presented is a first attempt to apply empowerment theory, as conceptualized by psychology, to an understanding of the process by which structural changes in status can alter women’s positions and allow them the capabilities to exert control and mastery over their own lives and bodies. The findings from this study provide robust data suggesting that land ownership plays an important role in (1) altering women’s power and status within the household; (2) increasing women’s empowerment and psychological well-being; and (3) decreasing women’s receipt of domestic violence. As such, the findings suggest that land ownership substantially challenges traditional gender roles and increases women’s power and influence within the household, in turn providing a stronger base for women’s empowerment. This study also importantly demonstrates that the conceptualization and
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methodological approach to empowerment from within the discipline of psychology bridged the theoretical arguments surrounding human rights with the practical implementation of development interventions, and provided empirical support that has yet to be demonstrated elsewhere. These groundbreaking findings uncover the psychological mechanisms surrounding women’s empowerment and suggest that if we are to continue putting women’s empowerment at the forefront of international attention, there is great need for psychologists in this area of investigation. Indeed, there is great need for social interventions that have the capacity to alter risk environments for women, particularly in countries or regions where rates of gender-based violence are high (Garcia-Moreno, 2002) and women are disproportionately affected by HIV/AIDS (Dunkle et al., 2004). Through collaborative efforts, I believe the protection of human rights by development interventions, coupled with legislation that more broadly grants women rights, could effectively lead to the very notions of empowerment that are conceptualized by psychologists. NOTES 1. This was a collaborative project bringing together distinct expertise of both science and grass roots community advocacy. It was the researchers’ expertise that ensured a study design that had theoretically grounded research questions and an evaluation that used sound methodology and appropriate assessment. It was the collaborators and program implementers’ expertise that brought gender and cultural sensitivity to all aspects of the project and maintained the community relevance. Each member of the research team served an absolutely critical role. Unique and invaluable contributions were made by (in no particular order) the women, effort, leaders, work, dedication, and change that make up the Xochilt-Acalt women’s center; the CIERUNIC S.A. research team led by Ver onica Aguilera Carri on; the suggestions, tireless translation, and support provided by Anne McSweeney; the dedicated driving, assistance, and support of Juan Pastor Solis Rojas; the translation and diligent commitment to women’s well-being of Helen Dixon; the professional support and coordination from Sonia Arguto at FIDEG; and the encouragement, advice, and training provided by the Red de Mujeres Contra la Violencia. 2. For study details, analyses, and findings, please refer to the original manuscript Grabe & Arenas, 2009).
REFERENCES Acosta-Belen, E., & Bose, C. E. (1990). From structural subordination to empowerment: Women and development in third world contexts. Gender and Society, 4, 299–320. Agarwal, B. (1994). Field of one’s own: Property rights in South Asia. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.
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Agarwal, B. (2001). Participatory exclusions, community forestry, and gender: An analysis for South Asia and a conceptual framework. World Development, 29, 1623–1648. Ba~ nos, R. M., & Guillen, V. (2000). Psychometric characteristics in normal and social phobic samples for a Spanish version of the Rosenberg self-esteem scale. Psychological Reports, 87, 269–274. Baron, R. M., & Kenny, D. A. (1986). The moderator-mediator variable distinction in social psychological research: Conceptual, strategic, and statistical consideration. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 51, 1173–1182. Bartky, S. (1990). Femininity and domination: Studies in the phenomenology of oppression. New York: Routledge. Coles, A., & Wallace, T. (2005). Gender, water and development. Oxford: United Kingdom: Berg Publishers. Connell, R. W. (1987). Gender and power: Society, the person and sexual politics. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Cornell Empowerment Group. (1989). Empowerment and family support. Networking Bulletin, 1, 1–23. Deere, C. D. (2001). Empowering women: Land and property rights in Latin America. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Deere, C. D., & Leon, M. (2001). Empowering women: Land and property rights in Latin America. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Dunkle, K. L., Jewkes, R. K., Brown, H. C., Gray, G. E., McIntryre, J. A., & Harlow, S. D. (2004). Gender-based violence, relationship power, and risk of HIV infection in women attending antenatal clinics in South Africa. The Lancet, 363, 1415–1421. Food Agriculture Organization. (2004). The state of food insecurity in the world. Rome, Italy: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Garcia-Moreno, C. (2002). Violence against women: Consolidating a public health. In G. Sen, A. George, & P. Ostlin (Eds.), Engendering international health: The challenge of equity (pp. 111–142). Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Goetz, A. M., & Gupta, R. S. (1996). Who takes the credit? Gender, power, and control over loan use in rural credit programs in Bangladesh. World Development, 24, 45–63. Grabe, S., & Arenas, C. (2009). Promoting gender equality through development: Land ownership and domestic violence in Nicaragua. Gendered perspectives on international development (Working paper no. 295). East Lansing, MI: Gender, Development, and Globalization Program, Michigan State University. Grown, C., Rao Gupta, G., Kes, A. (2008). Seven priorities, seven years to go: Progress on achieving gender equality. ICRW Millennium Development Goals Series Washington, DC: International Center for Research on Women. Grzywacz, J. G., Hovey, J. D., Seligman, L. D., Arcury, T. A., & Quandt, S. A. (2006). Evaluating short-form versions of the CES-D for measuring depressive symptoms among immigrants from Mexico. Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences, 28, 404–424. Harris, L. M. (2006). Irrigation, gender, and social geographies of the changing waterscapes of southeastern Anatolia. Environment and Planning D, 24, 187.
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Hendy, H. M., Weiner, K., Bakerofskie, J., Eggen, D., Gustitus, C., & McLeod, K. C. (2003). Comparison of six models for violent romantic relationships in college men and women. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 18, 645–655. Hill, M. T. (2003). Development as empowerment. Feminist Economics, 9, 117–135. Holvoet, N. (2005). The impact of microfinance on decision-making agency: Evidence from South India. Development and Change, 36, 75–102. Ikdahl, I. (2008). ‘‘Go Home & Clear the Conflict’’: Human rights perspectives on gender and land in Tanzania. In B. Englert & E. Daley (Eds.), Women’s land rights and privatization in Eastern Africa (pp. 18–39). Oxford: James Currey. International Center for Research on Women. (2005). Property ownership for women enriches, empowers, and protects: Toward achieving the third millennium development goal to promote gender equality and empower women. Washington, DC: Author. International Center for Research on Women. (2006). Property ownership and inheritance rights of women for social protection: The South Asia experience. Washington, DC: Author. Kabeer, N. (1994). Reversed realities: Gender hierarchies in development thought. New York: Verso. Kabeer, N. (1999). Resources, agency, achievements: Reflections on the measurement of women’s empowerment. Development and Change, 30, 435–464. Kabeer, N. (2001). Conflicts over credit: Re-evaluating the empowerment potential of loans to women in rural Bangladesh. World Development, 29, 63–84. Kabeer, N. (2005). Is microfinance a ‘‘magic bullet’’ for women’s empowerment? Analysis of findings from South Asia. Economic and Political Weekly, 4709–4718. Khagram, S. (2004). Dams and development: Transnational struggles for water and power. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Lastarria, S. (2001). Privatization of land rights and access to factor markets: A path to gender equity? Paper presented at the Agrarian Reform and Rural Development Conference, The American University, Cairo, Egypt. Lastarria-Cornhiel, S. (1997). Impact of privatization on gender and property rights in Africa. World Development, 25, 1317–1333. Lastarria-Cornhiel, S. (2008). Module 4: Gender issues in land policy and administration. Gender in agriculture sourcebook (pp. 125–171). Washington, DC: World Bank Publications. MacKinnon, D. P. (2000). Contrasts in multiple mediator models. In J. S. Rose, L. Chassin, C. C. Presson, & S. J. Sherman (Eds.), Multivariate applications in substance use research: New methods for new questions (pp. 141–160). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Magrath, W. B., Grandalski, R. L., Stuckey, G. L., Vikanes, G. B., & Wilkinson, R. (2007). Timber theft prevention: Introduction to security for forest managers (Working paper no. 41242). Washington, DC: World Bank Publications. McCarthy, J. (2005). Devolution in the woods: Community forestry as hybrid neoliberalism. Environment & Planning, 37, 995–1014. Moghadam, V. M. (2005). Globalizing women: Transnational feminist networks. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
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Molyneux, M., & Razavi, S. (2002). Gender justice, development, and rights. New York: Oxford University Press. Naples, N. A., & Desai, M. (2002). Women’s activism and globalization: Linking local struggles and transnational politics. New York: Routledge. Narayan, D. (2005). Conceptual framework and methodological challenges. In D. Narayan (Ed.), Measuring empowerment: Cross-disciplinary perspectives (pp. 3–38). Washington, DC: World Bank Publications. Nussbaum, M. C. (2000). Women and human development: The capabilities approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nussbaum, M., & Sen, A. (1993). The quality of life. Oxford, United Kingdom: Clarendon Press. Ozer, E. M., & Bandura, A. (1990). Mechanisms governing empowerment effects: A self-efficacy analysis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 58, 472–486. Panda, P., & Agarwal, B. (2005). Marital violence, human development, and women’s property status in India. World Development, 33, 823–850. Perkins, D. D. (1995). Speaking truth to power: Empowerment ideology as social intervention and policy. American Journal of Community Psychology, 23, 765–794. Perkins, D. D., & Zimmerman, M. A. (1995). Empowerment theory, research, and application. American Journal of Community Psychology, 23, 569–579. Phillips, A. (2002). Multiculturalism, universalism, and the claims of democracy. In M. Molyneux & S. Razavi (Eds.), Gender, justice, development, and rights (pp. 115–140). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pulerwitz, J., Gortmaker, S. L., & DeJong, W. (2000). Measuring sexual relationship power in HIV/STD research. Sex Roles, 42, 637–660. Rappaport, J. (1987). Terms of empowerment/exemplars of prevention: Toward a theory for community psychology. American Journal of Community Psychology, 15, 121–148. Razavi, S. (1999). Gendered poverty and well-being: Introduction. Development and Change, 30, 409–433. Razavi, S. (2003). Introduction: Agrarian change, gender and land rights. Journal of Agrarian Change, 3, 2–32. Rocheleau, D., & Edmunds, D. (1997). Women, men and trees: Gender, power and property in forest and agrarian landscapes. World Development, 25, 1351–1371. Ryff, C. D. (1989). Happiness is everything, or is it? Explorations on the meaning of psychological well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57, 1069–1081. Sen, A. (1985). Well-being, agency, and freedom: The Dewey lectures 1984. The Journal of Philosophy, 82, 169–221. Sen, A. (1995). Gender inequality and theories of justice. In M. Nussbaum & J. Glover (Eds.), Women, culture, and development: A study of human capabilities (pp. 259–273). New York: Oxford University Press. Sen, A. (1999). Development as freedom. New York: Oxford University Press. Sharp, J., Briggs, J., Yacoub, H., & Hamed, N. (2003). Doing gender and development: Understanding empowerment and local gender relations. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 28, 281–295.
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Shiva, V. (2002). Water wars: Privatization, pollution and profit. Cambridge, MA: South End Press. Sobel, M. E. (1990). Effect analysis and causation in linear structural equation models. Psychometrika, 55, 495–515. Spence, J. T., Helmreich, R., & Stapp, J. (1973). A short version of the attitudes towards women scale (AWS). Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society, 2, 219–220. Straus, M. A., Hamby, S. L., Boney-Mccoy, S., & Sugarman, D.B. (1996). The revised conflict tactics scales (CTS2): Development and preliminary psychometric data. Journal of Family Issues, 17, 283–316. Taylor, P. L., & Zabin, C. (2000). Neoliberal reform and sustainable forest management in Quintana Roo, Mexico: Rethinking the institutional framework of the forestry pilot plan. Agriculture and Human Values, 17, 141–156. Tripp, A. M. (2002). The politics of women’s rights and cultural diversity in Uganda. In M. Molyneux, & S. Razavi (Eds.), Gender, justice, development, and rights (pp. 413–440). Oxford: Oxford University Press. United Nations Development Fund for Women. (2006). Violence against women: Facts and figures. New York: United Nations Development Fund for Women. United Nations Development Programme. (1995). Human development report 1995. New York: Oxford University Press. United Nations 4th World Conference on Women. (1995). Report of the fourth world conference on women No. A/Conf.177/20). Beijing, China: United Nations. United Nations General Assembly, 52nd session. (2000). United Nations millennium declaration No. A/Res/55/2. New York: United Nations. Varughese, G., & Ostrom, E. (2001). The contested role of heterogeneity in collective action: Some evidence from community forestry in Nepal. World Development, 29, 747–765. Wingood, G. M., & DiClemente, R. J. (2000). Application of the theory of gender and power to examine HIV-related exposures, risk factors, and effective interventions for women. Health Education & Behavior, 27, 539. World Bank. (1993). Water resource management. Washington, DC: International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank. World Health Organization (WHO). (2005). WHO multi-country study on women’s health and domestic violence against women: Summary report of initial results on prevalence, health outcomes and women’s responses. Geneva, Switzerland: Author. Zimmerman, M. A. (1990). Taking aim on empowerment research: On the distinction between individual and psychological conceptions. American Journal of Community Psychology, 1, 169–177. Zimmerman, M. A. (1995). Psychological empowerment: Issues and illustrations. American Journal of Community Psychology. Special Issue: Empowerment Theory, Research, and Application, 23, 581–599. Zwarteveen, M. Z. (1997). Water: From basic need to commodity: A discussion on gender and water rights in the context of irrigation. World Development, 25, 1335–1349.
Chapter 3
Missing Children and Child Abductions: An International Human Rights Issue Michele A. Paludi Katie L. Kelly
One missing child is one too many. —John Walsh
Child abduction and missing children are problems that affect families around the world. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (2009) reported that each day, an average of 2,185 children are missing. This means during the course of writing this chapter, more than 131,100 children were reported missing. Child Find of America (2009) and Boudreaux, Lord, and Etter (2000) reported that approximately 203,900 children each year are abducted by a parent or family member in violation of a court decree, custody order, or other custodial rights. Thus, during the course of co-editing and publishing this threevolume book set, more than 407,800 children were abducted by a noncustodial parent, and 1,595,050 children were missing in general. Furthermore, the incidence of international child abduction increases each year as a consequence of the ease of international travel and increase in bicultural relationships (Moskowitz, 2005). The Report on Compliance with the Hague Convention (2008) indicated that in the 2007 fiscal year, the U.S. Central Authority assisted ‘‘left-behind’’ parents in the United States in responding to 575 cases of international parental child abductions involving 821 children. In addition, the Department of State assisted in the return to the United States in 2007 of 341 children abducted to or wrongfully retained in other countries. Of these 341 children, 217 returned from countries that are Hague
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Convention (to be discussed subsequently in this chapter) partners with the United States. Two hundred sixty-two children that were abducted to or wrongfully retained in the United States were returned to their country of origin in 2007. Convention countries with the highest incidence of reported abductions to the United States in 2007 were Mexico, United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, and Australia. Recovery rates for Hague Convention countries vary by how well the courts implement the treaty (Report on Compliance with the Hague Convention, 2008). Rates of recovery of abducted children in countries not part of the Hague Convention are extremely low. More than 1.5 million children experience a runaway or throwaway episode during a given year in the United States. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (2009) reported that one in seven children aged 10 to 17 received a sexual solicitation over the Internet. In addition, 34 percent of these children experienced an unwanted exposure to sexually related material, including pictures of naked individuals or people engaging in sex. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (2009) further reported that one in five girls and one in ten boys will be sexually victimized before they reach adulthood. When names and faces are attached to these statistics, the enormity of the problem is sobering. As Stanley (2003) noted: ‘‘The names of the missing are as common as those of the children who live next door. . . . ’’ (p. 16). The abduction of a child or adolescent has a radiating impact and can thus impact the life experiences of all individuals in the child’s community and country, transforming parents, siblings, grandparents, friends, clergy, and teachers into victims as well (Boudreaux et al., 2000; Fravel & Boss, 1992; Penner, Dovidio, & Albrecht, 2000; Plass, 2007; Report on Compliance with the Hague Convention, 2008; Spilman, 2006; Tedisco & Paludi, 1996). Most children and adolescents experience an immediate postvictimized generalized distress response that is characterized as a state of psychological shock, including intrusive waking images or dreams, depression, and emotional numbing. Thus, they repeatedly reexperience the victimization. The extent of the psychological and physical damage that is experienced by missing children and adolescents is severe and may not surface for several years (Finkelhor & Browne, 1988; Report on Compliance with the Hague Convention, 2008; Tedisco & Paludi, 1996). In this chapter we discuss types of abductions and missing children, including runaways, throwaways, stranger abductions, and noncustodial parental abductions (Finkelhor, Hotaling, & Sedlak, 1992; Gullotta, 2005). We also discuss the empirical research on the impact of abductions on children and adolescents, including the effects on their psychological and physical well-being, achievement and career development, interpersonal relationships, and self-concept. Furthermore, we
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review the psychological research on perpetrators of abductors, including repeat offenses; the impact of power, not sex, on their modus operandi; and their manipulation process. We review the legislation concerning missing children and child abductions. We offer recommendations for future research and responsibilities of educators, including curriculum integration projects for children and adolescents. Finally, we discuss a feminist restructuring of the legislation for international abductions. John Walsh, whose son, Adam, was abducted and murdered, once stated that he wished that he and his wife spent more time encouraging Adam to respect his safety rather than respecting adults’ authority: ‘‘If I had taught him to scream, he might be alive now’’ (quoted in Gelman, 1984, p. 86). Personal statements help break the silence surrounding child abductions and missing children. As Tedisco and Paludi (1996) noted, ‘‘silence enhances our illusion of the invulnerability for non victims. It is because none of our children and adolescents are safe that the silence must be broken’’ (p. 20). Tedisco and Paludi used the ‘‘just world hypothesis’’ (Lerner, 1980) to help explain why individuals are reluctant to accept the reality of child abductions. Individuals believe that bad things occur only to those people who bring on or deserve the consequences of their actions. We tend to find a personal reason to explain the abduction: something the child said, did, wore, and so on. This is a coping mechanism for them since the alternative realization is frightening: ‘‘It could happen to me or to someone I love.’’ It is our goal is to have this chapter contribute to break the silence surrounding child abductions, especially those abductions occurring within the context of intimate partner violence.
TYPES OF MISSING CHILDREN AND CHILD ABDUCTIONS Stranger Abduction A stranger or nonfamily abduction is defined as an incident in which a nonfamilial acquaintance or stranger detains or takes a child without lawful authority or permission from the child’s parents or legal guardians primarily for the purposes of ransom, sadistic, or sexual assault or murder (Boudreaux, Lord, & Dutra, 1999; Finkelhor, Hammer, & Sedlak, 2002; Gallagher, Bradford, & Pease, 2002). Boudreaux et al. (1999) defined a ‘‘stranger’’ as an individual the victim has never met before the abduction and who is not part of the child’s immediate family. Stereotypical abduction refers to abduction that occurs in conjunction with ransom, murder, or the abductor’s intent to keep the child permanently (Asdigian, Finkelhor, & Hotaling,
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1995; Finkelhor et al., 2002). Findings from the National Incidence Studies of Missing, Abducted, Runaway and Thrownaway Children (NISMAET) (Sedlak, Finkelhor, Hammer, & Schultz, 2002) estimated that stranger abductions account for approximately 2 percent of all abductions. The following categories of stranger abductors have been identified in the literature (Tedisco & Paludi, 1996): pedophiles, serial killers, profiteers, and childless psychotics. Each of these categories are summarized below. Pedophiles Pedophilia is defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the American Psychiatric Association (2000) as: recurrent, intense, sexual urges and sexually arousing fantasies, of at least six month’s duration, involving sexual activity with a prepubescent child. The age of the child is generally 13 or younger. The age of the person is arbitrarily set at age 16 years or older and at least five years older than the child.
A pedophile is thus a significantly older individual who prefers to have sex with persons legally considered children and whose sexual fantasies and erotic imagery focus on children (Stevens, 2001). We note that not all pedophiles abduct children (Greenberg, Bradford, & Curry, 1993; Lanning, 1994; Salter, 2004). Pedophiles are more commonly sexually molested at a younger age than individuals who were not sexually molested and are not pedophiles (Greenberg et al., 1993; Lang & Langevin, 1991; Levant & Bass, 1991; Stevens, 2001). Individuals who are pedophiles have experienced abuse and other forms of ineffectual parenting and disciplining, characterized by anger, hostility, and laissez-faire parenting (Stevens, 2001). Individuals who are pedophiles thus identify with children better than with adults (Bahroo, 2005; Levant & Bass, 1991; Salter, 2004; Spilman, 2006). This identification with children allows them to seduce children; they ‘‘understand’’ their problems at home or at school (Tedisco & Paludi, 1996). The majority of pedophiles use child pornography for sexual arousal and gratification. This pornography is a prelude to sexual activity with children (Salter, 2004). Furthermore, pedophiles use pornography to lower children’s inhibitions (Lanning, 1994; Stevens, 2001). Serial Killers Stranger abductors who are serial killers use domination, power, and control as motivational themes (Beasley, 2004; Drukteinis, 1992).
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They frequently move from state to state abducting and murdering their victims. Profiteers Profiteers are defined as individuals who are criminal exploiters who sell children to pornographers, traffickers, or adoptive parents (Chase & Statham, 2005; Hunt & Baird, 1990; Rafferty, 2007, 2008; Simkhada, 2008). Trafficking is characterized by physical and emotional trauma, humiliation, degradation, and violence associated with treatment of children as a commodity (Ireland, 2006; Rafferty, 2008). Childless Psychotics Children, especially infants (children under two years of age), may be abducted by individuals who have not been able to give birth to children of their own or have recently miscarried a child or had a child that was stillborn (Shogan, 2006; Strohman, 2005). CHARACTERISTICS OF STRANGER ABDUCTORS Most child abductors are male who are motivated by power, dominance, and control, not sex (Doyle & Paludi, 1997). Abductors may fuse aggression with sexuality. Malamuth and Check (1981), for example, reported that some men have a heightened sexual arousal as stimulated by graphic scenes of sexual violence. Abductors target victims within their own race or ethnic group. Hanfland, Keppel, and Weis (1997) reported that abductors’ average age is 27 years old. Most abductors are unmarried. Hanfland et al. (1997) further found that half of the abductors studied live alone or with their parents, and half are unemployed and have a history of sexual, alcohol, drug, and mental problems. Two-thirds of the abductors have been arrested for violent crimes. When women abduct children, they do so for emotional satisfaction (e.g., childless psychotics). Girls are more likely to be abducted by strangers as well as family members; boys are more likely to be abducted by family members. In addition, older children are more likely to be victimized than younger children since they are independent of the supervision of parents and other adults (Finkelhor, 1995). Apparent Normalcy Salter (2004) reported that stranger abductors appear to be ‘‘normal.’’ This apparent normalcy creates the opportunity for children to accompany a stranger or noncustodial parent. There is no research to
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date that suggests that an abductor can be easily identified by his or her blatant mistreatment of children or adolescents (Tedisco & Paludi, 1996; Quina & Carlson, 1989). Children, especially young children, do not know who strangers really are. Thus, potential abductors may not be labeled by children as ‘‘strangers’’ because they do not meet the child’s own definition of the term. Modus Operandi Research has identified that abductors are repeat offenders with a modus operandi (Freeman-Longo & Wall, 1986; Quina & Carlson, 1989). The majority of abductors have committed hundreds of abuses for 10 to 15 years or more prior to their first arrests. According to Courtois (1988), the child is manipulated by the unequal power in the relationship that is by the relationship with the perpetrator on whom she is dependent. The child is further coerced by the perpetrator’s strong desire to keep the activity a secret, which has the purpose of minimizing intervention and allowing repetition. (p. 6)
Burgess and Holmstrom (1974) identified two kinds of modus operandi that apply to child abductors: ‘‘blitz attack’’ and ‘‘confidence assault.’’ In the blitz attack, a stranger appears suddenly, for example, jumps out of a car in front of a child walking on a street. Children are in shock at this occurrence and this shock interferes with any defensive action they may take. In addition, the shock of this individual’s behavior precludes the child from seeing or remembering facts about the individuals’ appearance, comments, and so forth at a later time. The confidence assault is an elaborate scheme set up by the abductor. Lanning (1994) refers to this confidence assault as a psychological assault rather than a physical one. There are stages to the confidence assault. It first starts with gaining the confidence or trust of the targeted victim. This trust is then used to manipulate the child into physical and psychological vulnerability. By the time the child realizes the individual is violent, the child’s options for escape are limited by the abductor. The abductor continues the confidence assault by convincing the child that he or she is a participant in the crime or caused the crime (Quina & Carlson, 1989). LURES USED BY STRANGER ABDUCTORS Research has outlined several lures used by stranger abductors (Boudreaux et al., 2000; Burgess & Holmstrom, 1974; Tedisco & Paludi, 1996): asking children for directions, asking children to help locate a
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missing pet, informing the child that their parent has been injured in an accident and is hurt, ringing the doorbell when the child is home alone to gain entry into the house, and offering to give children a ride home. In addition, these lures are used with vulnerable children, such as children who are quiet, who appear to have an intense need for adult affection and approval, are withdrawn, have poor social skills with children their own age, or are from divorced homes. Other examples of vulnerability were outlined by Huttinger (1984), including children who walk alone to or from school, wait for a school bus by themselves, ride a bicycle alone or at night, wait for rides in parking lots after dark, or are wearing articles of clothing that prominently display their names (permits abductors to portray familiarity). Boudreaux et al. (2000) reported that abductors select victims from areas where they feel safe and where their risks in abducting children are minimized.
ABDUCTION HOMICIDE According to the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (Boudreaux, Lord, & Jarvis, 2001), one in four abducted children is murdered by their abductor. Hanfland et al. (1997) reported that abductors who murder children are more likely to conceal the body than murderers in general. The murder of children by abductors is caused by one of three factors (Lanning, 1994): (1) inadvertent, where the abductor may not have intended to murder the child; (2) indiscriminate, where the abductor may or may not have chosen the victim; and (3) most commonly, murder to avoid detection. Most victims of stranger abductions are likely to be murdered immediately or within 24 hours (Boudreaux et al., 1999; Brown & Keppel, 2006; Hanfland et al., 1997). Sex-related murders of abducted children are common (Heide, Beauregard, & Myers, 2009). Finkelhor et al. (2002) reported that in 40 percent of stranger kidnappings, the child is murdered. Children younger than four years and adolescents between 13 and 17 years are at highest risk for murder (Dalley, 2000).
Abductors’ Explanations for Abductions Strangers who abduct children have predictable reactions (Lanning, 1994), including denial of engaging in the abduction, minimizing their actions, justifying the abduction, fabrication of the reason for the abduction (e.g., conducting research on missing children), having a mental illness, and pleading nolo contendere to avoid civil liability. Research by Quina and Carlson (1989) and Russell (1975) has addressed the following psychological profiles of child abductors. They
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RUNAWAYS AND THROWAWAYS According to Hammer, Finkelhor, and Sedlak (2002), runaway and throwaway youth constitute the largest component of missing children each year. These youth make up approximately 45 percent of all children reported missing during each year. Approximately 1.6 and 2.8 million children and adolescents run away or are thrown out of their homes in a year (Hammer et al., 2002; National Runaway Switchboard, 2009; Sanchez, Waller, & Greene, 2006). Child Find of America (2009) found that approximately 5,000 runaways die on the streets of this country each year. Runaways are defined as children of 14 years or younger who leave home without permission from a parent or guardian for at least one night. For older adolescents, runaways are defined as individuals who stay away from home without permission for at least two nights. Situational runaways are comprised of youth who leave home for a day or two following a disagreement with their parent(s). This is the largest group of runaways (Denoff, 1991; Pennbridge, Yates, David, & Mackenzie, 1990; Sanchez et al., 2006). Chronic runaways do not return to their home but rather live in transitory housing, shelters, abandoned buildings, or underneath highway bridges (Giffords, Alonso, & Bell, 2007; Sanchez et al., 2006). Throwaways are defined as youth who leave home because their parent(s) abandoned them, told them to leave, or subjected them to extreme abuse or neglect. Throwaways (or thrownaways) are linked with runaways; for example, it is common for youth to run away after parents threaten them with throwing them out of their homes (Gullotta, 2005). Child Find of America (2009) and Kempf-Leonard and Johansson (2007) reported that the majority of youth who run away or are thrown
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away are between 15 and 17 years old, with the gender ratio equal. Reasons for children and adolescents running away include family problems, physical abuse, peer pressure, alcohol and other drug abuse, and sexual abuse. (Child Find of America, 2009; Khong, 2008; Peled & Muzicant, 2008; Thompson & Pillai, 2006). Youth who run away because of sexually abusive homes are referred to as ‘‘terrified runners’’ (Finkelhor & Dziuba-Leatherman, 1974; Greene & Esselstyn, 1972; Quina & Carlson, 1989). Palenski and Launer (1987) identified a process of running away that involves the following stages: family disengagement, effects of friends as role models, recognizing the ‘‘right’’ situation, shrinking alternatives, and managing the residuals. Runaway youth report their involvement with their families was at a minimum (family disengagement). As their involvement with their family becomes less frequent, peers become more attractive. They witness friends running away from their family to deal with the disengagement. Palenski and Launer (1987) noted in their research that youth did not perceive running away as a feasible solution until they saw peers with similar family problems leave home. Palenski and Launer (1987) also found that youth decide to run away when they are in a state of extreme turmoil or in one of extreme passivity (recognizing the right situation). Furthermore, youth who run away do so when other alternatives to dealing with family problems no longer seem viable (shrinking alternatives). If the difficulties the youth was facing did not necessitate bringing in authorities, for example, law enforcement, then an alternative to running away was seen as likely. However, once a third party becomes involved, youth believe that running away is the best way to protect themselves (Tedisco & Paludi, 1996). Palenski and Launer (1987) also found that youth had misgivings about running away (managing the residuals). Youth have to consider the realities of street life, including food, shelter, and school. There are some runaway programs that can assist youth with these realities (Franks & Goswami, 2009; Thompson & Pillai, 2006). However, most youth receive assistance from abductors and abusers they encounter on the street. Runaway youth are the people most vulnerable to further abuse (Gullotta, 2005; Molino, 2007; Terrell, 1997). Huttinger (1984), for example, noted that ‘‘local and national call services and ‘buy-a-kid’ rings sell runaway children for a night or permanently’’ (p. 112). Furthermore, abductors use runaways as accomplices to their own crimes (Tedisco & Paludi, 1996). In addition, runaway youth do not have health insurance nor access to medical care. Consequently, they are prone to diseases (Millstein, 1989). Runaway youth are considered to be in the highest groups for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection (Millstein, 1989); many engage in prostitution to obtain money for their food, shelter, and drugs (Flowers, 2001).
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The life of a runaway or throwaway is not the romantic, idealized life once considered by adolescents who, because of their stage of cognitive development, believe nothing bad could ever happen to them because of their uniqueness (Elkind, 1967). What may have been seen to be an improvement for runaways’ problems with their families is in reality an intolerable burden. As Tedisco and Paludi (1996) stated: Runaway teens are not prepared for the callousness and indifference of individuals they encounter on the street, let alone the cruelty of some individuals who are waiting for the opportunity to abuse them even more. . . . These adolescents as well as those who appear alone and frightened are easily spotted and are quickly identifiable as ‘‘the new kids.’’ (Huttinger, 1984)
NONCUSTODIAL PARENTAL ABDUCTION The U.S. Department of Justice reported that approximately 203,900 children were victims of a family abduction, as indicated in the national NISMART study (2002). Noncustodial parental abduction is defined as taking and keeping a child in violation of the custodial parent’s rights. Child Find of America (2009) noted that 35 percent of children abducted by a noncustodial parent are between six and eleven years of age. Children younger than three years of age are typically not abducted by a noncustodial parent because they create unique problems for the abductor: the children need constant supervision and care. Older children and adolescents are likely to telephone home, run away, and alert law enforcement agencies, and are thus are not likely to be abducted by a noncustodial parent (Hyde & Hyde, 1985). Approximately 24 percent of the abductions last between one week and one month. Included in this category of abductions are relatives of the child who take the child on behalf of the noncustodial parent. Child Find of America (2009) reported that 21 percent of noncustodial abductions are committed by relatives. The reasons why noncustodial parents and other relatives abduct children are varied, including dissatisfaction with the court’s custody decision, denial of visitation for not paying child support, anger with the end of their relationship and using the children as pawns in this argument, and anger with the custodial parent’s new partner or lifestyle (Abrams, 1983; Allender, 2007; Child Find of America, 2009; Donner, 2006; Johnston, Girdner, & Sagatun-Edwards, 1999). Abrams (1983) found that malice and revenge are the most common motives for noncustodial parental abductors who have a ‘‘get-even mentality’’ (p. 126). In addition, a parent may fear their child is or will be abused by the other parent and thus abduct the child to protect her or him
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(Humphreys, 1995; Levendosky, Lynch, & Graham-Bermann, 2000). We will discuss this further subsequently in the chapter when we review the literature on abductions occurring in the context of intimate partner violence. Hegar and Greif (1991) surveyed 371 parents who requested assistance from missing children’s organizations in order to profile families where abduction by a noncustodial parent or relative occurred. Hegar and Greif noted that abductors were less educated and less likely to be employed than searching parents. The majority of noncustodial abductions involved a single child, and 55 percent of the abducting parents were male. In addition, Hegar and Greif found that mothers who children were abducted by their fathers reported more intimate partner violence in their marriage, more fault-related reasons for divorce, and more force used in abducting the children than did fathers whose children were kidnapped by their mothers. Similarly, Cole and Bradford (1992) found abducting parents were more likely to be male, not born in America, and had previous psychiatric histories and previous criminal charges. Noncustodial parental abductors tell the children that the custodial parent is unfit, ill, dead, or will kill them if they return. Furthermore, these abductors tell children that the custodial parent has a new relationship and a new family and is not interested in having them returned (Tedisco & Paludi, 1996). Many of these children are also physically and/or sexually abused by the abducting parent (Faller, 1991; Hegar & Greif, 1991; Johnston et al., 1999). Consequently, noncustodial parental abductors move frequently and change their names and the names of their children. Children describe themselves as pawns between their feuding parents. They thus have little opportunity to develop a sense of trust, which is an important part of developing an identity (Donner, 2006). The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (2009) identified conditions under which the likelihood of an international abduction of a child is great: previous abduction, friends and/or family living in another country, financially independent or can work anywhere, recently sold a home, closed a bank account, liquidated assets, no strong ties to the child’s home state, instability in relationships, and/or a prior criminal record. The Report on Compliance with the Hague Convention (2008) noted that parents who abduct their children to other countries are similar to those who abduct their children to other states within the United States: They often have young children. They usually have support from family or other individuals for what they are doing. They generally do not value the other parent’s relationship with the child. Some are convinced their actions are justified because they believe they rescued their child from
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As a consequence of abducting parents returning to their country of birth, the physical distance makes locating, recovering, and returning children who were internationally abducted difficult (Girdner, 1994). In addition, lack of sufficient funds to help locate the abducted child makes locating the child complex, as do difficulties with foreign laws and U.S. laws. IMPACT OF ABDUCTIONS ON CHILDREN AND FAMILIES Research in child abductions, including international abductions, has documented impact on several areas of functioning, including emotional/psychological, physiological or health-related, academic, interpersonal, and self-perception (Finkelhor, Hotaling, & Sedlak, 1990; Forehand, Long, Zogg, & Parrish, 1989). Psychological problems stemming from abductions are subtle and may not surface for several years. In addition, young children who have been abducted and abused may not be able to verbalize the impact of this victimization until they are older (Tedisco & Paludi, 1996). Examples of emotional/psychological effects of abductions include, but are not limited to, guilt, denial, withdrawal from social settings, shame, depression, fear, anger, anxiety, phobias, isolation, fear of crime, helplessness, frustration, shock, and decreased self-esteem (Hatcher, Barton, & Brooks, 1992; Terr, 1983). The following are reported physical/health-related effects of abductions: headaches, tiredness, respiratory problems, substance abuse, sleep disturbances, eating disorders, lethargy, gastrointestinal disorders, and inability to concentrate (Finkelhor et al., 1990). The impact of abductions on social and interpersonal relationships has included the following: withdrawal, fear of new people, lack of trust, changes in social network patterns, and relationship difficulties (Forehand, Long, Zogg, & Parrish, 1989; Schetky & Haller, 1983). Children victims of international abductions have difficulty making friends and thus forming this aspect of their identity (Report on Compliance with the Hague Convention, 2008). Koss (1990) and Lundberg-Love and Marmion (2006) noted that adult women who were victims of child sexual abuse had identifiable degrees of impairment when compared with nonvictims, including clinical depression, drug abuse, panic, obsessive-compulsive symptoms, suicidal ideation, or deliberate attempts at self-harm. Plass (2007) noted that in addition to symptoms stemming from the abduction per se,
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children and adolescents experience secondary victimization; that is, boys are likely to be physically assaulted, and girls are likely to be sexually assaulted. Children and adolescents who try to escape the abductor frequently experience increased violence and the threat of death, blame for the abduction and abuse, and/or death of their family members. In addition they respond to the victimization by developing a dissociative disorder as a psychological protection. Walker (1992) noted that in children younger than five years, multiple personalities may develop from the dissociation. Bryant (1992) found that children may become preverbal and may continue in a state of chronic shock if not permitted to express feelings related to the trauma. Greif and Hegar (1993), in their longitudinal study of the impact of abductions on children and their parents, reported: ‘‘those children who were doing the most poorly had been missing longer, had been reunited with their families for a shorter period of time, had no contact with the abductor, and reportedly had a worse abduction experience’’ (p. 54). In addition, the U.S. Department of Justice (cited in Report on Compliance with the Hague Convention, 2008) noted that children who are victims of international abductions suffer greater effects associated with adapting to new cultural norms and values. Furthermore, they may miss months or years of education. Their names are frequently changed, as are their birthdates and physical appearance so as to conceal their identity (Report on Compliance with the Hague Convention, 2008). According to the Report on Compliance with the Hague Convention (2008): If and when the child is reunited with the left-behind parent, they may find that they no longer have a relationship with that parent or even a language in common. They may be distrustful of the left-behind parent and question why that parent did not try harder to get them back. They may find that the left-behind parent has remarried and that they have a new, unfamiliar stepparent and siblings. Children who were abducted while very young may not even remember life with the left-behind parent. (p. 48)
Spilman (2006) and Janvier, McCormick, and Donaldson (1990) noted that parents experience trauma vicariously with their children. Greif and Hegar (1991) also reported parents of abducted children experienced feelings of rage, loss, loss of appetite, impaired sleep, and depression. Forehand, Long, Zogg, and Parrish (1989) reported that the trauma for parents did not end when the child was recovered. Hatcher et al. (1993) noted that the majority of the parents they studied had concerns that their child would be reabducted. When an international child abduction occurs, left-behind parents may have to deal with unfamiliar cultural, legal, and linguistic barriers while searching for their child (Report on Compliance with the Hague Convention, 2008).
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Certainly financial pressures of dealing with child abductions, both domestic and international, make the emotional symptoms more pronounced. Left-behind parents of children who have been internationally abducted may have insufficient funds to travel to another country and may not have an attorney who is familiar with legal issues of abduction in that country. Fravel and Boss (1992) noted that siblings of abducted children develop symptoms of developmental regression and phobias. In addition, parents of abducted children overprotect the remaining children (Forehand, Long, Zogg, & Parrish, 1989).
EDUCATIONAL PROGRAMS ON CHILD ABDUCTIONS AND MISSING CHILDREN Research with children (and adults) suggests that child abductions are not well understood (e.g., Bromberg, 1997; Finkelhor & DziubaLeatherman, 1995; Newman, 1985). Tedisco and Paludi (1996) identified myths commonly believed by individuals that are used to ‘‘explain away’’ child abductions or diminish the impact of abductions to victims and their families. These myths include: . An abductor is a psychotic human being, easily identifiable by children and adults. . There are no long-term affereffects of abductions for those who are found. . It is only young, helpless children who are the prey of abductors. . Runaway children and adolescents are not targeted for abductions. . Parental abduction is not a serious matter and is not a form of child abuse. . Abductions do not happen here to the people I know—they happen somewhere else.
Tedisco and Paludi (1996) noted that these myths contribute to keeping the issue of child abductions hidden. Curriculum training programs disclose the hidden issue and create an empowering learning environment for children and adolescents. Training programs in general include three major components: (1) needs assessment, (2) facilitating the training programs, and (3) posttraining evaluations (Badhesha, Schmidtke, Cummings, & Moore, 2008). Poorly conceptualized and poorly facilitated training programs on child abductions and missing children cause more harm than good (Bromberg, 1997; Johnson et al., 2006). Despite the fact that children and adolescents may like learning about safety education, the impact of such training may not translate into sustained, positive results that are transferred out of the training program. We hope that the approach identified in this next section will
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assist schools in measuring student behaviors and school outcomes, not solely changes in student attitudes and perceptions. NEEDS ASSESSMENT There are several topics to be discussed in any training program on abductions (e.g., legal definitions, behavioral examples, the school’s policy, common lures). In keeping with the literature in human resource management (e.g., DeCenzo & Robbins, 2007; Dessler, 2009), we recommend conducting a needs assessment with children and adolescents as well as school personnel to identify additional issues they expect to be covered in a training session. Examples of additional topics include how to tell parents about a potential abduction and how to discuss feeling uncomfortable with a family member touching them. Brown (2002) identified four reasons why needs assessments must be conducted prior to facilitating training programs: to (1) identify problem areas in the school’s training, policy, and procedures; (2) obtain school administrators’ support; (3) develop data for measuring the effectiveness of the training program; and (4) determine the costs and benefits of the training program. Needs assessments may be conducted through anonymous surveys and/or focus groups (Lucier, 2008). The main goal of the needs assessment, therefore, is the establishment of mutual trust and respect, methods of inclusion, and verbal and nonverbal communication. The process of the assessment will be consistent with the goal of the training programs in which the children and adolescents will subsequently participate (Tyler, 2002). During the needs assessment, several factors must be addressed by schools to establish an effective training program for children and adolescents on abductions (Tedisco & Paludi, 1996): 1. Parental notification and permission to teach about child abductions and missing children. 2. Contacts with law enforcement who can assist with children’s reports of experiences prompted by the training program. 3. A policy and procedure for children to use to report a potential abduction.
EDUCATIONAL QUALIFICATIONS OF TRAINERS The following qualifications of trainers of children and adolescents on the topic of abductions have been noted in the literature (e.g., Tedisco & Paludi, 1996): 1. Knowledge of child and adolescent development, including cognitive, emotional personality, peer, and physical development.
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TRAINING PROGRAM Training Goals Goals for training programs that have been identified in the child abduction literature (Bromberg, 1997; Newman, 1985; Tedisco & Paludi, 1996) include: 1. Define ‘‘missing,’’ including nonparental abductions, runaways, throwaways and stranger abductions. 2. Educate students about the legal definitions and behavioral examples of abductions. 3. Define ‘‘stranger’’ for children and adolescents to include family acquaintances, neighbors, and individuals with whom families have brief contact, e.g., letter carriers, television repairperson. 4. Discuss ‘‘unsafe’’ places. 5. Discuss the impact of being abducted on children’s and adolescents’ emotional and physical well being. 6. Discuss the effects of abductions on parents, siblings, friends, and school mates. 7. Tell children and adolescents what their rights and responsibilities are with respect to abductions. 8. Empower children and adolescents to take control of their bodies. 9. Discuss children’s and adolescents’ fears and anxieties about abductions. 10. Discuss common lures of abductors. 11. Assist in making the child and adolescent knowledgeable about safety strategies to make the abductor’s job of luring them more difficult. 12. To create an environment that is free of the fear of retaliation for speaking out about child abductions.
Once the goals have been established, the school’s policies and procedures regarding reporting potential child abductions must be revised, taking into account new case law and research from the behavioral sciences (see Tedisco & Paludi, 1996). Because the policy statements and
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procedures are part of the training session content, they must be completed prior to the training. Training programs on child abduction awareness involve more than a recitation of individuals’ rights and responsibilities and what the law and school policy requires. Training also requires dealing with children’s and adolescents’ assumptions and misconceptions, as well as the anxieties about the training itself. Thus, training sessions must devote ample time to dealing with the children’s and adolescents’ feelings, misconceptions, and questions. Children and adolescents may want to discuss topics related to abductions and abuse following the training program with the trainer without hearing any comments from peers. Because child abduction and abuse are intimate for children and adolescents, they are unlikely to ask questions in public.
COGNITIVE MATURITY OF CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS Effective curriculum projects take into account the cognitive stage of development of children and adolescents. For example, children and some young adolescents need to be provided with concrete examples, not hypothetical situations, for them to understand concepts (Elkind, 1967). Therefore, behavioral rehearsal or behavioral skills training (Poche, Brouwer, & Swearingen, 1981) would be recommended for children; having them role play positive solutions to conflict situations that are presented to them. Research by Fryer, Kraizer, and Miyoshi (1987) with children in kindergarten, first, and second grades found that children’s susceptibility to a child lure as measured by a paper-andpencil method indicated their knowledge about what to do increased as a result of training. However, the children were easily lured by an adult posing as an abductor and luring them to accompany him. Thus, cognitive-only approaches will not by themselves be effective for children and adolescents. Geonie (cited in Tedisco & Paludi, 1996) uses behavioral rehearsal with puppets for teaching young children about abductions that can take place walking home from school, answering the door when children are home alone, and so on. Newman (1985) uses photographs of each step of a scenario depicting a potential abduction. A story line accompanies the photographs; questions and alternative answers are posed to children to help them learn about abductions. Research by Poche, Yoder, and Miltenberger (1988) using videotapes and behavior rehearsal found children could learn to resist potential abductors. Johnson et al. (2006) reported that behavioral skills training in conjunction with in situ training proved effective for teaching abduction prevention to young children.
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Older children and adolescents may be taught about abductions using case studies and scenarios about children who are confronted with a potential abduction and strategies for reporting an abduction to school officials, parents, law enforcement, and so on. Examples of these case studies may be found in Tedisco and Paludi (1996). In addition, adolescents live in the immediate present; they rarely consider how their behavior in the present could be beneficial or harmful to them in the future. They rely on a ‘‘personal fable’’ (Elkind, 1967, 1988); that is, a subjective story they tell themselves about their uniqueness; how they are not subject to the dangers suffered by others. Thus, they may not believe that they could be a victim of an abduction out of the conviction that ‘‘nothing bad will happen to me—I’m special.’’ Curriculum projects must take into account this egocentrism and help adolescents to understand their own vulnerability to abductions. We note that since most of the abductions are committed by noncustodial parents, teaching children and adolescents about ‘‘stranger danger’’ may be misguided (Finkelhoret al., 1992). In addition, programs that encourage children to ‘‘Run, Yell and Tell’’ may not be reasonable if the potential abduction occurs in a remote area. Furthermore, as Bromberg (1997) noted: ‘‘ . . . it is likely that screaming will infuriate the would-be captor and that the adult is likely to attempt to render the child unconscious to prevent him or her from drawing the attention of individuals who might eventually pass within earshot of the screaming child victim’’ (p. 5). This strategy also may not work with international child abductions. Tedisco and Paludi (1996) also recommend the following issues to be taken into account in designing a training program on abductions: assistance from school psychologists during and following the training program to assist children and adolescents who may have flashbacks, are visibly upset, and/or are expressing anger toward the trainer because they are angry at a parent or perpetrator. POSTTRAINING EVALUATIONS While there are several training programs on abductions for children and adolescents, there have been few attempts to determine the extent to which children can transfer the information learned to potential real life situations (Bromberg, 1997). Measuring the effectiveness of training programs is an important aspect of the training program so that the school may determine if the training delivered or failed to deliver the expected benefits. The measures of success for the training programs in abductions are ones identified in the needs assessment phase. Issues in the measurement phase can be discussed in two phases: types of information about which to measure and ways to measure whether or not the training effort achieved its goals. It is not enough to merely
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assume that any training is effective (Roberts, Alexander, & Fanurik, 1990). The most well-known model for determining the effectiveness of training programs is the Kirkpatrick Model (Kirkpatrick, 1959, 1998) that is comprised of four levels: reaction, learning, behavior, and results. Results concerns the benefits resulted from training. Behavior taps into to what extent trainees change their behavior as a result of this training. The learning level asks to what extent trainees improved their knowledge and skills and changed their attitudes as a result of the training programs. Finally, the reaction component determines trainees’ opinions about the structure of the training program, location of the program, trainer effectiveness, and so on. The most commonly used level of the Kirkpatrick Model is the reactions level. However, this is the least valid evaluation technique (Tan, Hall, & Boyce, 2003). Individuals’ opinions are heavily influenced by factors that may have little to do with the training effectiveness. By measuring reactions, schools do not obtain information regarding children’s and adolescents’ learning, how well they are integrating the new knowledge and skills, or whether there has been increased reporting of problems post training. Trainers must assist children and adolescents in practicing their knowledge to determine whether they are able to translate the knowledge into appropriate behaviors. Bromberg (1997) recommended the following training programs with children and adolescents that incorporate empirically validated principles of learning: modeling new behaviors, drill and reinforcement, maintenance of behaviors, training in neutral environments to promote generalization across settings and teaching novel problems to ensure transfer of training to new situations. As Bromberg (1997) concluded: Presenting children with an abduction prevention program is insufficient; children must receive the right kind of program. Such programming includes frequent opportunities for rehearsal of skills and receiving corrective feedback to shape appropriate responses to potential abductors. (p. 8)
Common performance-based evaluations that incorporate any of the Kirkpatrick Model levels are posttraining, pre-post training, and prepost training performance with control group. In a posttraining evaluation, students’ knowledge of information presented in the training is measured after they have attended the training program to determine whether they have increased their knowledge of this information. However, some trainees may have known this information prior to participating in the training program. Thus, to simply provide a ‘‘posttraining survey or test’’ may overstate the benefits of the training program.
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Pre-post training evaluations can assist with this concern (Sadri & Snyder, 1995). The trainer administers a test or quiz prior to the beginning of the training program. Such a quiz may ask questions regarding the types of abductions, how to tell school officials, and so on. Following the training program, the trainer readministers the quiz and then determines whether scores on the post-test quiz are higher than those on the pretest version. This method can provide more reliable information about whether the training program contributed to increased scores on the posttest quizzes, which is what one would expect if the training program was effective. To further answer the question regarding training effectiveness, a pre-post training with a control group can be used. In this method, two groups of children or adolescents are established and evaluated on their knowledge, attitudes, behavior, and so on. The control group, however, is given no training. The other group does receive training. Both groups are given a posttest. This method corrects for factors other than training that influenced students’ performance. The group that received training should have higher posttest scores that those in the control group. Sample curricula are presented in Tedisco and Paludi (1996). Legislation must be made part of the training, including training programs for educators, school personnel, and parents.
THE PROTECT ACT OF 2003: AMBER ALERT The Protect Act of 2003, referred to as the AMBER Alert program (America’s Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response), was established in 2003 as a voluntary partnership between law enforcement agencies, transportation agencies, and media broadcasters in order to activate an urgent bulletin in child abduction cases. AMBER Alert has as its goal to immediately bring together an entire community to assist in the search for and recovery of a missing child (Griffin & Miller, 2008; Zgoba, 2004). There are five components that must be met in order for an AMBER Alert to be issued (Miller & Clinkinbeard, 2006; Zgoba, 2004). 1. Confirmation by law enforcement that the child has been abducted; 2. Belief by law enforcement that the child is facing imminent danger; 3. Substantial information regarding the victim, offender, and vehicle; 4. The abduction is of a child 17 years or younger; 5. The child’s name and other critical identification information have been entered into the National Crime Information Center computer.
AMBER alert information is assembled for public dissemination. Such information includes photos of the missing child, suspected
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abductor, and suspected vehicle. This data is faxed to radio stations designated as primary stations under the Federal Communications Commission’s Emergency Alert System. These stations interrupt programming to announce the AMBER alert and notify television stations and cable stations of the alert. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children is also alerted by law enforcement. This center transmits the information to authorized secondary distributors; that is, companies, businesses, and organizations that can deliver geographically targeted messages to customers. In some states, electronic highway billboards are used in their AMBER alert system. In addition, wireless AMBER alerts are available for users who wish to receive such alerts. AMBER plan statistics (2009) indicated that there have been 443 successful recoveries of missing children. International AMBER Alert plans exist in the following countries: Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Greece, Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. In 1999, the International Center for Missing and Exploited Children was established to assist with international child abductions. Information about AMBER Alert programs in the United States and internationally may be obtained from http://www.amberalert.gov and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children: http://www.missingkids.com.
HAGUE CONVENTION OF THE CIVIL ASPECTS OF INTERNATIONAL CHILD ABDUCTION The Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction is a treaty developed by the Hague Conference on Private International Law. This treaty aims to provide a quick method to return a child younger than 16 years of age who is taken from one member nation to another. The Preamble to this treaty states its mission: ‘‘to insure the prompt return of children who have been abducted from their country of habitual residence or wrongfully retained in a contracting state not their country of habitual residence.’’ This agreement thus seeks to return abducted children to the country where they normally live so that courts of that country may decide on issues of custody and visitation rights (Reynolds, 2006). A Hague Convention case is not about deciding what is in the child’s best interest. Rather, it concerns the return of the child to the jurisdiction that will hear the custody matter. The Hague Convention defines ‘‘wrongful’’ removal or retention of a child under the following conditions: a. It is in breach of rights of custody attributed to a person, an institution or any other body, either jointly or alone, under the law of the State in
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The Hague Convention applies only between countries that are both parties to the Convention (Report on Compliance with the Hague Convention, 2008). In the United States, the implementing legislation enacted in 1988 is the International Child Abduction Remedies Act. Convention parties are listed in Appendix 1.
THE CHILDREN’S PASSPORT ISSUANCE ALERT PROGRAM The U.S. Central Authority began the Children’s Passport Issuance Alert Program in 2007. This program gives parents the opportunity to request their U.S. citizen children be registered in the Department’s Passport Lookout System. Any passport application for a child who is registered in this program will alert the Department who, in turn, will alert the parent(s). Parents will be notified in advance of a potential abduction should a passport be requested for a child registered in this program. To date, foreign embassies do not have to adhere to U.S. regulations for children with dual nationality (Report on Compliance with the Hague Convention, 2008).
STATE CLEARINGHOUSES A clearinghouse is a central point for law enforcement personnel, education programs, prevention programs, and legislators to coordinate their efforts in locating abducted and missing children. Clearinghouses exist in each of the 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands, Canada, and the Netherlands. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (2009) recommends the following functions of clearinghouses: 1. Collecting and maintaining computerized data and investigative information on missing persons in the states. 2. Compiling statistics on the missing children’s cases handled and the number resolved by the clearinghouse each year. 3. Assisting in the training of law enforcement and other professionals on issues relating to missing and unidentified persons.
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4. Operating a clearinghouse of information regarding methods of locating and recovering missing persons. 5. Keeping and distributing information regarding methods of locating and recovering missing persons. 6. Assisting in the preparation and dissemination of flyers of missing persons and their abductors. 7. Publishing, on a regular basis, a directory of missing persons for dissemination to state and local public and nonprofit agencies and to the public. 8. Establishing and operating a statewide, toll-free telephone line for reports of missing persons and reports of sightings of missing persons.
Information about clearinghouses may be obtained from The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children: http://www.missing kids.com. CONCLUSION: FEMINIST CRITIQUE OF CHILD ABDUCTION RESEARCH AND THE HAGUE TREATY Nobody believes that domestic violence kills and nobody believes it is detrimental to children. This world has got to wake up. To me, if there is domestic violence, if the children see it or hear it, that to me is detrimental. Batterers should not have rights to children. —Denise Brown
Weiner (2000) reported that the Hague Convention has a masculine bias: it was initially drafted in response to abductions of children by fathers or other male relatives. Weiner (2000) has offered a feminist corrective to this bias: to include in the definition abductor mothers who are battered and are fleeing for their safety and the safety of their children. Estimates indicate that male partners assault a minimum of 4 million women each year in the United States. Abuse in couples’ relationships include intense criticisms, put downs, verbal harassment, sexual coercion and assault, physical attacks, intimidation, restraint of normal activities and freedoms, and denial of access to resources (Butts Stahly, 1999). Straus, Gelles, and Steinmetz (1980) once concluded that ‘‘The American family and the American home are perhaps as or more violent than any other American institution or setting (with the exception of the military, and only then in time of war)’’ (p. 4). Walker (1999) noted that the Fourth United Nations International Conference on Women in 1996 identified no country that had an absence of domestic violence. Women around the world are more at risk of homicide as a result of battering than from all other categories of causes (Lundberg-Love & Marmion, 2006). Children are often in the middle of domestic violence (Graham & Rawlings, 1999; Lundberg-Love & Marmion, 2006). Walker (1999)
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found that each year, at least 3.3 million children in the United States between the ages of three and seventeen years are at risk of exposure to their mothers’ being battered by their fathers. Children may be abused by the violent parent. Homicide is currently one of the five leading causes of child mortality in the United States. In addition, children may grow up to repeat the same behavior patterns they witnessed in their parents (Fantuzzo & Mohr, 1999; McGuigan & Pratt, 2001). Weiner (2003) noted that seven of nine Hague Convention cases that reached an appeals court in late 2000 involved a mother who abducted her child to escape a battering mate. As Shetty and Edelson (2005) noted: Approximately one third of all published and unpublished Convention cases we have identified using online legal databases include a reference to some type of family violence, and 70% of these include details of adult domestic violence. (p. 120)
Research by Johnston, Sagatun-Edwards, Bloomquist, and Girdner (2000) concerning 634 abductions in California found that ‘‘mothers who abducted were more likely to take the children when they or the children were victims of abuse, and fathers who abducted were more likely to take the children when they were the abusers’’ (pp. 2–3). Shetty and Edleson (2005) reported that intimate partner violence is not seen as a legitimate concern in international abductions but rather as an unsubstantiated allegation’’ (p. 119). Weiner (2003) has noted the common victim-blaming question of women who are being battered; that is, ‘‘Why does she stay with the batterer?’’ (e.g., Graham & Rawlings, 1999) is reversed in international child abduction cases to ‘‘Why didn’t she stay in the child’s country of habitual residence to litigate with the child’s father?’’ As Shetty and Edleson (2005) noted, having children of battered women return to their county of habitual residence will expose them to the batterer while custody decisions take place: Mothers who abduct their children and flee to find a safe haven are not perpetrators, as the Hague Convention implies, but are victims of their partner’s violence. They are also victims of an international treaty, written with good intentions, but, when implemented, has unintended negative consequences for their safety and that of their children. (p. 135)
Thus, ‘‘habitual residence’’ for children in all countries must be redefined to include a residence in which the child’s well being is secured and not violence-prone. In addition, domestic and international laws must not work against the psychology of the victimization process of intimate partner violence. As Riane Eisler is quoted as saying:
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For most of recorded history, parental violence against children and men’s violence against wives was explicitly or implicitly condoned. Those who had the power to prevent and/or punish this violence through religion, law, or custom, openly or tacitly approved it. . . .The reason violence against women and children is finally out in the open is that activists have brought it to global attention.
And, as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stated in 1999 at the formation of the International Center for Missing and Exploited Children: . . . ultimately these matters are not just about individual children and the pain of victim parents, but they really are a question of human rights and whether or not we will enforce our laws evenly and fairly to anyone who comes within our jurisdictions.
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Bryant, C. (1992). The victimology of children: A transpersonal conceptual treatment model. In E. Viano (Ed.), Critical issues in victimology: International perspectives. New York: Springer. Burgess, A., & Holstrom, L. (1974). Rape: Sexual disruption and recovery. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 49, 648. Butts Stahly, G. (1999). Violence against women by male partners: Prevalence, outcomes and policy implications. American Psychologist, 48, 1077–1087. Chase, E., & Statham, J. (2005). Commercial and sexual exploitation of children and young people in the UK—A review. Child Abuse Review, 14, 3–25. Child Find of America. (2009). www.childfindofamerica.org Cole, W., & Bradford, J. (1992). Abduction during custody and access disputes. Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, 37, 264–266. Courtois, C. (1988). Healing the incest wound: Adult survivors in therapy. New York: Norton. Dalley, M. (2000). Stranger abduction. Canada’s Missing Children Annual Report. Ottawa, ON, Canada: Missing Children’s Registry, Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Decenzo, D., & Robbins, S. (2007). Fundamentals of human resource management. New York: Wiley. Denoff, M. (1991). Irrational beliefs, situational attributions, and the coping responses of adolescent runaways. Journal of Rational-Emotive and CognitiveBehavior Therapy, 9, 113–135. Dessler, G. (2009). Fundamentals of human resource management. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Donner, M. (2006). Tearing the child apart: The contribution of narcissism, envy, and perverse modes of thought to child custody wars. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 23, 542–553. Doyle, J., & Paludi, M. (1997). Sex and gender: The human experience. New York: McGraw Hill. Drukteinis, A. (1992). Serial murder: The heart of darkness. Psychiatric Annals, 22, 532–538. Elkind, D. (1967). Egocentrism in adolescence. Child Development, 38, 1025–1034. Elkind, D. (1988). The hurried child: Growing up too fast too soon. New York: Addison-Wesley. Faller, K. (1991). Possible explanations for child sexual abuse allegations in divorce. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 61, 86–91. Fantuzzo, J., & Mohr, W. (1999). Prevalence and effects of child exposure to domestic violence. The Future of Children, 9, 21–32. Finkelhor, D. (1995). The victimization of children: A developmental perspective. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 65, 177–193. Finkelhor, D., & Browne, A. (1988). The traumatogenic effects of child sexual abuse. In L. Walker (Ed.), Handbook on sexual abuse of children. New York: Springer. Finkelhor, D., & Dziuba-Leatherman, J. (1994). Victimization of children. American Psychologist, 49, 173–183. Finkelhor, D., Hammer, H., & Sedlak, A. (2002). Nonfamily abducted children: National estimates and characteristics. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice.
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Hatcher, C., Barton, C., & Brooks, L. (1992). Families of missing children. Final Report. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice. Hegar, R., & Greif, G. (1991). Abduction of children by their parents: A survey of the problem. Social Work, 36, 421–426. Heide, K., Beauregard, E., & Myers, W. (2009). Sexually motivated child abduction murders: Synthesis of the literature and case illustration. Victims and Offenders, 4, 58–75. Humphreys, J. (1995). Dependent-care by battered women: Protecting their children. Health Care for Women International, 16, 9–20. Hunt, P., & Baird, M. (1990). Children of sex rings. Child Welfare, 69, 195–207. Huttinger, B. (1984). My child is not missing: A parent’s guidebook for the prevention and recovery of missing children. Plantation, FL: Child Safe Products. Hyde, M., & Hyde, L. (1985). Missing children. New York: Franklin Watts. Ireland, K. (2006). Sexual exploitation of children and international travel and tourism. Child Abuse Review, 2, 263–270. Janvier, R., McCormick, K., & Donaldson, R. (1990). Parental kidnapping: A survey of left-behind parents. Juvenile and Family Court Journal, 41, 1–8. Johnson, B., Miltenbergere, R., Knudson, P., Egemo-Helm, K., Kelso, P., Jostad, C., et al. (2006). A preliminary evaluation of two behavioral skills training procedures for teaching abduction prevention skills to schoolchildren. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 39, 25–34. Johnston, J., Girdner, L., & Sagatun-Edwards, I. (1999). Developing profiles of risk for parental abduction of children from a comparison of families victimized by abduction with families litigating custody. Behavioral Sciences and the Law, 17, 305–322. Johnston, J., Sagatun-Edwards, I., Blomquist, M., & Girdner, L. (2000). Prevention of family abduction through early identification of risk factors. Washington, DC: Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, U.S. Department of Justice. Kempf-Leonard, K., & Johansson, P. (2007). Gender and runaways: Risk factors, delinquency, and juvenile justice experiences. Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice, 5, 308–327. Khong, L. (2008). Runaway youths in Singapore: Exploring demographics, motivations and environments. Children and Youth Services Review, 31, 125–139. Kirkpatrick, D. (1959). Techniques for evaluating training programs. Journal of the American Society for Training Development, 13, 3–9. Kirkpatrick, D. (1998). Evaluating training programs: The four levels. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler. Koss, M. (1990). The women’s mental health research agenda: Violence against women. American Psychologist, 45, 374–380. Lang, R., & Langevin, R. (1991). Parent–child relations in offenders who commit violent sexual crimes against children. Behavioral Sciences and the Law, 9, 61–71. Lanning, K. (1994). Child molesters: A behavioral analysis. School Safety, Spring, 12–17. Lerner, M. (1980). The belief in a just world. New York: Plenum. Levendowsky, A., Lynch, S., & Graham-Bermann, S. (2000). Mothers’ perceptions of the impact of woman battering on their parenting. Violence Against Women, 6, 247–271.
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Levant, M., & Bass, B. (1991). Parental identification of rapists and pedophiles. Psychological Reports, 69, 463–466. Lucier, K. (2008). A consultative training program: Collateral effect of a needs assessment. Communication Education, 57, 482–489. Lundberg-Love, P., & Marmion, S. (2006). Intimate violence against women. Westport, CT: Praeger. Malamuth, N., & Check, J. (1981). Penile tumescence and perceptual response to rape as a function of victim’s perceived reactions. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 10, 528–547. McGigan, W., & Pratt, C. (2001). The predictive influence of domestic violence on three types of child maltreatment. Child Abuse and Neglect, 25, 869–883. Miller, M., & Clinkinbeard, S. (2006). Improving the AMBER alert system: Psychology research and policy recommendations. Law and Psychology Review, 30, 1–21. Millstein, S. (April 1989). Behavioral risk factors for AIDS among adolescents. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Kansas City, MO. Molino, A. (March 2007). Characteristics of help-seeking street youth and non-street youth. Paper presented at the 2007 National Symposium on Homelessness Research, Washington, DC. Moskowitz, G. (2005). The Hague Convention on international child abduction and the grave risk of harm exception. Family Court Review, 41, 580–596. National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. (2009). http://www.missingkids.com National Runaway Switchboard. (2009). National Runaway Switchboard. http:// www.1800runaway.org/ Newman, S. (1985). Never say yes to a stranger. New York: Perigee. Palenski, J., & Launer, H. (1987). The process of running away: A redefinition. Adolescence, 22, 347–362. Peled, E., & Muzicant, A. (2006). The meaning of home for runaway girls. Journal of Community Psychology, 36, 434–451. Penner, L., Dovidio, J. & Albrecht, T. (2000). Helping victims of loss and trauma: A social psychological perspective. In J. Harvey & E. Miller (Eds.), Loss and trauma: General and close relationship perspectives (pp. 62–85). Philadelphia: Brunner-Routledge. Pennbridge, J., Yates, G., David, T., & Mackenzie, R. (1990). Runaway and homeless youth in Los Angeles County, California. Journal of Adolescent Health Care, 11, 159–165. Plass, P. (2007). Secondary victimizations in missing child events. American Journal of Criminal Justice, 32, 30–44. Poche, C., Brouwer, R., & Swearingen, M. (1981). Teaching self-protection to young children. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 14, 169–176. Poche, C., Yoder, P., & Miltenberger, R. (1988). Teaching self-protection to children using television techniques. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 21, 253–261. Quina, K., & Carlson, N. (1989). Rape, incest, and sexual harassment: A guide for helping survivors. New York: Praeger. Rafferty, Y. (2007). Children for sale: Child trafficking in Southeast Asia. Child Abuse Review, 16, 401–422.
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Rafferty, Y. (2008). The impact of trafficking on children: Psychological and Social Policy Perspectives. Child Development Perspectives, 2, 13–18. Report on Compliance with the Hague Convention. (2008). Civil aspects of international child abduction. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of State. Reynolds, S. (2006). International parental abduction: Why we need to expand custody rights protected under the Child Abduction Convention. Family Court Review, 44, 464–483. Roberts, M., Alexander, K., & Fanurik, D. (1990). Evaluation of commercially available materials to prevent child sexual abuse and abduction. American Psychologist, 45, 782–783. Russell, D. (1975). The politics of rape. New York: Stein & Day. Sadri, G., & Snyder, P. (1995). Methodological issues in assessing training effectiveness. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 10, 30–32. Salter, A. (2004). Predators: Pedophiles, rapists, and other sex offenders. New York: Basic Books. Sanchez, R., Waller, M., & Greene, J. (2006). Who runs? A demographic profile of runaway youth in the United States. Journal of Adolescent Health, 39, 778–781. Schetky, D., & Haller, I. (1983). Child psychiatry and law: Parental kidnapping. Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry, 22, 279–285. Sedlak, A., Finkelhor, D., Hammer, H., & Schultz, D. (2002). National estimates of missing children, an overview. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice. Shetty, S., & Edleson, J. (2005). Adult domestic violence in cases of international parental child abduction. Violence Against Women, 11, 115–138. Shogan, M. (2006). Emergency management plan for newborn abduction. Journal of Obstetric, Gynecologic and Neonatal Nursing, 31, 340–346. Simkhada, P. (2008). Life histories and survival strategies amongst sexually trafficked girls in Nepal. Children and Society, 22, 235–248. Spilman, S. (2006). Child abduction, parents’ distress, and social support. Violence and Victims, 21, 149–165. Stanley, P. (2003, September). Giving kids a fighting chance. USA Today, 16–17. Stevens, D. (2001). Inside the mind of sexual offenders: Predatory rapists, pedophiles, and criminal profiles. Bel Air, CA: Author’s Choice Press. Straus, M., Gelles, R., & Steinmetz, S. (1980). Behind closed doors: Violence in the American family. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books. Strohman, L. (2005). Stranger infant abductions: Offense characteristics, victim selection, and offender motivation of female offenders. Dissertation, Drexel University. Tan, J., Hall, R., & Boyce, C. (2003). The role of employee reactions in predicting training effectiveness. Human Resource Development Quarterly, 14, 397–411. Tedisco, J., & Paludi, M. (1996). Missing children. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Terr, L. (1983). Child snatching: A new epidemic of an ancient malady. The Journal of Pediatrics, 103, 151–156. Terrell, N. E. (1997). Street life: Aggravated and sexual assaults among homeless and runaway adolescents. Youth Society, 28, 267–290. Thompson, S., & Pillai, V. (2006). Determinants of runaway episodes among adolescents using crisis shelter services. International Journal of Social Welfare, 15, 142–149.
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Tyler, K. (2002). Evaluating evaluations. HR Magazine, 47. Walker, L. (1992). Traumatized populations: Role and responsibilities of professionals. In E. Viano (Ed.), Critical issues in victimology: International perspectives. New York: Springer. Walker, L. (1999). Psychology and domestic violence around the world. American Psychologist, 54, 21–29. Weiner, M. (2000). International child abduction and the escape from domestic violence. Fordham Law Review, 69, 593. Weiner, M. (2003). The potential and challenges of transnational litigation for feminists concerned about domestic violence here and abroad. American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy, and the Law, 11, 749–800. Zgoba, K. (2004). The Amber Alert: The appropriate solution to preventing child abduction? Journal of Psychiatry and Law, 32, 71–88.
APPENDIX 1: PARTNERS OF THE HAGUE CONVENTION OF THE CIVIL ASPECTS OF INTERNATIONAL CHILD ABDUCTION Argentina Australia Austria Bahamas Belgium Belize Bosnia and Herzegovina Brazil Bulgaria Burkina Faso Canada Chile China (Hong Kong and Macau only) Columbia Costa Rica Croatia Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Dominican Republic Ecuador El Salvador Estonia Finland
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France Germany Honduras Hungary Iceland Ireland Israel Italy Latvia Lithuania Luxembourg Macedonia Malta Mauritius Mexico Monaco Montenegro Netherlands New Zealand Norway Panama Paraguay Peru Poland Portugal Romania Saint Kitts and Nevis San Marino Serbia Slovakia Slovenia South Africa Sweden Switzerland Turkey Ukraine United Kingdom (Bermuda, Cayman Islands, Falkland Islands, Isle of Man, Montserrat)
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Uruguay Venezuela Zimbabwe APPENDIX 2: RESOURCES ON CHILD ABDUCTIONS AND MISSING CHILDREN AMBER Alert http://www.amberalert.gov American Bar Association http://www.abanet.org Committee for Missing Children, Inc. http://www.findthekids.org Child Abduction Resource Center http://www.globalmissing.com Child Find of America http://www.childfindofamerica.org Child Focus (Belgium) http://www.childfocus.org Childfind Canada (Canada) http://www.childfind.ca/ Find the Children http://www.findthechildren.com Hague Conference Permanent Bureau–Child Abduction Section Hcch.e-vision.nl/index_en.php? Inter-American Bar Association http://www.iaba.org Lost Children’s Network http://www.lostchildren.org Missing Children Society of Canada http://www.mcsc.ca National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth http://www.naehcy.org National Center for Missing Adults http://www.missingadults.org National Center for Missing and Exploited Children http://www.missingkids.com National Center for Prosecution of Child Abuse http://www.ndaa-apri.org
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National Runaway Switchboard http://www.1800runaway.org/ Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention http://www.ojjdp.ncjrs.org Polly Klaas Foundation http://www.pollyklaas.org/ Prevent Child Abuse–America http://www.preventchildabuse.org Team HOPE-Support for Families with Missing Children http://www.teamhope.org U.S. Department of State, Office of Children’s Issues http://www.travel.state.gov Vanished Children’s Alliance http://www.vca.org WomensLaw.org http://www.womenslaw.org
Chapter 4
Women and Sexuality: An International Perspective Donna Castaneda Monica Ulibarri
Sexuality is a fundamental aspect of human experience, but the study of sex at a global level has been minimal. Some countries have large research databases on sexual behavior, but almost none of these are in the developing countries, and basic sexuality information is lacking for whole regions of the world. No worldwide organization is charged with collecting and archiving information on sexuality, in contrast to organizations such as the World Health Organization or the Pan American Health Organization, which maintain health statistics worldwide or across large geographic regions (Mackay, 2001). In particular, women’s experience of sexuality, except as it relates to fertility and childbirth, has received little attention at the international level. Even basic information on women’s sexual experience, such as average age at first intercourse or average number of sexual encounters with a partner per week, is unclear except in a relatively small number of countries, primarily those in the Western world. More nuanced and detailed knowledge of women’s sexuality—how women in diverse cultures navigate sexual identity, desire, and pleasure in differing social, political, and cultural contexts, for example, is difficult to find. This situation notwithstanding, our effort here is to present and discuss the available information on various aspects of women’s sexuality, such as sexual desire, sexual behavior, sexual problems, and the concept of women’s sexual rights and its relationship to human rights. Our goal is to present, as much as possible given the incredible
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diversity of societies in the world, the differences as well as commonalities in women’s sexual lives across the above themes in women’s sexuality. DEFINITION OF WOMEN’S SEXUALITY While no universal definition of sexuality exists, and how sexuality is constructed, managed, and acted out by women varies historically and cross-culturally, an important premise in any understanding of women’s sexuality is that it is very much embedded within and grows out of political struggles, gender relations, cultural meanings surrounding femininity, and legal and social definitions of human rights. Sexuality is a personal psychological, emotional, and physical experience, but how women learn about, understand, and approach their sexuality cannot be separated from the larger sociocultural context of their lives. This contextualized approach to the study of women’s sexuality has not always existed and only relatively recently (the last 15 to 20 years) has a fuller understanding of the social and cultural embeddedness of sexuality been articulated (for examples see Blackwood & Wieringa, 1999a; Correa & Parker, 2004; Parker et al., 2004). Sexuality has been primarily viewed as a natural and immutable aspect of life, and the biomedical model, along with studies of specific sexual behaviors, has been the prevailing framework governing the study of women’s sexuality (see Amaro, Navarro, Conron, & Raj, 2002 for a discussion). On the other hand, globalization, whether through economic, technological, or cultural processes, has led to exposure to and engagement with a much wider array of cultural constructions surrounding sexual and relational intimacy, thus highlighting the limitations of the standard sexuality frameworks (Obermeyer, 2000; Padilla, Hirsch, Mu~ noz-Laboy, Sember, & Parker, 2007; Parker et al., 2004). Out of these larger globalization processes, the definitions of sexuality have expanded to include not only behavioral and biological aspects, but also recognition of the multiplicity of factors that may influence sexuality (Promotion of Sexual Health: Recommendations for Action, 2000). This change can be seen in the working definition of sexuality developed by the Pan American Health Organization, World Health Organization, and World Association of Sexology that is useful to present here: Sexuality is a central aspect of being human throughout life and encompasses sex, gender identities and roles, sexual orientation, eroticism, pleasure, intimacy and reproduction. Sexuality is experienced and expressed in thoughts, fantasies, desires, beliefs, attitudes, values, behaviours, practices, roles and relationships. While sexuality can include all of these dimensions, not all of them are always experienced or expressed. Sexuality is influenced by the interaction of biological, psychological,
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social, economic, political, cultural, ethical, legal, historical, religious and spiritual factors. (Promotion of Sexual Health: Recommendations for Action, 2000)
This definition does not overtly incorporate a gendered perspective, such as, compared to men, the greater subordination of women and efforts at control of women’s sexuality that are seen worldwide. It includes the suggestion of diversity in gender identity and sexual orientation, but it does not include the notion of compulsory heterosexuality (Rich, 1983) that constrains many women’s sexual options, even in what are considered sexually liberal countries and societies. Nevertheless, the above definition represents a broadened perspective on sexuality that stems from greater global and cross cultural engagement, not just by researchers, corporations, and government entities, but also by ordinary women as they traverse geographic, cultural, and political boundaries due to a myriad of reasons such as economic necessity, family reasons, or political conflict and oppression. Along with the expansion in the concept of sexuality, another critical and related change has been the increased acceptance of love as the basis for entering marriage. The past 100 years, particularly since the 1950s, have seen changes in ideals and purposes of marriage. Duty, defined gender roles and responsibilities, and procreation were the primary basis for entering a marriage relationship. Sexuality was of course part of these relationships, but the purpose of sexuality was procreation rather than pleasure. Love and emotional intimacy might occur in a marital relationship, but it was not necessarily the impetus or goal of marriage. As Jennifer Hirsch states (2007, p. 94), ‘‘Marriage was a system for organizing social reproduction, not a project for personal satisfaction.’’ At this juncture in time, the modern marital ideal in many very diverse cultures has come to mean a companionate relationship that emphasizes pleasure, intimacy, and personal satisfaction of the relationship partners. A key component of these companionate relationships is sexual enjoyment and the fulfillment of mutual sexual needs (D’Emilio & Freedman, 1988; Hirsch, 2007). Researchers point to the role of ‘‘literacy, fertility decline, the media, the intertwining of sexuality, modernity, desire, and commodification’’ (Hirsch, 2007, p. 101) as important forces for social change in the definition of ideal marital relationships at a global level and, in fact, it is affective processes and adult love relationships that have increasingly become strategies for defining oneself as modern. Another term that has emerged within the global sexuality discourse, particularly in response to the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and that must be distinguished from sexuality, is sexual health. It is related to the concept of sexuality—in fact, sexuality and health always intersect in numerous direct and indirect ways—but cannot be conflated with or
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substituted for it. Sexual health for women refers not just to the absence of sexual dysfunction and sexual diseases, such as HIV/AIDS or other sexually transmitted diseases, nor does it refer narrowly to positive reproductive health such as healthy pregnancy, childbirth, and contraceptive use. It includes these dimensions, but it also incorporates the notion of an overarching well being experienced when a person has the ability to freely, responsibly, and safely express their sexual desires without the fear of coercion, discrimination, or violence (Promotion of Sexual Health: Recommendations for Action, 2000; Sexual Health—A New Focus for WHO, 2004). The sexual health concept is situated within the larger domain of public health and, as such, a consequence and necessary component of the notion of sexual health is education services about sexuality, reproductive biology, how to control fertility, and protection against sexually transmitted diseases. Because of the growing understanding among social scientists, program planners, and international health advocates that gender inequality is at the heart of women’s vulnerability to sexual health problems (Raimondo, 2005), such as their risk for HIV/AIDS and sexual victimization, these services must be provided in a manner that increases women’s autonomy and freedom of choice, and supports and empowers them to confront hostile, oppressive, or demeaning gender arrangements and ideologies in their social and personal environments (Ruklos Hampton, McWatters, Jeffery, & Smith, 2006; Undie, Crichton, & Zulu, 2007). SEXUAL RIGHTS AS HUMAN RIGHTS For women to participate in a sexual life of their own choice and to achieve and maintain sexual health, their sexual rights, as a component of basic human rights, must be recognized (Promotion of Sexual Health: Recommendations for Action, 2000). As Palesa Beverley Ditsie eloquently stated in 1995 at the UN’s Fourth World Conference on Women, ‘‘. . . no woman can determine the direction of her own life without the ability to determine her sexuality . . .’’ (as cited in Wieringa & Blackwood, 1999b, p. 26). Addressing sexuality within the context of human rights means addressing complex issues for women, such as the integrity of the body, the role and value of sexual pleasure and nonprocreative sex, sexual choice and sexual agency, sexual diversity that includes same-gender sexual relationships, and finally, determining how do these relate to the rights of the individual and her humanity (Weeks, 2007). Thus, in examining women’s sexuality internationally, the connection of sexuality to broader issues of human rights is a theme that emerges prominently. The awareness of the connection between sexual rights and human rights has grown in the last 20 or so years and is due to the
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intersection of multiple streams of separate and interwoven social change activities and events, such as the feminist, lesbian and gay, women’s health, and civil rights movements that began in the 1960s and ‘70s in Western countries; the transnational women’s health and reproductive rights movements and development work that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, and the concomitant advocacy to prioritize women’s reproductive rights, particularly by international women’s nongovernmental organizations (NGOs); the activism to incorporate into human rights convention reports language supporting sexual health, sexual rights, and gender equality; and the HIV/AIDS pandemic, the focus on sexual diversity that grew out of it, and the resulting women’s and lesbian, bisexual, gay, transgender, and queer movements that grew in developing countries in the wake of HIV/ AIDS (Mongrovejo, 1999; Parker, 2007; Parker et al., 2004; Petchesky, 2003; Tiefer, 2002a; Weeks, 2007). It is also due to the rapid pace of globalization in the last quarter century that has led to fundamental changes in national and international economies, political systems and institutions, media, work, family life, and most importantly, in conceptualizations of gender relations, identity, and sexualities (Carnoy & Castells, 2001; Hirsch, 2007; Weeks, 2007). Taken together, these events and activities have provided new vocabularies, concepts, and spaces for a larger, more informed, analysis of sexual life (Parker, 2007). For instance, in development work, sexuality has often been seen as peripheral to the important issues of inequality and poverty. However, a focus on sexual rights makes apparent the false dichotomy between sexuality and human rights by making visible the linkages between women’s sexuality on the one hand, and poverty and poverty-related problems such as lack of educational access for girls, sexual violence and victimization, homophobia and compulsory heterosexuality, and the legal and economic structures countries put into place to regulate and control women’s daily life, on the other hand (Correa & Jolly, 2008; Petchescky, 2003). Not surprisingly, placing women’s sexuality at the cornerstone of human rights has also stimulated resistance to change and, despite important global changes and the increased understanding of the link between sexuality, women’s rights, and social justice, the promise of a transformed approach to women’s sexuality is still unevenly achieved. Progressive language contained in international human rights documents is nonbinding and has not necessarily been translated into policies at the level of individual countries (Tiefer, 2002a). Political, corporate, and conservative religious interests that are served by maintaining gender inequality, sometimes in the guise of allowing individual countries to maintain oppressive cultural traditions and norms surrounding gender and sexuality, are still powerful. This can be seen in policies, and consequently funding, that promote abstinence only as a
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strategy to reduce HIV/AIDS infection and other sexually transmitted diseases, provide contraception only to married women, restrict or outlaw access to safe abortion services, or that outlaw and severely punish the expression of women’s sexuality outside marriage or with other women (Dabash & Roudi-Fahimi, 2008; Goldberg, 2009; Petchesky, 2003). Despite oppressive responses to the growing discourse on women’s sexual rights, or possibly because of them, a key realization is that sexuality can no longer be viewed as a private, personal process, unconnected to domestic or international politics and policies, but has ‘‘taken shape on a global level . . . as a key contested domain or field of struggle’’ (Correa & Parker, 2004, p. 19). SEXUAL BEHAVIOR With publication of the Kinsey et al. work on women’s sexual behavior in 1953 and the work of Masters and Johnson in 1966, the thinking on human sexuality moved into its modern forms. With their clearly empirical emphasis on documenting actual sexual practices and behaviors, these works were a leap forward in sexuality research. Most importantly for women, their sexual experiences and priorities were given a prominence previously absent in the sexuality literature. However, the study of women’s sexual behavior has progressed little beyond this focus on acts or even sequences of behaviors, or sexual scripts, and further illumination of women’s sexual lives is still needed. International studies of women’s sexual behavior from across a spectrum of social class origins are difficult to find and research that does exist focuses heavily on potential for disease or health problems, particularly those that may affect reproduction and fertility. This has led to important information about which sexual behaviors put women most at risk for sexual health problems, but it has not necessarily led to an increased understanding of women’s sexual practices, needs, or experiences. One of the few cross-national surveys of sexual behavior, the Durex Sexual Well-being Survey (2007), included samples from 26 countries in Europe (e.g., United Kingdom, Poland, France), Asia (e.g., India, China, Malaysia), Latin America (e.g., Brazil, Mexico), North America (e.g., Canada, United States), Australia, and Africa (e.g., South Africa, Nigeria). It was conducted over the Internet except in Nigeria where face-to-face or self-completed surveys were used due to low Internet and telephone use. Certainly, the sample is one that has access to computer technology and is likely more comfortable with sexuality in general, thus, findings reflect the experiences of a possibly small demographic subset within each of these countries. However, the study provides interesting insights into sexual behavior of women from a large number of countries, particularly when differences by sexual
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orientation are presented. For instance, bisexual women report an average of 13 male, and three female sexual partners, homosexual women report an average of 11 female partners, and heterosexual women reporting an average of seven male sexual partners. Austrian women report the highest average number of sexual partners, 29, while Chinese women report the lowest average number of sexual partners, at only two. The number of sexual partners was higher for men in every country except New Zealand, where women reported an average of 20 sexual partners, while men reported an average of 17 sexual partners. With regard to sexual behaviors, bisexual women show the highest rate of vaginal sex (94 percent), followed by heterosexual women (84 percent), and homosexual women (77 percent). Regarding anal sex, again bisexual women are most likely to give (23 percent) and receive (39 percent) anal sex, compared to 18 percent of heterosexual and 15 percent of homosexual women receiving anal sex, and 8 percent of heterosexual and 10 percent of homosexual women giving anal sex. Use of sexual devices by women giving anal sex was not clarified. Both bisexual and homosexual women report higher rates of giving oral sex, 71 and 77 percent respectively, than heterosexual women, 56 percent. Bisexual and homosexual women also report higher rates of receiving oral sex, 75 and 74 percent, respectively, than heterosexual women, 55 percent. Finally, for more unusual sexual activities, such as bondage/S&M and telephone sex, bisexual and homosexual women report higher rates than heterosexual women. Twenty-three percent of bisexual women and 28 percent of homosexual women report bondage/S&M activities, compared to only 5 percent of heterosexual women; 24 percent of bisexual women and 48 percent of homosexual women report telephone sex, while only 9 percent of heterosexual women report engaging in telephone sex. Finally, 22 percent of women report masturbation once a week, compared to 43 percent of men. Other results in the Durex survey show that the weekly rate of sexual activity and satisfaction with that activity varies considerably worldwide. Respondents in Japan reported the lowest weekly rate of sexual activity, 34 percent, and they also reported the lowest satisfaction with that activity, 15 percent. Greece had the highest percentage of respondents who reported having sex weekly, 87 percent, but only 51 percent reported being satisfied with that activity; on the other hand, in Nigeria, while 53 percent of respondents reported having sex weekly, 67 percent of them were satisfied with this activity. Not enough information about the conduct of the Durex survey is available to determine the validity of these results for women. Nevertheless, where results are presented by gender, they provide an intriguing picture of women’s sexual behavior worldwide. First, bisexual women, and to a lesser extent homosexual women, appear to engage in a wider range of sexual activities than heterosexual women and to
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do so with both women and men. They also report more sexual partners than heterosexual women. These results are consistent with other research that shows that women who have sex with both women and men tend to engage in a wider range of sexual behaviors and to have more sexual partners than women who have sex with men only (Casta~ neda & G omez Bastidas, 2005; Lemp et al., 1995; Reinisch, Sanders, & Ziemba-Davis, 1995; Richters, Bergin, Lubowitz, & Prestage, 2002). They also demonstrate that sexual identity labels (bisexual, homosexual, heterosexual) do not necessarily indicate the gender of one’s sexual partners or the behaviors in which one is most likely to engage. They are also similar to research that shows that women engage in masturbation to a lesser extent than men (Oliver & Shibley Hyde, 1993) and that persons from certain Asian countries, such as Japan, report less satisfaction with sex (Laumann et al., 2006). In addition to simply understanding what sexual behaviors women engage in with their partners, investigating women’s sexual behavior cross-culturally highlights several related issues important to mention. First, labels for sexual acts cannot be applied uncritically across cultures and sexual acts have meanings that vary depending on the society one is examining. The relatively few cross-national studies of sexual behavior tend to have a predetermined set of sexual behaviors to be investigated, such as heterosexual intercourse, oral sex, and so on (e.g., Durex Sexual Well-being Survey, 2007; Nicolosi et al., 2004), but this should not preclude the possibility of other sexual behaviors that may be more common among women. Sexual behavior is not finite or standardized, and how it is carried out can be variable and highly dependent on the situational and relational context. That being said, however, sexual acts, in whatever context they occur, have a materiality and physicality that cannot be overlooked by researchers and theoreticians, just as the women involved do not overlook them. These behaviors exist in time and space, they involve the body, as well as emotional and cognitive processes. Second, anthropological work demonstrates that the connection between sexual behavior and sexual identity is conceived differently in different cultures. In the West, sexual identity is much more strongly categorical and compartmentalized, and it is also more highly linked to sexual acts and to the gender of one’s sexual partner. But in other cultures conceptualizations of sexual identity are more fluid, and the notion of sexual behavior as a signifier of a static and categorical sexual identity may not be applicable. For instance, among Creole women in Suriname, South America, mati work, or erotic attachments among women, is common. But mati women do not identify themselves as lesbian and they continue to have relationships with men through marriage, concubinage, or visiting relationships. In this case, sex with both women and men is part of women’s sexuality. Mati work reflects an
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ideology of sexuality for Surinamese women that is fluid and multiply defined, rather than a component of a fixed identity. Reflective of this is that when asked women themselves say ‘‘I mati’’ instead of ‘‘I am mati’’ (Wekker, 1999, p. 126). Another example of the differing relationship between sexual behavior and sexual identity is in Guatemala. Lesbian organizing in Guatemala did not begin until the 1990s, and it grew out of the civil war that lasted throughout the 1970s and 1980s and the resulting national emphasis on human and citizen rights. In this Guatemala is similar to other countries in Latin America where lesbian and gay rights movements developed out of internal liberation struggles (Sarda, 2008). This contrasts with the identity politics that dominates the discourse in the lesbian movement in the United States and the West generally. For many lesbians in Guatemala, lesbianism is defined as sexual behaviors and practices, not as an inherent identity (Berger, 2006). Lastly, in any discussion of sexual behavior the notion of social power is critical to address, as only an incomplete understanding of women’s sexuality is possible without doing so. Most societies are stratified in terms of social power, and the ability to carry out sexual behavior is very much influenced by where one stands in terms of the particular power hierarchy in a society. Gender and sexual orientation are key elements that determine social power. For example, in most societies heterosexual women and men, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals do not have the same freedom to choose their sexual partners, marry whom they want or stay single, have or not have children, or even receive sex-related education or information because they typically do not have the same status, power, and privilege in a given society (Reinfelder, 1996a). In fact, the ability to have safe and nonabusive sexual experiences is differentially distributed depending on gender and sexual orientation (along with other factors such as wealth, kinship, and ethnicity/cultural group, etc.) (Grieg, 2008). SEXUAL DESIRE At its most basic, sexual desire refers to the interest one has in seeking out and engaging in sexual activity, but even this simple definition belies a great deal of complexity, especially as it applies to women (Bailey, 2009; Basson, 2005; Wood, Barthalow Koch, & Kernoff Mansfield, 2006). While it is often assumed to be natural and universal and to operate similarly in women and men, research has shown that sexual desire does not operate in the same manner for women as for men and that it may not even be understood in similar ways. For instance, instead of a linear progression through the sexual response cycle that is initiated by sexual desire, researchers have found that sexual desire for women may sometimes precede or follow sexual arousal (Graham, Saunders, Milhausen,
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& McBride, 2004; Laan & Both, 2008); despite low sexual desire being one of the most commonly reported sexual problems among women, only a small percentage of these women report being unhappy with their sexual experiences; and unlike men, where a strong correlation exists between genital vasocongestion and subjective report of sexual arousal, studies of women’s response to erotic stimuli, usually in the form of videos, show that while they may show signs of physiological sexual arousal, such as vasocongestion, they do not necessarily report subjective sexual arousal (Laan, Everaerd, van Bellen, & Hanewald, 1994; Laan & Janssen, 2007). As a concept sexual desire is sometimes confused with the need for intimacy or to be loved, sexual arousal, sex drive, and overt sexual behavior (Wood, Barthalow Koch, & Kernoff Mansfield, 2006). However, when heterosexual women and men are asked to define sexual desire, they tend to come up with a similar definition—that it is primarily a psychological experience characterized by a sense of longing, urge, yearning, need, want, and so forth, but they differ in what they consider to be the goals and objects of sexual desire (Regan & Berscheid, 1996). Women emphasize love, emotional intimacy, and commitment as the goals of sexual desire more than men, while men are more likely than women to specify a physically and/or sexually attractive other as the object of sexual desire. Most of the above research has been done with samples from the West and how women from around the world conceive, define, and act upon sexual desire has not received as much research attention. Nevertheless, discourses on women’s sexual desire outside Western or European context do exist. For example, Bennett (2005), in her work on single Muslim women in contemporary Indonesia, shows that these young women are very aware of their embodied sexual desire—even young women who do not have a sexual relationship are able to speak about their sexual desires. Despite living in a social context where openly sexually active women are stigmatized and where young single women must carefully navigate their sexual desires, the needs of their male partners, and social obligations, they can readily articulate their sexual desires and they courageously and actively seek out their own sexual autonomy. The practice of female genital cutting (FGC), which can range from a slight cutting of the clitoral hood to removal of the clitoris, the labia major and minora, and in its most extreme version includes infibulation, the sewing together of the two sides of the remaining tissue with only a small opening left for urination and menstruation, is common in some parts of Africa, particularly, although not exclusively, among Muslim cultures in Africa. Much international controversy surrounds the practice of FGC due to its perceived negative health effects on women and that it is often performed on girls before they reach
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menarche. Among feminists in the West, FGC has been considered one of the most dramatic and harmful symbols of women’s subordination (see Hernlund & Shell-Duncan, 2007, for a discussion), although over time a more complex approach to this topic has evolved that takes into consideration voices, experiences, and agency of African women themselves. One of the reoccurring questions with regard to FGC is whether the various forms of FGC influence sexual functioning or even sexual desire. Although FGC is presumed to negatively affect women’s ability to experience sexual pleasure, available evidence demonstrates that sexual desire, sexual pleasure, erotic feelings, and orgasm are experienced even among women with the most extreme forms of FGC (Ahmadu, 2007; Dopico, 2007). In fact, qualitative interviews with women who have experienced FGC demonstrate that many have satisfactory and pleasurable sexual relationships with men and they affirm that sexual pleasure is equally important for women as for men. When they note problems, they attribute them to the quality of their relationships with partners, presence of children, stress from work, and difficult economic circumstances—factors that influence the sexual enjoyment of women who have not experienced FGC. Furthermore, as Ahmadu (2007) notes, while chastity and modesty are typically part of the cultural underpinnings for FGC, these ‘‘do not condition women to repress their sexuality in Islamic or African ‘traditional’ societies’’ (pp. 294–295). She contends that sexual passivity and repression for women in the West stem from psychoanalytic models that are then applied to understanding African women’s sexual relationships (also see Obermeyer, 2000, for a discussion). The uncritical application of Western constructions of women’s sexuality and sexual desire to African women, particularly those who have experienced FGC, negates the possibility of emergence of counter narratives surrounding sexuality and they may also make difficult the work to address the sexual and health problems such women may actually experience. Unequivocal application of understandings, values, and priorities surrounding women’s sexual desire from Western ‘‘centres to non-Western margins’’ (Phillips, 2007, p. 148) can, as in the case of sexuality among women who experience FGC, obscure sexual meanings rather than clarify them. Clearly, despite societal restrictions and cultural control, women across the world can and do practice a sexual agency and it is not simply a form of resistance, but also an assertion of their own erotic desires (Blackwood & Wieringa, 1999b). Another example of how cultural constructions of women’s sexual desire differ and how these constructions may organize and define women’s own behavior and understanding of their sexual selves, is that in many cultures where FGC occurs, women’s sexual desire is seen as stronger than that of men (Obermeyer, 2000). FGC, along with other cultural controls on women’s autonomy, such as veiling and
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restrictions on movements, are thought to be necessary to reign in this powerful drive. This view is in contrast with the perception in the United States, where women are believed to have lower sexual desire than men and men’s desire for sex is believed to be harder to control (Baumeister, Catanese, & Vohs, 2001). Despite the apparent differences in how sexual desire is believed to operate among women and men, what is similar in both cases is that women from very different parts of the world continue to have less freedom than men to openly express and carry out their sexual desires. Desire and the search for sexual pleasure are certainly part of women’s sexuality everywhere, but women’s sexuality has always contained elements of both pleasure and danger and the consequences for women who transgress ‘‘traditional’’ sexual customs, norms, and ideologies, whatever those may be in a particular social and cultural context, can be quite serious (Vance, 1985). SEXUAL PROBLEMS Both qualitative and quantitative research with international samples of women demonstrates that the experience of sexual problems by women, such as deficient or absent sexual desire, insufficient lubrication, dyspareunia, and so forth, is not uncommon (Dopico, 2007; Laumann, Paik, & Rosen, 1999; Parish, Luo, Laumann, Kew, & Yu, 2007; Shokrollahi, Mirmohamadi, Mehrabi, & Babei, 1999). Over the last eight years, there has been a lively debate in the academic literature over the definition, categorization, and diagnosis of women’s sexual health problems. On the one side is the medical model which focuses on physiological processes and physical causes of women’s sexual dysfunctions, on the other is the ‘‘New View of Female Sexual Problems’’ which takes a more bio-psycho-social perspective on women’s sexual problems (Tiefer, 2002b). As is suggested in the labeling alone, the new view of women’s sexual problems sees the medical model’s use of the term ‘‘dysfunction’’ as limiting, distorting, and pathologizing women’s experiences (McHugh, 2006). Its emphasis on sexual physiology and performance reinforces narrow definitions of sexuality, ignores possible contextual, social, and psychological factors, limits styles of sexuality to genital arousal and orgasm only, and leads to the likelihood of treatment of sexual problems with pharmaceutical solutions rather than counseling (Bancroft, 2002; Bancroft, Graham, & McCord, 2001; Moynihan, 2003; Moynihan, 2005; Tiefer, 2002b; McHugh, 2006; Nicholls, 2008). In response to the medical model, in 2000 a multidisciplinary group of scholars, therapists, and researchers convened to conceptualize and design an alternative classification system for women’s sexual concerns taking into account social, political, emotional, relational, and physical aspects of women’s sexual experiences (Tiefer, 2001, 2002b).
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Their work culminated in the production of a manifesto/document, classification scheme, and numerous commentaries and research articles promoting their ‘‘New View’’ of female sexual problems (Wood, Barthalow Koch, & Kernoff Mansfield, 2006). The New View work group prefers the term ‘‘sexual problems’’ to ‘‘sexual dysfunction.’’ They define sexual problems as ‘‘discontent or dissatisfaction with any emotional, physical, or relational aspect of sexual experience (Kaschak & Tiefer, 2002). Their classification system, based upon psychological, biological, and social causes of women’s sexual problems, has four categories that women can use to identify their own sexual problems (Kaschak & Tiefer, 2002). The four categories that encompass issues such as lack of sexual information, cultural attitudes and messages, family and work stress, partner and relationship issues, and psychological factors like depression and anxiety are as follows: (1) sociocultural, political, or economic factors; (2) partner and relationship factors; (3) psychological factors; and (4) medical factors. The New View perspective on women’s sexual problems fits well with the more contextualized approach to women’s sexuality taken by global researchers, however, almost no research is available that tests the utility of the New View classification system or compares it to the medical model with actual samples of women from diverse cultures and societies experiencing sexual problems. Nicholls (2008) has provided one of the first studies documenting the validity of the New View categorization system. Nichols surveyed 49 British heterosexual women about their sexual problems to see whether they could classify the problems using the New View classification scheme. Overall, 98 percent of the reported problems were categorized using the New View scheme; 65 percent were attributed to relational factors, 20 percent to contextual/external, 8 percent to individual psychological, and 7 percent to medical factors. Interestingly, medical factors accounted for the least amount of sexual problems, whereas relational and contextual factors accounted for the most. These results demonstrate the importance of taking into consideration women’s social and environmental contexts, as well as their relationships when assessing their sexual problems. Likewise, medical research is beginning to acknowledge the importance of partner- and contextual-related factors on women’s sexual functioning (Chedraui, Perez-Lopez, San Miguel, & Avila, 2009; Domoney, 2009). The new view of women’s sexual problems is predicated upon a Western ideal of the companionate heterosexual relationship, rather than the variety of relationship forms and customs outside the West where marriage is primarily a system of organizing social reproduction and where the sexual needs and problems of non-married women may not even be acknowledged. However, anthropological research points
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to the extensive existence and valuing of both passionate and companionate love in many societies around the world, even in those societies where women’s choice of marriage partner is made for them by the family (see Inhorn, 2007, for a discussion; Jankowiak & Fischer, 1992). As globalization processes further expand the discourse on women’s sexuality and relationship options, hopefully, we will see in the upcoming decade the emergence of more empirical studies demonstrating the strengths of the New View perspective at an international level which may help to expand our knowledge of and treatment for women’s sexual problems everywhere. CONCLUSION At the beginning of this new millennium, sexuality is undergoing a revolution, one that is maybe less apparent, but no less real, than those that occurred in the 1920s and 1960s. While the changes in sexual behavior and attitudes seen in those previous periods were geographically focused on the United States and Western Europe, the current sexual revolution is seen across Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America (Francoeur & Noonan, 2004; Mahdavi, 2007; Reinfelder, 1996b), as well as in North America and Europe. The changes may be small in any given community, uneven across different worldwide societies and cultures, but they are most clearly seen in the slow but incremental changes in sexual behavior and attitudes among women and men. As Weeks (2007) states ‘‘we are living in a time of transition, in the midst of a long, convoluted, messy, unfinished but profound revolution that has transformed the possibilities of living our sexual diversity and creating intimate lives’’ (p. 3). REFERENCES Ahmadu, F. (2007). ‘‘Ain’t I a woman too?’’ Challenging myths of sexual dysfunction in circumcised women. In Y. Hernlund & B. Shell-Duncan (Eds.), Transcultural bodies: Female genital cutting in global context (pp. 278–310). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Amaro, H., Navarro, A. M., Conron, K. J., & Raj, A. (2002). Cultural influences on women’s sexual health. In G. Wingood & R. J. DiClemente (Eds), Handbook of women’s sexual and reproductive health (pp. 71–92). New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum. Bailey, J. M. (2009). What is sexual orientation and do women have one? In D. A. Hope (Ed.), Contemporary perspectives on lesbian, gay, and bisexual identities (pp. 43–63). Bancroft, J. (2002). The medicalization of female sexual dysfunction: The need for caution. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 31, 451–455. Bancroft, J., Graham, C. A., & McCord, C. (2001). Conceptualizing women’s sexual problems. Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, 27, 95–103.
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Basson, R. (2005). Women’s sexual dysfunction: Revised and expanded definitions: Canadian Medical Association, 172, 1327–1333. Baumeister, R. F., Catanese, K. R., & Vohs, K. D. (2001). Is there a gender difference in strength of sex drive? Theoretical views, conceptual distinctions, a review of relevant evidence. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 5, 242–273. Bennett, L. R. (2005). Women, Islam, and modernity. New York: Routledge/ Cuzon. Berger, S. A. (2006). Guatemaltecas: The Women’s Movement 1986–2003. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Blackwood, E., & Wieringa, S. E. (Eds.). (1999a). Same-sex relationships and female desires: Transgender practices across cultures. New York: Columbia University Press. Blackwood, E., & Wieringa, S. E. (1999b). Sapphic shadows: Challenging the silence in the study of sexuality. In E. Blackwood & S. E. Wieringa (Eds.), Same-sex relationships and female desires: Transgender practices across cultures (pp. 39–66). New York: Columbia University Press. Carnoy, M., & Castells, M. (2001). Globalization, the knowledge society, and the Network State: Poulantzas at the millennium. Global Networks, 1, 1–18. Casta~ neda, D., & G omez Bastidas, E. (2005). HIV/AIDS risk behavior among Mexican women working in a maquiladora. Revista Interamericana de Psicologia, 39, 267–274. Chedraui, P., Perez-Lopez, F. R., San Miguel, G., & Avila, C. (2009). Assessment of sexuality among middle-aged women using the Female Sexual Function Index. Climacteric: The Journal of the International Menopause Society, 12, 213–221. Correa, S. & Jolly, S. (2008). Development’s encounter with sexuality: Essentialism and beyond. In A. Cornwall, S. Correa, & S. Jolly (Eds.), Development with a body: Sexuality, human rights, & development (pp. 22–42). London: Zed Books. Correa, S., & Parker, R. (2004). Sexuality, human rights, and demographic thinking: Connections and disjunctions in a changing world. Sexuality Research & Social Policy, 1, 15–38. Dabash, R. & Roudi-Fahimi, F. (2008, September). Abortion in the Middle East and North Africa, policy brief. Washington, DC: Population Reference Bureau, Gynuity Health Projects. D’Emilio, J., & Freedman, J. B. (1988). Intimate matters: A history of sexuality in America. New York: Harper & Row. Domoney, C. (2009). Sexual function in women: what is normal? International Urogynecology Journal and Pelvic Floor Dysfunction, 20, S9–17. Dopico, M. (2007). Infibulation and the orgasm puzzle: Sexual experiences of infibulated Eritrean women in rural Eritrea and Melbourne, Australia. In Y. Hernlund & B. Shell-Duncan (Eds.), Transcultural bodies: Female genital cutting in global context (pp. 224–247). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Durex Sexual Well-being Survey (2007). Retrieved May 16, 2009, from http:// www.durex.com/en-US/SexualWellbeingSurvey/Fequency%20of%20Sex/ Pages/default.aspx
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bisexual women in San Francisco and Berkeley, California. American Journal of Public Health, 85, 1549–1552. Mackay, J. (2001). Global sex: Sexuality and sexual practices around the world. Sexual and Relationship Therapy, 16, 71–82. Masters, W. H., & Johnson, V. E. (1966). Human sexual response. Boston, MA: Little, Brown. Mahdavi, P. (2007). Passionate uprisings: Young people, sexuality and politics in post-revolutionary Iran. Culture, Health & Sexuality, 9, 445–457. McHugh, M. C. (2006). What do women want? A new view of women’s sexual problems. Sex Roles, 54, 361–369. Mongrovejo, N. (1999). Sexual preference, the ugly duckling of feminist demands: The lesbian movement in Mexico. In E. Blackwood & S. E. Wieringa (Eds.), Same-sex relations and female desires: Transgender practices across culture (pp. 308–335). New York: Columbia University Press. Moynihan, R. (2003). The making of a disease: Female sexual dysfunction. British Medical Journal, 326, 45–47. Moynihan, R. (2005). The marketing of a disease: Female sexual dysfunction. British Medical Journal, 330, 192–194. Nicholls, L. (2008). Putting the new view classification scheme to an empirical test. Feminism & Psychology, 18, 515–526. Nicolosi, A., Laumann, E. O., Glasser, D. B., Moreira, E., Paik, A., & Gingell, C. (2004). Sexual behvior and sexual dysfunctions after age 40: The Global Study of Sexual Attitudes and Behavior. Urology, 64, 991–997. Obermeyer, C. M. (2000). Sexuality in Morocco: Changing context and contested domain. Culture, Health, & Sexuality, 2, 239–254. Oliver, M. B., & Shibley Hyde, J. (1993). Gender differences in sexuality: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 114, 29–51. Padilla, M. B., Hirsch, J. S., Mu~ noz-Laboy, M., Sember, R. E., & Parker, R. G. (2007). Introduction: Cross-cultural reflections on an intimate intersection. In M. B. Padilla, J. S. Hirsch, M. Mu~ noz-Laboy, R. E. Sember, & R. G. Parker (Eds.), Love and globalization: Transforming intimacy in the contemporary world (pp. ix–xxxi). Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. Parish, W. L., Luo, Y., Laumann, E. O., Kew, M., & Yu, Z. (2007). Unwanted sexual activity in married women in urban China. Journal of Sex Research, 44, 158–171. Parker, R. (2007). Editorial: Sexuality, health, and human rights. American Journal of Public Health, 97, 972–973. Parker, R., di Mauro, D., Filiano, B., Garcia, J., Mu~ noz-Laboy, M., & Sember, R. (2004). Global transformations and intimate relations in the 21st century: Social science research on sexuality and emergence of sexual health and sexual rights frameworks. Annual Review of Sex Research, 15, 362–398. Petchesky, R. P. (2003). Global prescriptions: Gendering health and human rights. London: Zed Books Ltd. Phillips, R. (2007). Histories of sexuality and imperialism: What’s the use? History Workshop Journal, 63, 136–153. Promotion of Sexual Health: Recommendations for Action. (2000, May 19–22). Proceedings from a regional consultation convened by the Pan American Health Organization, World Health Organization, in collaboration with the
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Chapter 5
Arranged and Forced Marriage Noorfarah Merali
The family is the cornerstone of society, making marriage a highly valued social institution in every part of the world. Marriage is a legally and socially recognized union that entails sexual, economic, and social rights and obligations for the partners, with the expectation of a lifelong relationship (Bachrach, Hindin, & Thompson, 2000). The United Nations branding of 1994 as the International Year of the Family led to the explication of the basic human rights of individuals within marital relationships, and to increased attention being paid to their protection and preservation (Levesque, 2001). Sexual rights in marital relationships involve individuals having autonomous input in sexual and reproductive decision making (Levesque, 2001). Economic rights comprise a broad category that asserts each individual’s entitlement to material sustenance in terms of food, shelter, health care, and any other requirements to satisfy one’s basic needs (Hellsten, 2005; Levesque, 2001; Texier, 2005). This category of rights also emphasizes each family member’s access to and decision-making power over personally acquired resources (Gilbert, 2005a), such as employment income. The right to education, employment, and access to community resources and opportunities for one’s betterment is also an economic right, as well as a developmental right accorded to youth (United Nations, 1990; Wilson, 2005). Social rights address both family relations and interactions within the surrounding cultural milieu. This category of rights emphasizes freedom of association (Eide, 2005; McBride, 2005), and freedom in forming and exiting marital and family relationships (Probert, 2005). Cultural social rights include each person’s right to cultural preservation, cultural participation, and some level of cultural self-determination (Gilbert, 2005b; Levesque, 2001).
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The protection of all of these basic human rights in marital relationships is predicated on accepting the equality in status and worth of marital partners and on upholding each person’s overarching right to personal security in family life (Levesque, 2001; MacPherson, 2004). Levesque postulates that women are often reliant upon their families to protect their rights and well-being. Therefore, the above rights intersect with women’s rights to gender equality and freedom from domestic violence (Cook & Cusack, 2005; Guichon, 2005). While Western societies have emphasized personal initiation of the mate selection and marriage process, many other societies around the world have historically practiced arranged marriages. These include China (Xiaohe & Whyte, 1990; Zang, 2008), Japan (Blood, 1967; Langen, Streltzer, & Kai, 1997), Vietnam (Wisensale, 1999), Israel (Rockman, 1994), Romania (Oprea, 2005), Nepal (Ghimire, Axinn, Yabiku, & Thornton, 2006), Pakistan (Zaidi & Shuraydi, 2002), Kenya (Cattell, 1992), India (Madathil & Benshoff, 2008), Bangladesh and Sri Lanka (Kurian, 1991), and various societies in the Middle East (Bhopal, 1999). These societies vary in the ethnic, cultural, and religious composition of their resident populations, attesting to the widespread practice of arranged marriages across diverse groups. For the purpose of this chapter, an arranged marriage is defined as a marriage that is formed through third-party intervention. Arranged marriages usually involve parents or relatives identifying potential mates for their sons or daughters and planning the marriage ceremony. However, some arranged marriages involve religious figures or matchmakers that families enlist to facilitate the joining of two parties who have compatible spiritual, astrological, or cultural profiles. The use of religious or cultural mediators by families arranging the marriages of their sons or daughters has occurred across various groups, such as some Orthodox Jews (Rockman, 1994) and families of Japanese descent (Blood, 1967). Marriages that are arranged by parents tend to have the goal of uniting two families to fulfill various obligations to each other rather than to bond two autonomous individuals. They are based on cultural values that emphasize collectivism or family and group-centered living, rather than the rugged individualism of Western society. Familyarranged marriages tend to be perceived as sacramental unions that are based on perceived compatibility between the couple in family background, education, culture, and religious beliefs and values (Bhopal, 1999). The assumption that often lies behind family-arranged marriages is that love is not sufficient to sustain a lifelong relationship; it may actually lead individuals to make erroneous decisions in the mate selection process due to idealization of their desired mate (Xiaohe & Whyte, 1990). In contrast, similarity in background and fundamental values is viewed to facilitate a secure bond that can endure the challenges of childrearing, aging, and the passage of time. It is also
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assumed that love and passion will eventually develop in arranged marriages after a true friendship and partnership is formed. Xiaohe and Whyte (1990) state this common assumption frankly: ‘‘Love matches start out hot and grow cold, while arranged marriages start out cold and grow hot’’ (p. 709). Arranged marriages may occur at any point during the lifespan, from childhood through widowhood (Cattell, 1992; Levesque, 2001) and involve varying levels of choice and active participation among the parties whose lives are being joined. Some arranged marriages occur with the assumption of a monogamous relationship, whereas others involve entering a specific rank order in pre-existing polygamous family systems (Catell, 1992). The level of gender equity or inequity in family relations may be affected by the nature of the arranged marriage process, such as negotiation of a bride price (Rastogi & Therly, 2006), or by cultural norms related to family life in the surrounding society (Wisensale, 1999). This chapter discusses the variability in arranged marriage practices, considering issues of consent and coercion as they relate to basic human rights of freedom of association, personal security, and opportunities for personal development. The influence of state laws, immigration policies, modernization, acculturation, and sociodemographic variables on arranged marriage practices is also examined. The chapter subsequently reviews research on the interpersonal and personal outcomes of arranged marriages with and without coercion. These outcomes include marital satisfaction, domestic violence, mental health status, self-harm/suicide attempts, and criminality. Where comparative data is available for arranged marriages versus self-initiated unions, these alternative family formation strategies are evaluated in terms of their outcomes. The chapter concludes with a critical analysis of existing laws, policies, and arranged marriage outcomes to outline future directions that respect cultural differences in structuring family life and fundamental human rights of individuals within family relationships. SUBTYPES OF ARRANGED MARRIAGE Three subtypes of arranged marriage have been described in the literature. They involve different levels of women’s participation and choice in the process. The first subtype is the traditional or planned pattern. In this form of arranged marriage, parents identify, screen, and select a mate for their daughter through contact with relatives, family friends, or religious mediators. There may be little or no interaction between the woman and her potential husband. In cases where the woman does not have the opportunity to see the selected man prior to her wedding day, this is referred to as a ‘‘blind marriage.’’ In other cases, she may only see a photograph and then meet him for the first
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time at the marriage ceremony. Alternatively, she may have one or two face-to-face meetings with him, and the meetings may be supervised by family members (Qureshi, 1991; Stopes-Roe & Cochrane, 1990). The second subtype of arranged marriage is the modified traditional or delegation pattern. In this form of arranged marriage, the daughter has some input in the type of mate she is seeking, and parents take into account this input in identifying a suitable mate for her. Upon the identification of a potential husband, the woman is then given the opportunity to say yes or no. If she declines the identified candidate, the parents continue their search for another suitable person for her consideration. The last subtype of arranged marriage is the cooperative or jointventure pattern. Both parents and their daughter may be involved in the identification, screening, and marriage planning process, but parental consent is an essential prerequisite for the marriage. Some dating and courtship may occur prior to the marriage, and this may be supervised or unsupervised (Qureshi, 1991; Stopes-Roe & Cochrane, 1990). CONSENT AND COERCION It is important to note that although all three subtypes of arranged marriage emphasize parental choice and consent for the daughter’s marriage, the daughter’s level of choice and consent may vary across the subtypes. A forced marriage occurs when parties are coerced into marriage against their will with both physical and emotional pressure that results in significant duress (Dostrovsky, Cook, & Gagnon, 2007). Forced marriages violate both the basic human right to freedom of association in entering marital relationships and the right to personal security in the application of physical consequences for declining the proposed union. A daughter who sincerely believes that her parents are acting on her best interests and will identify the best marriage partner for her may voluntarily submit to a blind marriage. This willingness to participate in such an arrangement would make it consensual, and there would be no violation of the woman’s human rights. In contrast, a daughter who has a desire to have personal input into the process may perceive the traditional or planned pattern of arranged marriage as coercive if she has voiced this desire and her desire has been disregarded. Similarly, it is possible that a daughter whose family is practicing the modified traditional pattern, where the parents are presenting potential mates for her to consider, may still feel coerced into the process out of obligation to her parents. This is particularly likely if she wishes to independently seek and join with her potential husband (Zaidi & Shuraydi, 2002). If a daughter desires a mate that her parents are not likely to approve (for example, a male from outside of her cultural group), even the
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cooperative or joint venture arranged marriage pattern may be experienced as a forced marriage process. Therefore, any of the three subtypes of arranged marriage may occur without any coercion or with the application of varying levels of emotional or physical pressure. Because arranged marriages occur at various stages in the lifespan across different cultural groups and world societies, the level of choice and consent that a person has in the process may vary with the individual’s age and developmental stage at the time of the marriage. The power to exercise personal decision-making may further be affected by a woman’s economic and social resources. In many parts of the world, parents have arranged the marriages of young girls to adolescent or adult males (Cattell, 1992; Levesque, 2001; Oprea, 2005; Tariq & Tariq, 1993). This practice is referred to as child marriage. It represents a violation of children’s rights to experiences and opportunities to facilitate their optimal cognitive, emotional, educational, and social development as stipulated in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (United Nations, 1990). These rights of children and youth parallel adult economic and social rights. Child marriage may also violate children’s right to personal security, as they most often occur through the application of force and can represent cases of sexual assault of minors (Cattell, 1992; Levesque, 2001; Tariq & Tariq, 1993). The most common form of arranged marriage occurs among young adult daughters and sons. Although there may still be application of some coercion in these cases, adults may have some options for resisting the marriage attempt. Nevertheless, they may face serious consequences for their resistance, such as a loss of family honor, being socially ostracized by the cultural community, abuse, and in the worst case scenario, honor killings (Werbner, 2007; Wilson, 2007). In some cultures, such as some African subcultures, the marriages of widows are also arranged (Potash, 1986). These second marriages may occur in childhood among girls who have had child marriages, during middle adulthood, or in later life. Cultural practices surrounding the arranged marriage of widows initially stemmed from the benevolent intent to ensure that women and their children were taken care of and provided material sustenance after the death of their husbands. To ensure adequate caretaking, widow marriages were most often arranged to other immediate family members, such as the deceased husband’s brother or cousin (Cattell, 1992). However, such marriages do not take into account widows’ desires or intentions and tend to be forced by family members. Many women do not consent to unite with their husbands’ kin and instead want to pursue an independent existence (Cattell, 1992). Some actively protest or resist consummating a marriage with their husbands’ relatives, but limitations in their economic and social resources may make them vulnerable to coercion (Potash, 1986). In some of the African cultures practicing arrangement
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of widow marriages, the widow is married into a polygamous family, and may occupy the lowest status among other co-wives, leading to a potential for collective maltreatment (Cattell, 1992). Coerced widow marriages represent a violation of women’s right to freedom in entering and exiting marital and family relationships in international human rights statutes (Probert, 2005). LAWS RELATED TO ARRANGED MARRIAGE Bachrach et al.’s (2000) definition of marriage emphasized both legal and social recognition of the union between marriage partners. Although some cultural groups may desire to practice arranged marriage, making it a socially sanctioned strategy for mate selection, applicable laws in their jurisdictions may not recognize some or all types of arranged marriages. Lack of legal recognition of arranged marriages would present a major barrier to the utilization of this family formation strategy. Laws related to marriage and family life vary greatly across countries, despite the existence of international statutes on human rights, women’s rights, and children’s rights that have direct bearing on marriage practices (Levesque, 2001). Existing laws reflect cultural and political changes that have occurred in various societies over time. They address multiple aspects of the marriage and family establishment process, such as choice of a marriage partner (Dostrovsky et al., 2007; Xiaohe & Whyte, 1990; Zang, 2008), the minimum age at the time of marriage (Dostrovsky et al., 1007; Wisensale, 1999), monetary exchange in the marriage process (Rastogi & Therly, 2006), living arrangements of the marriage partners (Wisensale, 1999), and gender equality in the marital relationship (Wisensale, 1999). Examples of state laws that cover each of these areas and their impacts are provided in this section. In North America, legislation on marriage and family life emphasizes personal initiative and choice in mate selection (Levesque, 2001; MacPherson, 2004). Other societies in the world have attempted to encourage personal choice and initiative in the mate selection and marriage process as a result of Western cultural influence, or in response to an influx of immigrant and refugee groups practicing arranged marriage. For example, for centuries, blind marriages were the most common form of marriage in China across all social classes. Chinese young adults would typically not even meet until their wedding day and the entire marriage process was strictly controlled and coerced by their parents (Xiaohe & Whyte, 1990). With increasing Western influence in the Republican era and the subsequent victory of the Chinese Communists, there was a major movement toward increasing personal choice in mate selection. Under the Communist government, the Marriage Law of the People’s Republic of China was adopted in 1950, ‘‘denouncing
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the arbitrary and feudal marriage system . . . which ignores the children’s interests and proclaiming that marriage shall be based upon the complete willingness of the two parties. Neither party shall use compulsion, and no third party shall be allowed to interfere’’ (Yang, 1959, p. 221, as cited in Xiaohe & Whyte, 1990). The new Marriage Law withdrew legal recognition for any type of arranged marriage, in attempt to abolish forced marriage. This major legislative change dramatically reduced the frequency of the practice of arranged marriage in Chinese society. In a multiple cohort study of marriages that took place in China from the 1930s to the 1980s, Xiaohe and Whyte (1990) found a consistent decline in arranged marriages over each decade. Close to 70 percent of marriages that took place in the 1930s were arranged or forced, whereas only 10 percent of marriages that occurred in the 1980s were arranged or forced according to the reports of married Chinese women. Zang (2008) obtained similar findings of increased personal choice and initiative in mate selection and marriage across recent decades in another multiple cohort study of a large-scale sample in China. Zang’s (2008) study is particularly important because it included not only Chinese participants, but also Turkish Muslim immigrants residing in China over the same decades. Therefore, the findings of the study attested to the effectiveness of laws in reducing marriage arrangement across a multi-ethnic sample. In response to the influx of immigrants and refugees who practice arranged marriage with varying levels of force into many world societies, a number of countries have also introduced laws that criminalize forced marriage. These countries include Britain, Norway, Belgium, Australia, Denmark, and Germany (Dostrovsky et al., 2007). However, these pluralistic societies have not criminalized third-party intervention in family formation, as marriage arrangement can also occur without emotional or physical pressure and distress. Allowing for noncoercive third-party intervention in family formation would serve to protect and uphold basic human rights related to cultural preservation and cultural self-determination. Political changes in Vietnamese society over time also led to the introduction of new laws related to marriage and family life (Wisensale, 1999). In addition to banning arranged and forced marriages, these laws increased the minimum age of marriage to prevent child and adolescent marriages. This step would serve to protect and promote youth’s rights to educational and social opportunities and experiences critical for their optimal development in accordance with the United Nations’ Declaration on the Rights of the Child (United Nations, 1990). Acknowledging women’s assistance in defeating French colonists in Vietnam during the mid-1950s, the Marriage and Family Law, which took effect in 1960, set a number of parameters to protect and promote women’s rights, as well as the rights of men and children.
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The law abolished arranged marriages, aiming to guarantee men and women equal freedom in the choice of a marriage partner. It also made polygamy illegal in Vietnamese society, enforcing monogamous relationships as the state norm. Similar to the effect of Chinese legislation, this change led to a decrease in the proportion of arranged marriages from 60 percent to less than 20 percent over only a single decade after the passage of the law, as well as to subsequent reductions in the following decades. Monogamy also became the only surviving form of marriage and family life (Wisensale, 1999). The law raised the minimum age of marriage for women to 18, and the minimum age for marriage was raised to age 21 for men (Wisensale, 1999). Therefore, there would be no legal recognition of child or adolescent marriages, making them subject to being nullified. Following suit, a number of nations hosting cultural groups that have traditionally promoted early marriage have raised the minimum age of marriage in matrimonial laws, including Great Britain, France, Gabon, and Indonesia (Dostrovsky et al., 2007). It is important to note that Vietnam’s Marriage and Family Law of 1960 was particularly unique from other state laws undergoing reform at that time in developing countries in two ways. First, the law included provisions emphasizing women’s freedom of living arrangements after the marriage takes place. It specified that women ‘‘shall not be forced to follow customary rules under which the wife usually moved in with her husband’s parents’’ (Law on Marriage and the Family as cited in Wisensale, 1999, p. 607). This aspect of the law is revolutionary. Extended family living arrangements are common across a number of cultures and societies, and may provide extra social support and assistance during the childrearing process. However, newly married women living in such arrangements have been found to be vulnerable to collective maltreatment by the husband, in-laws, and husband’s siblings, due to the inherent power imbalance in the marital relationship in this context (Dasgupta, 2000; Levesque, 2001; Raj & Silverman, 2002). The new Vietnamese marriage law allowed newly married couples the option of nuclear family living if this was the desire of the woman and/or man in the relationship. Second, the Vietnamese law attempted to institute gender equality in marital relations, specifying men and women’s equal rights in their interactions and relationships in all spheres, including property ownership (Wisensale, 1999). Wisensale (1999) points out, however, that it is difficult to enforce the laws related to gender equality and to assess their impact given the privacy of the domestic sphere. His research found that substantial gender inequality still persists in male-female relationships in Vietnamese society. Another aspect of arranged marriages that has been addressed through legislation is the exchange of money or goods in the marriage
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process. In some cultures and countries, such as some South Asian nations, there has historically been a ‘‘bride price’’ or dowry that the family of the female has to provide to the family of the groom to accept their daughter into the new family she is joining. The amount of the dowry tends to depend on the man’s qualities, in terms of his socioeconomic status, education, family background, and appearance. The greater the man’s perceived worth, the greater the dowry that is demanded for acceptance of a particular bride as his wife. The dowry is usually given at the time of the marriage (Rastogi & Therly, 2006). In other cultures, such as some African cultures, a similar exchange may take the form of goods, such as cattle that a specific family owns (Cattell, 1992). Arranged marriages that are for the profit of one party or family in the relationship have clear implications for the power balance in the resulting marriage and for the perceived value of the man and woman in the union. Also, as Rastogi and Therly (2006) explain, the exchange of money or goods at the time of marriage often sets the stage for continuing demands placed on one family by the other, that may culminate in severe maltreatment or even murder of the new bride if they are not met. In a review of studies related to dowry-related deaths in India, Rastogi and Therly (2006) discovered that dowry-related violence and deaths accounted for more fatalities among women than any other causes of death. They also indicated that the range of annual deaths due to dowries in specific parts of the country was between 421 and 5,582. These numbers are clearly alarming. Rastogi and Therly (2006) describe the new marriage law that was introduced in India in 1961 that criminalized the act of giving or receiving a dowry on the part of either family in the marriage process. Despite the development of this law, the practice of dowry and related violence against women has continued to occur under the guise of ‘‘wedding gifts’’ being given to the groom’s family based on their requests. These gifts may take the form of a down payment for a family home, a car, and so on. Demands for such so-called gifts have still tended to continue after arranged marriages, jeopardizing the welfare of the new bride if her family’s financial resources have already been depleted. Since the demand for dowry is no longer publicly acknowledged, it makes it difficult for law enforcement officials to become aware of dowry-related marital problems until after violence occurs. In fact, many of the studies Rastogi and Therly (2006) reviewed attesting to a disturbingly high prevalence of dowry-related deaths were conducted after the passage of the 1961 law. The involvement of dowry in the fatalities was most often identified in investigating the women’s cause of death. The findings of the various studies reviewed above elucidate the variable impact of legislation surrounding arranged marriages. Laws in
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various parts of the world have been successful in increasing personal choice in mate selection and protecting and promoting children’s rights. However, legislation appears to be substantially less effective in promoting gender equality and in controlling marriages for profit. Therefore, women remain vulnerable to violations of their basic rights to equality and personal security.
INDIVIDUAL-LEVEL VARIABLES AFFECTING ARRANGED MARRIAGE PRACTICES Laws exercise their influence on marriage practices at the macro level of societies or cultural groups within specific societies. Existing research suggests that a number of microlevel individual variables also affect the frequency of arranged marriages and the forms that they take. These include Western cultural exposure through media influence, opportunities for interaction with peers, non-family living arrangements, education, employment, gender, and acculturation. The first few variables emerged as important in a large-scale study conducted across four different ethnic groups residing in Nepal (Hindus, Tibetan Burmese, Hill Burmese, and Newar groups). Nepal is another example of a country that had a widespread practice of arranged marriage. In contrast to other developing nations that had new legislation introduced related to marriage and family life between the 1930s and 1960s, Nepal had a new king who began to encourage more open interaction and exchange with non-Hindu nations starting in the 1950s (Ghirmire, Axinn, Yaiku, & Thornton, 2006). This led to increased exposure to Western culture and practices among the residents of Nepal, as well as advances in educational and social opportunities. Since that time, the frequency of arranged marriages among residents of Nepal has dropped to 50 percent of all marriages (Ghirmire et al., 2006). Ghirmire et al. (2006) found that the amount of TV viewing, listening to Western radio, and reading of popular magazines was a significant predictor of participation and choice in the selection of a marriage partner among Nepal residents, regardless of their cultural group membership. These types of media consumption exposed young people in Nepal to Western ideals relating to romantic love and autonomous decision making. Similarly, involvement in youth clubs or activities that provided opportunities for peer interaction significantly increased study participants’ involvement in decision making related to their marriages. Other factors that were related to personal initiative in the marriage process versus arranged marriage were educational attainment, moving away from the home to pursue education in another city (non-family living arrangements), and employment outside of the home (Ghirmire et al., 2006). These variables would also
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provide youth with some independence from their families, which may have been reinforced by their exposure to Western media. Zang (2008) was interested in examining whether relationships between increased education, employment status, and power in marital decision making hold across both genders. The author hypothesized that these relationships will not be evidenced among females from cultural groups that consider women as the main bearers and protectors of family honor, emphasizing their purity and chastity. Zang (2008) examined differences in arranged marriage rates between Han Chinese and Turkish Uyghur Muslims residing in China after the changes to marriage and family laws were instituted. Zang (2008) found that arranged marriage rates declined steadily among both cultural groups in each decade cohort. Education and employment status were clear predictors of personal involvement in mate selection rather than family-arranged marriages; when these variables were controlled, there was no difference between Han Chinese males and Turkish Uyghur Muslim males in the rate of arranged marriages. However, even when female educational level and occupational status was controlled, the Uyghur Muslim women experienced higher levels of arranged marriages than the Han Chinese women. They also experienced higher levels of arranged marriage than the males from both cultural groups. The findings supported the researcher’s hypothesis: Cultural beliefs related to female honor may lead women to be more frequently subject to parental intervention in mate selection and marriage than their male counterparts, even if they are educated and employed. A final important individual-level variable affecting arranged marriage practices is acculturation. Berry (2006) describes acculturation as a process of sociocultural transition resulting from intercultural contact that produces attitudinal or behavioral change. In pluralistic societies, immigrants from countries and cultures that have historically practiced specific forms of arranged marriage may be exposed to different ways of engaging in mate selection. They may also be exposed to cultural ideals related to love and romance. This cross-cultural exposure may change their expectations about the marriage process and their preferences for how traditional practices should be adapted in their new societies of residence. Zaidi and Shuraydi’s (2002) research serves as a case example. These researchers investigated the marital attitudes of second-generation young adult Pakistani Muslim females residing in Canada and the United States. The females were part of a culture that has a long history of practicing arranged marriages of the traditional or planned subtype. Due to their experiences growing up in North American society, the majority of their study participants expressed the desire for shifting to the modified traditional pattern of arranged marriage where they have some choice in mate selection. Alternatively, some expressed the desire to be free to self-initiate a ‘‘love marriage.’’
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Many of the participants expressed strong statements about various forms of resistance or rebellion they would engage in if their parents were not willing to adapt the arranged marriage practice to allow them greater choice and participation.
ARRANGED MARRIAGE OUTCOMES It is critical that further legislative actions, policies, and human rights advocacy in relation to arranged marriage be based on a solid understanding of the interpersonal and personal outcomes of these marriages, rather than on value judgments about how particular cultures establish and structure family life. The following sections review the emerging research in this area. Two interpersonal outcomes of arranged marriages have been studied: marital satisfaction and spousal abuse. In terms of personal outcomes, existing research has examined personal well-being, mental health problems, self-harm/ suicide attempts, and criminality among individuals in arranged marriage situations. Interpersonal Outcomes Marital Satisfaction Four studies have compared levels of marital satisfaction among individuals in arranged versus self-initiated marriages. The findings of these studies have been inconsistent. However, the nature of the studies and the research samples employed shed light on how the specific nature of arranged marriage practices and the match between personal expectations of marriage and the reality of married life relate to marital satisfaction. Blood (1967) was the first researcher to compare the outcomes of arranged and self-initiated marriages. He wanted to empirically assess the assumption of proponents of arranged marriage that ‘‘love matches start out hot and grow cold, while arranged marriages start out cold and grow hot’’ (Xiaohe & Whyte, 1990, p. 709). He administered a marital satisfaction survey to a sample of 444 couples living in various districts in Tokyo, Japan, who experienced either type of marriage. Blood’s study was a longitudinal study examining marital satisfaction across various lengths of time during the first decade after marriage (i.e., less than two years, two to four years, five to eight years, and nine or more years). Blood’s (1967) findings challenged the assumption he was testing. Overall, he discovered a significant decline in self-reported marital satisfaction over time among both arranged and self-initiated marriages. However, there were important gender differences. Men in arranged marriages appeared to show a significantly smaller decline in
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marital satisfaction over time than men in self-initiated marriages. The men with arranged marriages maintained higher levels of satisfaction over longer periods of married life. This trend was reversed for women, with women in arranged marriages showing a significantly greater decline in marital satisfaction with longer lengths of marriage than their counterparts in self-initiated unions. Based on these findings, Blood (1967) concluded that the advantages of arranged marriages for the maintenance of marital satisfaction and strong family bonds only hold for husbands. It is important to understand the findings of Blood’s (1967) study in the context of Japanese arranged marriage customs and life in Tokyo at the time of the research. Arranged marriage customs tended to involve the young couple having a ritualized meeting. They also had some opportunities to express an opinion about the family-chosen partner prior to entering the marriage (Blood, 1967). This suggests that their arranged marriages were not necessarily coerced. Also, it is essential to take into account the fact that the time period during which Blood’s study was done was marked by increasing contact with Western culture and society. This contact may have led Japanese couples to be exposed to ideals of romantic love that could have affected the levels of marital satisfaction of those who perceived themselves as less traditional, even if they were in traditional marriage arrangements. Existing research on acculturation suggests that women from other cultures often find greater liberation in Western culture than their male counterparts (Dion & Dion, 2001), possibly accounting for the decline in women’s marital satisfaction over the time of Blood’s (1967) study. Xiaohe and Whyte (1990) attempted to replicate Blood’s (1967) study in China, but they focused their study exclusively on women. They compared the self-reported levels of marital satisfaction of more than 500 Chinese women who had arranged versus self-initiated marriages using a general questionnaire on marital quality. To allow for a simultaneous examination of changes in marital quality over time across these two marriage methods, the researchers compared women who got married in various decades prior to and after the change in Chinese marriage and family laws. This included women who got married in 1933–1948, 1949–1957 and so on, up to the 1977–1987 decade. Therefore, their study utilized a multiple cohort, cross-sectional design. In contrast to Blood’s findings, Xiaohe and Whyte (1990) found a statistically significant increase in women’s levels of marital satisfaction over time in both arranged and self-initiated marriages. Women who had been married for 20 or more years reported the highest levels of marital satisfaction across both marriage methods. In comparing satisfaction levels between women in arranged and self-initiated unions across women married for different lengths of time, Chinese women in self-initiated marriages reported higher satisfaction levels at each stage
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of married life. It is important to reiterate that the primary form of arranged marriage practiced in China was blind marriage involving significant coercion (Xiaohe & Whyte, 1990). Therefore, the lower satisfaction of women in arranged marriages may simply reflect longstanding discontent over forced marriage. It may not accurately reflect the effects of marriage arrangement per se. As was discussed in previous sections, any of the three subtypes of arranged marriage may also occur without coercion. Madathil and Benshoff (2008) wanted to take into account expectations of marriage and their relationship to marital satisfaction in the process of comparing arranged and self-initiated marriages. Their study involved the best and most rigorous methodology out of all the studies discussed so far, because (a) it conducted both a within-culture comparison and a cross-cultural comparison to examine the possible effects of Western exposure and acculturation on marital satisfaction; (b) it included participants of both genders; (c) rather than using a general measure of marital satisfaction, it assessed multiple components of satisfaction independently and in combination; and (d) the demographic data collected addressed participants’ level of interaction with their spouse prior to marriage and whether their opinions about their prospective partner were considered in the arranged marriage process. Their study aimed to compare the perceived importance of various marital characteristics and marital satisfaction among couples from three groups: Asian Indians in arranged marriages residing in India, Asian Indians in arranged marriages residing in the United States, and Caucasian Americans in marriages of their own initiative. Their study included approximately 100 couples from each of these groups. It is important to highlight that 95 percent of the Asian Indian couples in the study who were residing in the United States reported that they had met their partners prior to marriage and their opinions were taken into account. Similarly, 82 percent of the Asian Indian couples residing in India reported that they had seen their partners prior to the arranged marriage and that their family considered their opinions. This suggests that the forms of arranged marriages they experienced were likely the modified traditional pattern or the cooperative pattern, and there was no coercion involved. The mean age of the study participants was fairly similar across the three groups. Their average ages ranged from 39 to 45. The average length of time the couples had been married was also relatively similar across the three groups. They were all in their second decade of married life, having been married between 12 and 18 years (Madathil & Benshoff, 2008). Madathil and Benshoff administered the Characteristics of Marriage Inventory (CHARISMA; Rosen-Grandon, 1998) to the couples across all three groups. Respondents are asked to rate the level of importance they attach to the marital issues addressed in each of the 18 items, as
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well as to rate their satisfaction with each marital issue. The 18 items on the scale assess three core characteristics of marriage. The first is loving, which involves open communication, demonstration of affection, mutual respect, forgiveness, and interpersonal sensitivity. The second is loyalty, which involves strong commitment to the marriage, a high degree of sexual activity, and strong moral values in the marital relationship. The final characteristic is shared values, which emphasizes high priorities placed on religiosity and childrearing, traditional gender roles, and management of conflicts (RosenGrandon, 1998). The Asian Indian couples in Madathil and Benshoff’s study scored significantly higher than their American counterparts in relation to the perceived importance of all three core marital characteristics across both genders. More specifically, the Asian Indian couples residing in the United States most firmly endorsed all three dimensions as extremely important to them. The most pronounced difference among these core marital characteristics among the three groups was in relation to shared values. American couples in marriages of their own initiation rated shared values as substantially less important to them than they were for Asian Indians in arranged marriages. A comparison of total levels of marital satisfaction and satisfaction in relation to each of the three core marital characteristics across the three groups using factorial analysis of variance revealed some very interesting results. First, there was no significant difference in the overall level of marital satisfaction between Asian Indians in arranged marriages who were residing in India and Americans in self-initiated marital relationships. An earlier study that also used the CHARISMA scale, comparing marital satisfaction between Asian Indians in arranged marriages living in India and Americans in self-initiated marriages, obtained similar results (Myers, Madathil, & Tingle, 2005). Second, there were no significant gender differences in marital satisfaction. Third, Asian Indians in arranged marriages who were living in the United States had a significantly higher level of overall marital satisfaction than the other two groups. This finding occurred across almost every one of the three core characteristics of marriage, which they had endorsed most highly. The researchers concluded that the match between expectations of marriage and the reality of arranged marriages can likely account for the high satisfaction rates among this group. They specifically emphasized how U.S. living may allow Asian Indian couples some independence from their families and freedom to acculturate, enabling them to mold their arranged marriages in a way that meets their ideals and maximizes personal satisfaction (Madathil & Benshoff, 2008). Madathil and Benshoff emphasized that their results support the idea that arranged marriages are a viable form of establishing a satisfying family life.
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Spousal Abuse Besides examining possible variance in positive outcomes of married life in the form of marital satisfaction across arranged and self-initiated marriages, researchers have investigated negative interpersonal outcomes, specifically spousal maltreatment. In their extensive review of existing research, Raj and Silverman (2002) report that there is no difference in domestic violence rates across arranged and self-initiated marriages that occur in the same locality. However, international arranged marriages have been found to increase women’s risk for various forms of spousal abuse, including physical battering, sexual abuse, and emotional abuse. Unique forms of immigration abuse have also been reported among women who have had international arranged marriages, such as threats of deportation and husbands imposing barriers to women’s English language learning and cultural integration (Bui & Morash, 1999; Chin, 1994; Cote, Kerisit, & Cote, 2001; Dasgupta, 2000; Raj & Silverman, 2002; Shirwadkar, 2004). International arranged marriages most often occur when families who have immigrated to Western countries collaborate with relatives from abroad to identify wives for their sons from their home countries. The desire of many immigrants to retain their cultural heritage and ensure a traditional family life leads to the application of arranged marriages across national borders. Women of the same cultural heritage who are already living in Western nations may be seen as acculturated rather than traditional (Raj and Silverman, 2002). In international arranged marriages, the marriage usually takes place in the family’s country of origin. Subsequently, the male returns to his country of current permanent residence or citizenship and files a sponsorship application on behalf of his new bride to facilitate her immigration (Merali, 2008). The escalation in women’s risk of being subjected to spousal abuse in international arranged marriages is attributed to shortcomings in family immigration policies in Western nations (Dasgupta, 2000; Merali, 2008; Raj & Silverman, 2002). Since most female marriage migrants are sponsored by husbands living in North America, the spousal immigration policies of Canada and the United States will be presented here as case examples. To be eligible to sponsor a wife, the Canadian or American spouse must provide documentation supporting his citizenship or status as a permanent resident. He must also provide financial statements, such as copies of bank account balances and paychecks, to demonstrate his ability to financially support his wife for a period of three years after her arrival. Financial capability to sponsor is based on having an income and savings level that would enable the couple to live significantly above the national poverty line. The husband signs a contract with the national government taking full
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responsibility for the sponsored bride’s basic needs (including food, shelter, health, and dental care) and integration needs (training in English/French as a second language, social programs, etc.) for this three-year period (Citizenship and Immigration Canada, 2002; U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, 2007). Once the application is approved and the foreign wife receives a visa number, she is able to immigrate to North America to be with her husband. In the first three years after her arrival, the wife has no independent access to resources and is not eligible to receive any social security benefits. Unlike immigrants who come to North America independently, she is not connected to any immigration agencies or social supports apart from her husband (Citizenship and Immigration Canada, 2002; U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, 2007). It is expected that with the husband’s support, over time, she will develop the skills to support herself and to integrate; she will learn English or French, seek employment, socially integrate with others, and adapt to North American ways. In Canada, once a sponsorship application is approved, the woman is granted the opportunity to become a permanent resident of Canada upon her own initiation of a permanent residence application (Citizenship and Immigration Canada, 2002). However, in the United States, the woman can only gain permanent residence status if her husband files an application on her behalf during the first two years after her arrival. If the husband does not file this application, she may be subject to deportation (U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, 2007). The immigration policies reviewed enforce women’s economic and social dependence on their husbands and husbands’ exclusive control of all resources that women may need to access. Existing international and cross-cultural research has implicated economic dependence and exclusive male control of resources in the etiology of gender-based violence. These conditions amplify any existing gender inequality in the marital relationship (Heise, 1998; Michalski, 2004). Social isolation of women has also been found to be a contributing factor for spousal maltreatment, especially when combined with other stressors in family relationships, such as marital conflict and financial strain (Heise, 1998; Michalski, 2004; Sokoloff & Dupont, 2005). A failure to connect female marriage migrants to immigration and settlement agencies for even a single visit prevents them from having any safety net in the event of experiencing marital or integration challenges. As their sponsors, their husbands would also be aware that the women do not have any connections to social resources in the host society. Furthermore, a significant proportion of male immigrants in North America experience unemployment and underemployment due to a lack of recognition of their foreign educational credentials. Therefore, although they can demonstrate financial capability to provide for their new brides, they
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may still experience financial hardship. This may lead them to perceive their responsibility for the wife as an added financial burden (Raj & Silverman, 2002). For example, some sponsored women in Merali’s (2009) study reported that their husbands were providing them with only a single meal a day or only buying them spring coats despite extreme winter weather. The fact that many brides entering North America through international arranged marriages are not proficient in English exacerbates their vulnerability to spousal maltreatment. The nature of their immigration status is often communicated to them only through their husbands or in-laws, leaving room for miscommunication of their status in the host society. For example, women who do not know English are often not aware that Canadian immigration policy grants them permanent resident status upon their own initiation of the application process. Existing studies have uncovered their tendency to helplessly resign to threats of deportation made by their husbands (Cote et al., 2001; Merali, 2009; Shirwadkar, 2004). Given the aforementioned shortcomings of family immigration policies in North America, some women who immigrate for international arranged marriages have become subject to violations of four basic human rights categories, as discussed by Merali (2009). Women’s right to personal security may be compromised through physical battering. Women’s economic right to material subsistence may be violated by sponsors’ failure to provide adequate food and clothing, in direct breach of the sponsorship agreement with the government of Canada or United States. Violation of women’s right to cultural participation may occur as a result of sponsor-imposed barriers to learning English as a second language. Finally, a violation of women’s right to freedom of association may occur when sponsors prohibit their interaction with other members of the host society (Merali, 2009). One or more of these violations have been reported across a number of studies of international marriages (Bui & Morash, 1999; Chin, 1994; Cote et al., 2001; Dasgupta, 2000; Raj & Silverman, 2002; Shirwadkar, 2004).
PERSONAL OUTCOMES Well-being Similar to research on interpersonal outcomes of arranged marriages, studies on personal outcomes have addressed both positive and negative consequences. Myers et al. (2005) are the only researchers to examine positive outcomes to date, and are also the only researchers to have conducted a study on personal outcomes of arranged marriages that has included a control group. In their study of couples in arranged marriages living in India and American couples in self-initiated
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marriages, Myers et al. compared perceived levels of personal wellness among the couples. They utilized the Wellness Evaluation of Lifestyle survey (WEL; Myers, Sweeney, Hattie, & Witmer, 1998). This 120-item self-report inventory addresses multiple components of personal wellbeing, including sense of self-worth, sense of control, emotional awareness, physical health care (i.e., nutrition and exercise), problem-solving ability, feeling loved, and strength of spirituality and cultural identity. It therefore considers positive functioning as a state of emotional, physical, spiritual, and cultural well-being. Myers et al. did not find any difference in total wellness scores on this measure between couples in arranged versus self-initiated marriages. Similarly, in examining subscale scores, there were no significant differences in the perceived self-worth of couples from the two groups, or in the areas of management of emotions, level of feeling loved, and problem-solving ability. There were some differences between the subscale scores of the couples from each group in the areas of spirituality, cultural identity, and nutrition, where the couples in arranged marriages scored higher than their counterparts. In contrast, in the areas of feeling a sense of control over their lives, couples in marriages of their own initiation had higher mean scores. These findings make sense given the individualism of American society versus the family orientation of Indian society. Mental Health Problems and Self-harm The remainder of studies on personal outcomes of arranged marriage has focused on negative outcomes, such as mental health problems, self-harm, and criminality. The preponderance of studies on negative outcomes likely reflects Western cultural biases against arranged marriage practices. It is also important to note that the studies that will be reviewed in the following sections are either descriptive studies or post-de-facto investigations identifying causes of mental health problems, suicide attempts, or criminality among samples experiencing these outcomes. None of the studies have utilized quasiexperimental designs. Langen et al. (1997) described the phenomenon of ‘‘Honeymoon Psychosis’’ (p. 171) among Japanese couples in arranged marriages vacationing in Hawaii. Their research was instigated by a disproportionately large number of Japanese individuals coming to the attention of the hospital emergency department in Honolulu, compared to their representation among visitors to Hawaii. The cases tended to involve severe psychological distress and delusions and hallucinations. It was determined through the assessment process that many of the Japanese patients coming through the hospital with psychosis were on their honeymoons in Hawaii. Langen et al. (1997) examined the
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hospital emergency and treatment records of 16 Japanese patients diagnosed with psychosis while on their honeymoons. They also interviewed the psychiatrists who had worked with these patients. The study was conducted over a two-year period, and the hospital record data was obtained after the patients’ treatment and discharge from the Honolulu hospital. The majority of the Japanese honeymooner patients had arranged marriages and had little or no premarital relationship experience. Their case records and psychiatrist interviews attested to them being overwhelmed with the marriage process and with their first sexual experiences. The sample included both men and women, with the mean age of men being 30 and the mean age of women being 27. The most important fact to note about this study is that 10 of the 16 patients had some level of pre-existing mental health problems, such as depression or anxiety, although many had concealed them from their spouse and/ or family. Therefore, it appears that rather than being precipitated by arranged marriages per se, honeymoon psychosis may simply be an extreme reaction to the stressful life event of marriage among individuals with pre-existing emotional vulnerabilities (Langen et al., 1997). Self-harm is a common outcome of the occurrence of severe emotional distress. Two studies have identified arranged marriages as a contributing factor in attempts to harm oneself and completed suicides. Konradsen, van der Hock, and Peiris (2006) studied the reasons for self-inflicted pesticide poisoning among 159 male and female patients who were hospitalized for these self-harm attempts in Sri Lanka within a single year. Konradsen et al. noted that the most common form of suicide attempts in Sri Lanka is through ingestion of pesticides, since the agricultural economy of the country has led to pesticides being readily available in local corner stores. The researchers interviewed the patients directly after their discharge from the hospital and/or interviewed family members through home visits. Their results indicated that 22 percent of the self-inflicted poisonings could be attributed to marital problems, with forced marriages being one of the major marital problems identified. Their study therefore links coercion in marriage arrangement to an adverse personal outcome, rather than arranged marriage without coercion. Vijayakumar and Thilothammal (1993) analyzed police records of suicide pacts that were part of investigations related to the self-harm attempts and completed deaths of 324 males and females in India during the five-year period from 1982 to 1987. Marriage related issues, including arranged marriages and dowry problems and demands, were among the most frequently occurring reasons for suicide attempts stated in the suicide pacts. The previously discussed statistics on homicides of new brides in arranged marriages involving dowries in India suggested that the pairing of arranged marriages with a bride price
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increases the likelihood that women will be maltreated. Vijayakumar and Thilothammal’s findings suggest that the phenomenon of bride price in arranged marriages may also jeopardize women’s livelihood by contributing to their likelihood of self-harm when they are unable to cope with dowry demands or maltreatment by others. Criminality Another negative personal outcome of arranged marriages that has been studied after the fact is criminality. Tariq and Tariq (1993) interviewed female convicts who were interned in prisons across four provinces in Pakistan. The convicts’ ages ranged from 15 to 51, with the majority of them falling in the 28 to 35 age group. Sixty percent were convicted for murder (42 of the study participants). The majority of the participants who had committed murder killed their husbands or in-laws. Tariq and Tariq conducted a content analysis of the characteristics of their marriages based on their interview data to identify the contributing factors for the marital problems that led to their criminality. Thirty-four percent of the female convicts had forced marriages, and 49 percent had marriages that occurred in childhood or adolescence. In 64 percent of their marriages, there was a sharp disparity between their ages at the time of marriage and the ages of the husbands they were married to, with the men being significantly older. Eighty-eight percent of the women also reported problems with their in-laws in the form of maltreatment. The results of this study highlight the types of marriage characteristics that may pose significant challenges to women’s coping ability. However, outbreaks of violence by women may represent acts of self-defense when they have no other options for escaping their plight. In reality, women are much more likely to be killed by others than to kill others (Rastogi & Therly, 2006). Rastogi and Therly’s work on dowry-related deaths in arranged marriages discussed in the previous section on laws illustrates this fact. IMPLICATIONS FOR LAW, POLICY, AND HUMAN RIGHTS ADVOCACY Although arranged marriages have often been considered to represent an atypical and inappropriate way of establishing family life from the Western perspective, the literature reviewed in this chapter suggests that they have been practiced across multiple countries, cultures, and religious groups (Bhopal, 1999; Blood, 1967; Cattell, 1992; Ghimire et al., 2006; Kurian, 1991; Langen et al., 1997; Madathil & Benshoff, 2008; Oprea, 2005; Rockman, 1994; Xiaohe & Whyte, 1990; Wisensale, 1999; Zaidi & Shuraydi, 2002; Zang, 2008). The diversity in arranged marriage practices likely reflects the plurality among the groups
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utilizing this family formation strategy. When marriages are arranged through third-party initiative rather than personal initiative, it may be assumed that there is no personal choice or consent in the process. However, each of the subtypes of arranged marriage may occur without any coercion and full consent of the partners, or through the application of various forms of emotional and physical pressure. When such pressure results in significant duress on the part of either of the prospective marriage partners, the arranged marriage becomes a forced marriage from a legal standpoint (Dostrovsky et al., 2007). The research reviewed in this chapter suggests that multiple variables may affect individuals’ desire for and likelihood of entering an arranged marriage, such as exposure to Western media, level of education, employment status, and non-family living arrangements (Ghirmire et al., 2006). Gender and acculturation have also been found to relate to the likelihood of third-party intervention in marriage and personal marriage preferences (Zang, 2008; Zaidi & Shuraydi, 2002). Even when other sociodemographic variables are controlled, women from cultures that view females as the bearers of family honor are more likely to have their marriages arranged than men (Zang, 2008). An examination of the outcomes of arranged marriages occurring within a particular nation suggests that when there is some level of choice in the marriage process, they may lead to the development of relationships that are as satisfying or more satisfying than self-initiated marital relations (Madathil & Benshoff, 2008). This may be especially the case when the individuals joined together in marriage have similar expectations of the marriage and shared cultural values (Madathil & Benshoff, 2008). In contrast, forced marriages have been found to yield lower marital satisfaction than marriages formed through personal initiative and personal choice, particularly among women (Xiaohe & Whyte, 1990). Research on personal outcomes of arranged marriages occurring within a specific nation identified a similar dichotomy in outcomes based on whether marriages are volitional or forced. No difference in overall levels of well-being among individuals in these marriages and personally-initiated unions has been found when some choice has been exercised (Myers et al., 2005). The exception occurs in cases where individuals have pre-existing mental health problems. The stress of adjusting to married life with an unfamiliar person may precipitate additional mental health challenges in those with pre-existing vulnerabilities, even in the absence of force (Langen et al., 1997). When arranged marriages are forced and occur in childhood or adolescence to older males, they have been found to be associated with negative outcomes, such as self-harm/suicide attempts (Konradsen et al., 2006; Vijayakumar & Thilothammal, 1993) and criminality (Tariq & Tariq, 1993). Laws related to arranged marriage have covered a wide range of issues, such as third-party intervention, the minimum age of marriage,
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family living arrangements, the negotiation of a bride price, and gender equality. Laws that have attempted to abolish arranged marriages altogether have been successful in dramatically reducing arranged marriage rates in nations where these laws were implemented (Wisensale, 1999; Xiaohe & Whyte, 1990; Zang, 2008). An examination of the rationale for the introduction of such laws suggests a misunderstanding of arranged marriages. The laws seem to be based on the assumption that all arranged marriages are forced marriages and ignore diversity among arranged marriage practices. Taking into account the research on arranged marriage outcomes, such laws are misguided. More importantly, in attempting to protect individual human rights related to freedom of association and autonomous decision-making, such laws may contravene essential cultural rights and freedoms, such as freedom of belief, expression, religion, and cultural tradition that are embedded in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (United Nations, 1948). These culturally based rights and freedoms are also addressed to varying degrees in national policies related to diversity and pluralism (Levesque, 2001). However, this category of rights and freedoms may have received limited attention and respect among some of the political regimes operating when laws abolishing arranged marriages were introduced. In international law, cultural rights and freedoms can only be legitimately challenged when they violate other basic human rights (Levesque, 2001). In the case of noncoerced arranged marriages within a specific nation, the research evidence suggests positive personal and interpersonal outcomes. It does not provide any evidence of higher rates of human rights violations in the form of domestic violence. In contrast to laws aiming to abolish arranged marriage altogether, those attempting to criminalize forced marriage and to raise the minimum age of marriage are more well informed. Laws focusing on forced marriage sanctions can serve to protect the human right to freedom of a marriage partner and also reduce the likelihood of negative personal and interpersonal outcomes of arranged marriage processes. Laws increasing age at the time of marriage can increase children’s likelihood of having access to educational, developmental, and social opportunities that they are accorded in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (United Nations, 1990). Despite the fact that laws banning the negotiation or exchange of a bride price in arranged marriages also appear well informed, the introduction of such a law in India has led the practice to occur implicitly rather than explicitly. This change has made it harder for law enforcers to detect dowry processes until after serious violence or dowry-related deaths have occurred. Therefore, there has been a consistent and startling rise in dowryrelated deaths since the introduction of this law in 1961 (Rastogi & Therly, 2006).
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Rastogi and Therly postulate the need to initiate public education for male and female members of communities practicing the exchange and negotiation of bride price to inform them of the risks to the welfare of daughters, sisters, and wives in the community as a whole. They also emphasize the need for community outreach efforts to help concerned family members, neighbors, and friends recognize signs of maltreatment and violence and learn how to intervene. It is surmised that community engagement can contribute to pro-active rather than reactive law enforcement. It is important to note that although legislative actions and community engagement can help guard against negative outcomes, such steps cannot guarantee gender equality in communities where substantial inequality has existed in family relationships (Wisensale, 1999). The conclusions reached so far focus on arranged marriages performed within a specific nation or locality. A review of existing studies suggested that when arranged marriages occur across international borders, women’s risk of being subjected to multiple forms of human rights violations is heightened (Raj & Silverman, 2002). These violations include various forms of abuse and neglect, as well as barriers to their social and cultural integration in the surrounding society. This elevation in risk is attributed to family immigration policies in immigrantreceiving nations, which tend to enforce new brides’ economic, social, and cultural dependence on their husbands and promote their alienation (Raj & Silverman, 2002). Raj and Silverman (2002) and Merali (2009) outline a number of changes that are needed to family sponsorship policies to reduce women’s vulnerability to maltreatment. One of these steps is translating immigration documents into their first languages to ensure that female marriage migrants have direct access to information that relates to their status as sponsored persons in the host country. This would eliminate the need for non-English-proficient women to rely on their husbands or in-laws for translation assistance, leaving no room for miscommunication. First-language education about human rights and their protection in the country they are entering would also empower the women to recognize and respond to any violations. Rights-based education could occur at the foreign embassies in their countries of origin prior to migration as a proactive step. Connecting women to immigration and settlement agencies for at least a single visit to ensure they have a safety net in the event of encountering abuse or sponsor-imposed barriers to cultural or social integration is also recommended (Raj & Silverman, 2002; Merali, 2008). To prevent neglect of women’s basic human right to material subsistence, family immigration policies may further consider the creation of a spousal allowance for sponsored brides that is based on the same proportion of their sponsors’ incomes that governments expect that sponsors will devote to their new brides
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(Merali, 2008). It is only if arranged marriages are understood in light of their intentions, diverse forms, actual outcomes, and local or international contexts that laws, policies, and human rights advocacy can be appropriately channeled to protect and preserve women’s well-being. REFERENCES Bachrach, C., Hindin, M., & Thomson, E. (2000). The changing shape of ties that bind: An overview and synthesis. In L. J. Waite, C. Bachrach, M. Hindin, E. Thomson, & A. Thornton (Eds.), The ties that bind: Perspectives on marriage and cohabitation (pp. 3–16). Hawthorne, NY: Aldine De Gruyter. Berry, J. W. (2006). Contexts of acculturation. In D. L. Sam & J. W. Berry (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of acculturation psychology (pp. 27–42). New York: Cambridge University Press. Bhopal, K. (1999). South Asian women and arranged marriages in East London. In R. Barot, H. Bradley, & S. Fenton (Eds.), Ethnicity, gender, and social change (pp. 117–134). New York: St. Martin’s Press. Blood, R. O. Jr. (1967). Love match and arranged marriage. New York: Free Press. Bui, H. N., & Morash, M. (1999). Domestic violence in the Vietnamese immigrant community: An exploratory study. Violence Against Women, 5, 769–795. Cattell, M. G. (1992). Praise the lord and say no to men: Older women empowering themselves in Samia, Kenya. Journal of Cross-Cultural Gerontology, 7, 307–330. Chin, K. (1994). Out of town brides: International marriages and wife abuse among Chinese immigrants. Journal of Comparative Family Studies, 25, 53–69. Citizenship and Immigration Canada. (2002). Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. Canada Gazette: Part II, Vol. 136 (No. 9). Cook, R. J., & Cusack, S. (2005). Women’s rights. In R. K. M. Smith & C. Van den Anker (Eds.), The essentials of human rights (pp. 366–369). London: Hodder Arnold. Cote, A., Kerisit, M., & Cote, M. L. (2001). Sponsorship for better or for worse: The impact of sponsorship on the equality rights of immigrant women. Ottawa: Status of Women Canada. Dasgupta, S. D. (2000). Charting the course: An overview of domestic violence in the South Asian community in the United States. Journal of Social Distress and the Homeless, 9, 173–185. Dion, K. K., & Dion, K. L. (2001). Gender and cultural adaptation in immigrant families. Journal of Social Issues, 57, 511–522. Dostrovsky, N., Cook, R., & Gagnon, M. (2007). Annotated bibliography on comparative and international law relating to forced marriage. Ottawa: Department of Justice Canada. Eide, A. (2005). Social rights. In R. K. M. Smith & C. Van den Anker (Eds.), The essentials of human rights (pp. 324–326). London: Hodder Arnold. Ghirmire, D. J., Axinn, W. G., Yaiku, S. T., & Thornton, A. (2006). Social change, premarital nonfamily experience, and spouse choice in an arranged marriage society. American Journal of Sociology, 111, 1181–1218.
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Gilbert, J. (2005a). The right to self-determination. In R. K. M. Smith & C. Van den Anker (Eds.), The essentials of human rights (pp. 317–319). London: Hodder Arnold. Gilbert, J. (2005b). Cultural rights. In R. K. M. Smith & C. Van den Anker (Eds.), The essentials of human rights (pp. 76–79). London: Hodder Arnold. Guichon, A. (2005). Violence against women: Domestic violence. In R. K. M. Smith & C. Van den Anker (Eds.), The essentials of human rights (pp. 358–363). London: Hodder Arnold. Heise, L. L. (1998). Violence against women: An integrated ecological framework. Violence Against Women, 4, 262–290. Hellsten, S. K. (2005). The right to health. In R. K. M. Smith & C. Van den Anker (Eds.), The essentials of human rights (pp. 148–151). London: Hodder Arnold. Konradsen, F., van der Hock, W., & Peiris, P. (2006). Reaching for the bottle of pesticide: A cry for help. Self-inflicted poisonings in Sri Lanka. Social Science & Medicine, 62, 1710–1719. Kurian, G. (1991). South Asians in Canada. International Migration, XXIX, 421–432. Langen, D., Streltzer, J., & Kai, M. (1997). ‘‘Honeymoon psychosis’’ in Japanese tourists to Hawaii. Cultural Diversity and Mental Health, 3, 171–174. Levesque, R. J. R. (2001). Culture and family violence: Fostering change through human rights law. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. MacPherson, S. (2004). Human rights in the family: An educational handbook. Edmonton: Indo-Canadian Women’s Association. Madathil, J., & Benshoff, J. M. (2008). Importance of marital characteristics and marital satisfaction: A comparison of Asian Indians in arranged marriages and Americans in marriages of choice. The Family Journal: Counseling and Therapy for Couples and Families, 16, 222–230. McBride, J. (2005). Freedom of association. In R. K. M. Smith & C. Van den Anker (Eds.), The essentials of human rights (pp. 18–20). London: Hodder Arnold. Merali, N. (2008). Theoretical frameworks for studying female marriage migrants. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 32, 281–289. Merali, N. (2009). Experiences of South Asian brides entering Canada after recent changes to family sponsorship policies. Violence Against Women, 15, 321–339. Michalski, J. H. (2004). Making sociological sense out of trends in intimate partner violence: The social structure of violence against women. Violence Against Women, 10, 652–675. Myers, J. E., Madathil, J., & Tingle, L. R. (2005). Marriage satisfaction and wellness in India and the United States: A preliminary comparison of arranged marriages and marriages of choice. Journal of Counseling & Development, 83, 183–190. Myers, J. E., Sweeney, T. J., Hattie, J. A., & Witmer, J. M. (1998). The Wellness Evaluation of Lifestyle. Palo Alto, CA: MindGarden. Oprea, A. (2005). The arranged marriage of Ana Maria Cioaba, intra-community oppression and Romani feminist ideals: Transcending the ‘primitive culture’ argument. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 12, 133–148.
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Potash, B. (1986). Widows in African societies: Choices and constraints. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Probert, R. (2005). The right to marriage and a family. In R. K. M. Smith & C. Van den Anker (Eds.), The essentials of human rights (pp. 244–247). London: Hodder Arnold. Qureshi, R. B. (1991). Marriage strategies among Muslims from South Asia. The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, 10, 10–14. Raj, A., & Silverman, J. (2002). Violence against immigrant women: The roles of culture, context, and legal immigrant status on intimate partner violence. Violence Against Women, 8, 367–398. Rastogi, M., & Therly, P. (2006). Dowry and its link to violence against women in India: Feminist psychological perspectives. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 7, 66–77. Rockman, H. (1994). Matchmaker matchmaker make me a match: The art and conventions of Jewish arranged marriages. Sexual and Relationship Therapy, 9, 277–284. Rosen-Grandon, J. R. (1998). Charisma: The characteristics of marriage inventory. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Shirwadkar, S. (2004). Canadian domestic violence policy and Indian immigrant women. Violence Against Women, 10, 860–879. Sokoloff, N. J., & Dupont, I. (2005). Domestic violence at the intersections of race, class, and gender. Violence Against Women, 11, 38–64. Stopes-Roe, M., & Cochrane, R. (1990). Citizens of this country: The Asian British. Clevedon, United Kingdom: Multilingual Matters Ltd. Tariq, P. N., & Tariq, A. (1993). Marital maladjustment and the crime of murder among Pakistani female criminals. International Journal of Psychology, 28, 809–819. Texier, P. (2005). Economic rights. In R. K. M. Smith & C. Van den Anker (Eds.), The essentials of human rights (pp. 100–103). London: Hodder Arnold. United Nations. (1948). Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Retrieved April 5, 2007, from: http://www.unhchr.ch/udhr/lang/eng.htm United Nations. (1990). Convention on the Rights of the Child. Retrieved January 10, 2009, from: http://www.unhchr.ch//html/menu3/b/k2crc. htm U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. (2007). Sponsoring a relative to come to the United States. Retrieved June 26, 2007, from http://www.uscis.gov/portal/site/uscis U.S. Immigration Support Organization. (2007). Getting a green card for your wife or husband. Retrieved June 26, 2007, from http://www.usimmigrationsupport.org/greencard_marriage.html Vijayakumar, L., & Thilothammal, N. (1993). Suicide pacts. Crisis: The Journal of Crisis Intervention and Suicide Prevention, 14, 43–46. Werbner, P. (2007). Veiled interventions in pure space: Honour, shame, and embodied struggles among Muslims in Britain and France. Theory, Culture, & Society, 24, 161–185. Wilson, A. (2007). The forced marriage debate and the British state. Race & Class, 49, 25–38.
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Wilson, D. (2005). The right to education. In R. K. M. Smith & C. Van den Anker (Eds.), The essentials of human rights (pp. 105–108). London: Hodder Arnold. Wisensale, S. K. (1999). Marriage and family law in a changing Vietnam. Journal of Family Issues, 20, 602–616. Xiaohe, X., & Whyte, M. K. (1990). Love matches and arranged marriages: A Chinese replication. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 52, 709–722. Zaidi, A. U., and Shuraydi, M. (2002). Perceptions of arranged marriages by Pakistani Muslim women living in a Western society. Journal of Comparative Family Studies, 33, 495–514. Zang, X. (2008). Gender and ethnic variation in arranged marriages in a Chinese city. Journal of Family Issues, 29, 615–638.
Chapter 6
Women’s Reproductive Rights: An International Perspective Joan C. Chrisler Cynthia Garrett
One woman somewhere in the world dies every minute of every day from pregnancy- and childbirth-related complications. The United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA) has estimated that 3 million girls worldwide are at risk of female genital cutting annually (Wakabi, 2007). Each year, tens of thousands of women die, more than 5 million are admitted to a hospital, and a considerable number become infertile as a result of unsafe abortions; 200 million women still have an unmet need for family planning and contraceptives of any kind (Hindin, 2007). Only 16 of 68 countries identified by the United Nations (UN) are on target to meet the Millennium Development Goals for reducing rates of maternal and child deaths by 2015 (Countdown Coverage Writing Group, 2008). Acceptance of women’s reproductive rights as basic human rights has grown in recent years. In 1994, at the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo, official international recognition of reproductive rights as human rights began as representatives of more than 180 nations agreed on basic protections for women’s ability to control their reproductive lives. The UN and other regional bodies have urged governments around the world to safeguard reproductive rights for all women (Center for Reproductive Rights, n.d.). These are promising signs, yet, as evidenced by the facts expressed above, we have a long way to go to guarantee reproductive justice for the world’s women, as reproductive rights are not universally maintained around the globe.
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What do we mean by the term ‘‘reproductive rights’’? According to the World Health Organization, reproductive rights are ‘‘the basic rights of all couples and individuals to decide freely and responsibly the number, spacing, and timing of their children and to have the information and means to do so, and the right to attain the highest standard of sexual and reproductive health. They also include the right of all to make decisions concerning reproduction free of discrimination, coercion, and violence’’ (ICPD Programme of Action, 1994, para 7.3). ‘‘Reproductive justice’’ is a more recent term that is used by some feminist activists to underscore the fact that, although in some countries (e.g., the United States) reproductive rights (e.g., abortion) are legal, many women are not able to access the services they need to exercise those rights (e.g., there may be no services available where they live, those services are not covered by health insurance). If women are not able to exercise their rights, it does them little good to know that the government guarantees their right to make their own ‘‘choices.’’ Rights þ resources þ accessibility ¼ justice. POLITICS AND CULTURE INFLUENCE REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE The factors that influence the degree to which reproductive rights are upheld are broad and interwoven. The political context of a region is one such factor. For example, during the Cold War modern contraceptive methods (manufactured in the West) were simply not available in the Soviet Union (Barrett & Buckley, 2007). Abortion was the primary method of preventing births in the Soviet Socialist Republics until the mid to late 1980s. Currently, in Uzbekistan, the IUD (intra-uterine device) is the most prevalent contraceptive method; 73 percent of married Uzbeck women report having used this method (Barrett & Buckley, 2007). The results of Barrett and Buckley’s study of contraceptive patterns in Uzbekistan suggest that women’s contraceptive choice is constrained. One factor in the high utilization of IUDs may be the pressure put on medical clinics by government agencies that link IUD insertion quotas and clinic funding. Historical events, such as civil wars and other armed conflicts, can severely restrict assess to reproductive health care, especially for political refugees. In one study (McGinn, Casey, Purdin, & Marsh, 2004), the researchers found that, during intense phases of armed conflict, rates of unsafe abortion and maternal mortality rise. The crisis management mentality of refugee camp personnel can also restrict reproductive choices. The risk of gender-based violence is always present during armed conflicts, as is the threat of becoming widowed and being forced to trade sex to meet basic needs (Petchesky, 2008). In recent wars around the globe (e.g., Bosnia, Darfur, Democratic Republic of the
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Congo) rapes have been widespread as a method of terrifying people and diluting ethnic solidarity. Thus, in times when women might be most in need of reproductive health care, its accessibility is especially likely to be curtailed. Palestinian refugees, for example, have struggled for access to reproductive health services since the beginning of the second Intifada in September 2000. According to interviews with health care providers (Bosmans, Nasser, Khammash, Claeys, & Temmerman, 2008), women have requested that physicians induce labor because they are afraid of being trapped at home by curfews when their contractions begin. There are reports of births, stillbirths, and even women dying during labor at military checkpoints. Although they live in an environment with unsafe access to prenatal and other reproductive health care, Palestinian women are under intense social pressure to bear more children as their contribution to the Intifada (Bosmans et al., 2008). On the other hand, some populations have increased access to reproductive health care due to political circumstances. In Israel, for example, women have state-funded access to assisted reproductive technologies including in vitro fertilization (IVF) (Birenbaum-Carmeli & Dimfeld, 2008). These technologies typically are offered free of charge to any Israeli woman up to the age of 45. She is eligible for such services up to the age of 51 if she uses donor eggs. Marital status and sexual orientation are not barriers to these services. State funding for such technologies is limited to two children with the woman’s present partner, but there have been exceptions to this rule. In contrast, contraceptives and abortion are only partially covered by the Israeli public health system (Birenbaum-Carmeli & Dirnfeld, 2008). Israel’s pronatal stance has been linked to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a component of nation building. Israeli leaders have expressed fear that Jews will become a minority population, a situation commonly referred to as the ‘‘demographic time bomb.’’ Civil servants keep a close watch on demographic projections. Beyond the impact of governments at the national level, policies in one country can have a ripple effect on access to reproductive options in other parts of the world. For example, in 1984 U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s administration established a policy known as the ‘‘Global Gag Rule,’’ which prevents performing abortions, providing counseling about reproductive options, referring patients to services, or even lobbying for abortion in developing nations that receive funds for health clinics from the United States (Sullivan, 2009). This particular policy has been a hotbed of controversy throughout the years. It was repealed during the Clinton administration, reinstated by the second Bush administration, and then repealed again by President Obama (Sullivan, 2009). The Global Gag Rule has had far-reaching implications for at least 20 developing countries. It has led to the disruption of delivery of
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contraceptives overseas, left many women with only unsafe options to abort, and increased instances of maternal mortality (Kort, 2008). This cruel policy interferes with the practice of medicine, health education, and counseling, and its cycle of repeal and reinstatement makes it very difficult for public health authorities in developing nations to plan and finance reproductive health services for their citizens. On a more positive note, international human rights bodies are attempting to persuade governments to change their laws to ease abortion restrictions (Boland & Katzive, 2008). In 2003, for example, the African Union adopted the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa. In brief, this protocol states that all appropriate measures to protect reproductive rights must be taken and that medical abortion must be allowed in case of rape, incest, or threats to a woman’s physical or mental health. As of 2007, 21 countries had ratified this protocol (Boland & Katzive, 2008). The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1979. It affirms women’s reproductive rights as necessary for women’s equality in political, economic, social, cultural, and civil arenas. As we write this, the only UN member nations that have not ratified CEDAW are Iran, Nauru, Palau, Qatar, Somalia, Sudan, Tonga, and the United States. Furthermore, international courts of human rights are now holding governments accountable for their violations of women’s reproductive rights. K. L. v. Peru, Paulina Ramirez v. Mexico, and Tysiac v. Poland1 are examples of cases that have been won in the interest of reproductive justice (Center for Reproductive Rights, n.d.). Closely intertwined with historical events and politics is the influence of culture on women’s reproductive rights. The historical events associated with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have served to create a culture of pronatalism on both sides that can reduce a woman’s choice regarding birth spacing and, consequently, might impact her health. Until recently, therapeutic abortions were available in Nicaragua if three physicians agreed that the procedure was necessary for the woman’s health, but this right, however limited, was eliminated for the sake of politics. Daniel Ortega, the former Sandinista leader, decided to run for the presidency of Nicaragua in 2006. His past as a guerilla leader hurt his popularity, and he decided to court Catholic and Evangelical Protestant leaders and their congregations to increase his political base. He announced that he had ‘‘found’’ Jesus, began to practice his religion with public devotion, and mentioned God frequently in his speeches (Goldberg, 2009). After his election, he thanked the religious leaders for their support by pushing to outlaw all abortions. The new policy was tied to cultural values such as marianismo,2 and the idea that motherhood is woman’s highest calling. Maternal mortality doubled after the new law was enacted; women died not only because they had
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sought unsafe abortions outside of hospitals and clinics, but because the new law is so draconian that physicians are afraid to intervene, even in medical situations where the woman’s life is in imminent danger, unless they can prove that the fetus is dead (Goldberg, 2009). For example, women with ectopic pregnancies have died as doctors waited for the fallopian tube to burst. Thus, Nicaraguan politics has killed women and forced physicians to choose between malpractice and jail. The opposite situation can also occur: Culture can impact politics. Such is the case in Ghana where marital rape was removed from the Domestic Violence Act passed on February 22, 2007, due to public pressure. Public opposition to the inclusion of the protection against marital rape stems from the belief in Ghanian custom that consent to marriage is equivalent to consent to sex (Stafford, 2008). A similar case occurred in early 2009 when the Afghan Parliament passed a bill that gave the minority Shia the right to enforce Sharia Law, which includes the right of men to demand sex from their wives except under a few circumstances (e.g., advanced pregnancy, temporary illness); in effect, it legalizes marital rape, as saying ‘‘no’’ is not recognized as a legal reason to avoid sexual intercourse. After an international outcry, President Karzai announced that Ministry of Justice officials would ‘‘study’’ the new law to be sure that it does not violate that national constitution, which established equal rights for women and men (Afghanistan ‘‘rape’’ law, 2009). Culture also plays a role in another form of violence against women. Female genital cutting remains a widespread practice in Africa despite the fact that 16 African countries have passed laws to ban it. UNFPA has estimated that 120 to 140 million women have been subjected to the procedure. For some African communities, the practice represents a passage from girlhood to womanhood. Some also believe that genital cutting will prevent girls from being unfaithful to their future husbands and preserve their chastity. UNFPA has reported that the most successful initiatives to eliminate this practice involve providing alternate rites of passage—an attempt to establish a new cultural tradition (Wakabi, 2007). Misunderstandings of culture can prevent outside support for women’s reproductive rights from being effective. For example, reproductive rights activists typically assume that the body belongs to the individual. In Nigeria, members of the Ngwa-Igbo and Ubang communities differ in their beliefs regarding body ownership. In Ngwa Igbo culture, the body belongs to the entire Ngwa society (Izugbara & Undie, 2008). This means that individuals have limited control over the uses of their bodies. In the instance of rape, the offense is against the larger community, not simply against the individual woman. The Ubang people’s body notions involve a splitting of the ownership rights of the married woman. In marriage, her ‘‘underneath’’ (which
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symbolize the sexual and reproductive organs that bring new life) are given to her in-laws, whereas the rights to her ‘‘head’’ (which symbolizes her own life) are retained by her birth community (Izugbara & Undie, 2008). Interventions built upon this belief will be less effective in cultures where the body is not believed to be owned by the individual. China’s one child per family policy has its cultural roots in collectivism. The value of the nation at large is considered to be more important than the choices of individual citizens (Greenhalgh, 2001). This policy, an effort to reverse China’s population boom, has relaxed somewhat since its initial implementation. There are currently exceptions where two children may be approved by the state. In addition, pilot projects are underway to increase birth control options for women. Women typically use an IUD after their first child and are sterilized after their second (if they are approved for a second) (Hardee, Xie, & Gu, 2004). Some groups within society are marginalized, and their reproductive rights limited, because of cultural beliefs. Examples of these groups include single women, lesbians, disabled and chronically ill women, poor women, and those who wish to exercise reproductive choice at an age considered inappropriate by cultural norms. Members of marginalized groups who pursue reproductive options may face additional barriers as individuals. In Australia, as of 2007, 70 percent of same-sex couples had conceived via informal ‘‘self-insemination’’ methods (Burstin, 2007). Although the Australian government has lessened restrictions on fertility treatments to include single women and same-sex couples, public funding for such expensive treatment is not allowed because it is argued that such persons are not medically infertile (Nader, 2007). In the United Kingdom, as of April 2009, support for reproductive freedom is better; lesbians and single heterosexual women can now name almost any adult as a second parent, which effectively removed some of the barriers to fertility treatment (Jones, 2009). Older women may also face cultural backlash if they seek motherhood, as societies struggle with the question of individual women’s freedom versus the best interest of the child. Quotes from medical personnel capture these sentiments: ‘‘Nature sends out a good message that we reach a certain age when we are too old to have children’’ (Sawer, 2008, p. 6); ‘‘Just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should’’ (Schafer, 2009, p. A13). Medical ethics and cultural beliefs tend to change slowly, and they have not caught up to the rapid pace of the development of reproductive technologies. In Western countries, postmenopausal women have successfully carried pregnancies to term with the assistance of donor eggs and IVF procedures. Persons with disabilities may face a host of limitations on their reproductive rights due to cultural denial that these individuals have
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sexual desires and engage in sexual activities (Henderson, 2007). In addition, women with cognitive impairments are at greater than average risk of sexual assault (Wacker, Parish, & Macy, 2008), which violates a basic form of human rights and increases their need for sensitive reproductive health care. Women with developmental disabilities are often thought to be incapable of raising children, yet adequate education regarding birth control may not be provided to them (Dotson, Stinson, & Christian, 2003). Religion is a powerful cultural factor that can influence women’s reproductive rights. Members of each religion report a diverse range of opinions on these matters, yet specific examples of the stances of religious leaders illustrate the ways in which religion directly impacts women internationally. The Roman Catholic Church is a strong advocate of natural family planning and rejects any artificial contraceptive methods. As recently as March 2009, Pope Benedict XVI remarked that condoms are not the answer to Africa’s AIDS problem and could make the problem worse (Butt, 2009). His remarks clearly suggest that women must limit their range of contraceptives and methods to protect themselves from this life-threatening disease. In other moves, bishops of three Roman Catholic dioceses in the United States in 2004 announced that they would deny the sacrament of communion to politicians who support reproductive rights (More Catholic bishops deny communion, 2004), a direct move to influence political action in a country that prides itself on the separation of church and state. In the United States, health care expenses have led to downsizing and combining of services; in some cases secular hospitals have merged with Catholic hospitals. Catholic hospitals are governed by the guidelines set forth in the Church’s Ethical and Religious Directives, which prohibit certain medical procedures, such as abortion, tubal ligations, emergency contraception, vasectomies, and counseling discussions about condoms and fertility treatments (Gelb & Shogan, 2005). As a result of these mergers, women have lost access to reproductive options previously available. In other countries, the separation of church and state is less clearly defined than in the United States. In the Philippines, for example, 80 percent of the population is Catholic, and many laws clearly demonstrate the influence of Catholicism. President Arroyo openly backs the Vatican’s anticontraception stance (Austria, 2004). Natural family planning is the government’s espoused method of family planning according to the Department of Health’s Web site (Department of Health, Philippines, n.d.). Although first-trimester abortion is ‘‘virtually unrestricted’’ in most countries in the European Union, it remains a crime in Ireland. Spain, which has some of the most progressive policies in Europe (including gay marriage), is in turmoil as we write this chapter because Prime Minister Zapatero and his political party are attempting
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to liberalize abortion laws (Burnett, 2009). Portugal only recently (2007) legalized abortion during the first 10 weeks of pregnancy, and Italy’s law (established in 1978) allows legal abortion only during the first 90 days (Burnett, 2009). All of these are countries where the Roman Catholic Church has traditionally exercised a great deal of influence. On a more positive note, there are feminist Catholic groups (e.g., Catholics for a Free Choice) attempting to find a place for reproductive rights within the traditional moral framework (Hunt, 1996). These groups often work together with the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, which includes representative groups within all the major religions practiced in the United States. Members of mainline Protestant churches and Jewish congregations tend to be more liberal in their perspectives regarding reproductive rights (Schenker, 2005). Islam also represents a wide range of beliefs about reproductive rights. Positions on family planning and abortion, for example, vary across the Muslim world. Generally speaking, family planning is allowed in Muslim countries of the Middle East and north Africa despite a high value placed on fertility. Although abortion is typically forbidden once the fetus achieves ensoulment (the timing of which varies based on the beliefs of specific Islamic sects), the one exception commonly allowed is in the case of saving a woman’s life (Hessini, 2007). Rape is increasingly considered a reason for abortion, although Kuwati muftis have decided that it does not justify the need. Groups such as the Indonesian Society for Pesantren3 and Community Development (P3M) have been working to reinterpret Islamic texts to explore women’s reproductive rights. P3M advocates for women’s health and safety with regard to reproduction, economic compensation for women’s reproductive role, and the right of women to make reproductive decisions (Sciortino, Matsir, & Mas’udi, 1996). Opinions on what is considered acceptable with regard to assistive reproductive techniques also vary by religion. Judaism supports artificial insemination with the husband’s sperm, but most rabbis do not support the use of donor sperm. Catholicism and some Evangelical Protestant churches do not accept assisted reproduction. Mainline Protestantism generally accepts all forms of assisted reproduction including IVF. Islam encourages treatment as long as husband and wife are the only parties involved; use cannot be made of donor eggs, sperm, or uterus (Schenker, 2005). Factors such as culture and religion typically influence the acceptability of services related to reproductive rights, but poverty can prevent access to them. In both sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia, economic status significantly influences the likelihood that a mother would have a skilled birth attendant present during labor and birthing (Merrick, 2002). In the United States, 5 percent of women experience an unintentional pregnancy each year, and the rate disproportionately
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represents low-income women among disadvantaged groups (Finer & Henchshaw, 2006). The World Bank has estimated that ensuring skilled care during birthing could reduce maternal deaths by 74 percent (Obaid, 2007). Contraceptive use is also impacted by economic status, although to a lesser degree, in sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia (Merrick, 2002). Voluntary access to family planning methods for all women would reduce maternal deaths by an estimated 20 to 35 percent (Obaid, 2007). Family planning initiatives have been misused at times, usually in ways that victimize low-income women. For example, in Peru, between 1996 and 1998, state-run family planning organizations favored sterilization over other forms of contraception, and the government’s campaigns targeted poor women. Sterilizations were often carried out in low-quality conditions and frequently did not require informed consent (Ewig, 2006). Between 2000 and 2004, use of modern family planning methods declined among the poorest segments of the Peruvian population, although the reasons remain unclear (Gribble, Sharma, & Menotti, 2007). Distrust is likely to be among them. When basic reproductive health care and access to family planning methods are a struggle, access to assisted reproductive technologies may seem like a luxury. One article (Papreen et al., 2000) documents the psychological pain of infertility among urban low-income residents of Bangladesh. In a culture where having children is highly valued, unwanted childlessness can result in a number of negative consequences. Respondents interviewed by Papreen and colleagues reported emotional problems, perceived role failure, social stigmatization from members of the community, and physical and psychological abuse within the home. In the United States, most private health insurance plans do not cover assisted reproductive techniques, nor does Medicaid, the government’s program for the poor uninsured. In many states, Medicaid does not cover abortion either. Thus, in counties around the world, poor women are left on their own to grieve for children they want, but cannot have, and to struggle to raise children they have, but did not want. Another important factor in the status of women’s reproductive rights is gender equality. According to one study (Pillai & Wang, 1999) of 101 developing nations, gender equality is the single most important factor that impacts the achievement of women’s reproductive rights. Male dominance is associated with increased fertility rates (Keyfitz, 1986). In South Africa, one study (Pettifor, Measham, Reev, & Padian, 2004) with a relatively large sample size of 4,066 participants showed that women who reported low relationship control were more likely to use condoms inconsistently than were those who reported high relationship control. When women have less control over sexual activity, they also have less ability to protect themselves from unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases (Roth, 2003).
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In Egypt, a study (Diop-Sidibe, Campbell, & Becker, 2005) showed that wives who are subject to domestic violence are less likely to use prenatal care or contraceptives. Specifically, women who reported three or more instances of abuse were significantly less likely currently to use contraceptives than were those women who reported one or two incidents. In addition, women who had ever been beaten by their husbands were at significantly greater risk of having gone without prenatal care during their most recent pregnancy. Progress is being made in some countries. In Honduras, for example, in a recent study (Speizer, Whittle, & Carter, 2005), more than half of the men and women surveyed supported shared reproductive decision making. Women who lived in less urban areas, had less education, and were of low to middle socioeconomic class were more likely than other women to believe that men should make all of the reproductive decisions and to live in a household where the man did make those decisions. Despite the fact that more than one-half of households supported shared reproductive decision-making, a higher proportion of women than men reported that they had more children than they wanted. This finding indicates that at least some women in Honduras have less control over their reproductive choices than they would like to have, but cultural changes in favor of gender equality and shared responsibility could pave the way to empower women to exert control over their reproductive lives. REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE IS IMPORTANT FOR WOMEN AND THEIR CHILDREN The decision of whether and when to bear children is a crucial one that has long-term consequences for women’s lives (Chrisler & Johnston-Robledo, 2000), and women cannot make those decisions unless they are able to control their own bodies and exercise their reproductive rights. Women’s ability to make reproductive decisions begins with the ability to determine whether, when, and with whom to engage in sexual activity; depends on the availability of various, accessible, safe, effective, and inexpensive methods of contraception, including emergency contraceptives (i.e., the ‘‘morning after’’ pill); requires safe, legal abortion as a back-up to contraceptive failure, in cases of rape or incest, and in cases of ectopic pregnancy, miscarriage, and other threats to women’s health; benefits from affordable infertility treatments; depends on prenatal and postnatal health care for women and their children; and requires safe and sensitive birthing assistance that is as responsive as possible to women’s preferences. Reproductive justice is important for women’s physical health. Contraception gives women the ability to control the number, and the space between, childbirths. Spacing is important for women’s health, as
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it allows them to recover fully from the previous pregnancy and birth before becoming pregnant again. Large numbers of children, and children born close together in time, are hard on women’s bodies, and can result in medical problems, chronic strain, and fatigue (Hawkins, Matteson, & Tabeek, 1995). Millions of women die each year from pregnancy- and birth-related complications and from unsafe abortions (UN, 2008; Wakabi, 2007). The UN estimates that a woman’s risk of dying from preventable or treatable pregnancy- and birth-related complications is 1 in 22 in underdeveloped nations (sub-Saharan African countries have the highest maternal mortality rates); in developed nations that risk is 1 in 7,300. Skilled medical personnel, sanitary equipment, and the ability to transport patients to hospitals and clinics with proper facilities should emergencies arise are critical to reducing maternal mortality (UN, 2008). Accessible contraception, liberalization of abortion laws (at a minimum, abortion should be safe and available to preserve women’s physical and mental health), and proper training and certification of abortion providers would save the lives of many women. Female genital cutting has no health benefits and many health hazards for women who undergo it. The procedures are often carried out in unsafe circumstances, which can lead to hemorrhaging and infections; the procedures are also associated with urinary tract ailments, dysmenorrhea, and childbirth complications (World Health Organization, 2008). Rape can result in physical injuries, potential unwanted pregnancy, and sexually transmitted diseases. Women who have been raped have been shown to increase their health care visits by as much as 56 percent in the year following the assault (Koss, 1994), and untreated STDs can results in cervical cancer, urinary tract infections, pelvic inflammatory disease, infertility, and even death (Chrisler, 2001). Laws against rape (including marital and acquaintance rape) and genital mutilation should be enforced to protect women’s health. Any sexual activity or body-altering procedure must require free consent. Reproductive justice is important for women’s mental health. The ability of individuals to exercise control over their bodies and their circumstances is important to mental health (Chrisler, 2008). Mentally healthy people not only have a greater sense of personal control than mentally ill people do, but they often overestimate the amount of control they have over events in their lives, which leads them to maintain a sense of optimism for the future (Taylor & Brown, 1988; Weinstein, 1984). Rape, unwanted pregnancy, and unwanted genital cutting are extreme examples of loss of control, and they often result in shame, depression, anxiety, and trauma (Chrisler & Ferguson, 2006). In countries where women’s bodies are considered to belong to the family or to the community, shame associated with rape is likely to be especially acute. Women who have been raped also complain of low self-esteem, body image concerns, self-perceived poor health, fear of intimacy, and
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an inability to trust men (Fanslow & Robinson, 2004). Higher than average rates of drug and alcohol abuse and eating disorders are often seen in victims (West, 2002), and suicidal thoughts are more common among victims than among the general population (Fanslow & Robinson, 2004). Depression is also associated with unwanted pregnancy (Rubin & Russo, 2004), miscarriage and stillbirth (Cosgrove, 2004), and seeking abortion when the decision is not supported by the women’s family and friends (Rubin & Russo, 2004). Even a wellplanned childbirth can be associated with disappointment and depression when a woman’s wishes for how to give birth are ignored or overruled by medical personnel due to complications (Johnston-Robledo & Barnack, 2004). Postpartum depression, or the milder ‘‘baby blues,’’ is not uncommon, especially after a first birth, a difficult birth, in circumstances where the woman lacks childcare assistance and social support as she recovers from birthing, or when the woman has had previous episodes of depression (Chrisler & Johnston-Robledo, 2002). Women’s reactions to infertility can range from disappointment in not being able to achieve a life goal to more serious complaints of stress, anxiety, depression, shame, low self-esteem, body image concerns, and marital strife (Spector, 2004). In pronatal cultures where motherhood is considered to be women’s purpose and highest achievement in life, infertility is particularly likely to damage women’s mental health and cause them to question their self-worth. Reproductive justice is important for children’s health and development. Infant mortality is lower in smaller families. Fewer children, whose births are spaced a few years apart, generally means healthier children. Parents can take better care of them and spend more time with each one, interacting with the children in ways that facilitate their development. Fewer children in poor families means more food, clothing, and room to play for each child. Parents with fewer children are more likely to be able to pay for their schooling, medical care, and leisure activities. Finally, children whose parents wanted them are more likely to feel loved and secure. Reproductive justice is essential to secure equal rights for women in both the public and the private sphere. As Michelle Goldberg (2009, p. 11) put it: ‘‘reproductive rights are intimately related to women’s economic freedom. Having smaller families allows women to work. When they bring financial resources into the family, their power tends to increase and their daughters’ welfare improves.’’ Without the ability to decide whether and when to bear children women cannot make plans, strive to meet personal goals, seek higher education, succeed in a career, or even manage to work outside the home. Women who have fewer children and greater financial resources are better able to negotiate with their partners and to exert some control over their own, and their children’s, future.
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FEMINIST PERSPECTIVES ON WOMEN’S REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS As we wrote this chapter, many slogans from the second wave of feminism came to mind: The personal is political; Sisterhood is global; Keep your laws off my body; Not the Church, not the state, women shall decide our fate; Every child a wanted child; Motherhood by choice, not chance; No means no. The slogans we chanted at rallies decades ago remain relevant today for women all over the world, including in Western democracies, when reproductive justice is not guaranteed. The radical feminists of the 1960s warned that reproductive rights are the essential underpinning of women’s liberation: If we lack the ability to control our own bodies, how can we expect to control anything else? Reproductive justice ¼ women’s empowerment. This is no less true today, as ‘‘a global culture war is raging, and it’s all about who controls women’s fertility—and, more broadly, women themselves’’ (Goldberg, 2009, p. 4). We must not give up the fight for reproductive justice. Significant progress has been made in many countries, and the groundwork has been laid for future success. As we noted earlier in this chapter, many international organizations and agencies now accept the once radical notion that women’s rights are human rights. The UN, the Organization of American States, the European Union, and the African Union all have ratified protocols in support of reproductive rights, although their member states do not necessarily live up to their agreements. The international courts have forced some countries to comply or to compensate victims, and international organizations, such as Human Rights Watch, collect data about violations of women’s reproductive rights and use the data to embarrass the leaders of those countries. The UN is pressuring its member nations to take steps to meet the Millennium Development Goals, which include the reduction of maternal and infant mortality. Planned Parenthood International, the Population Council, the Guttmacher Institute, and other organizations are providing advice and financial support to feminist groups and medical associations in countries around the globe who are working to secure reproductive justice. Concerned individuals can donate money and time to organizations that help women to help themselves. International pressure on countries whose laws oppress women’s rights (e.g., Afghanistan, Nicaragua) can be helpful, but it also can backfire. Planned Parenthood and the Population Council have their roots in the eugenics movement and Malthusian theory (Goldberg, 2009). Although the organizations repudiated that movement long ago, people who are aware of their history might continue to view their efforts with distrust. Political and religious leaders, who want to maintain the patriarchal social order, often accuse international
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organizations and agencies of neocolonialism when they advocate for women’s rights in underdeveloped countries (Goldberg, 2009). These leaders maintain that their cultural traditions (e.g., genital cutting, marital rape) are more important than women’s rights or that they should not have to change their culture to please outsiders. Thus, we can often be most effective by supporting local groups who advocate for change from within rather than appearing to force change from without. It is important to remember that cultures and societies are dynamic. They influence each other, and they are influenced by individuals and groups within. Politicians come and go; new religious groups arise, and old ones decline; artists and technologies change the way people think. We have seen an enormous amount of cultural and social changes during our lifetimes, and such changes will continue to occur despite some leaders’ attempts to maintain the status quo. We believe that the momentum is in women’s favor, as the international protocols indicate. Reproductive justice is on the way. The global culture war can eventually be won by the world’s women. Sisterhood is powerful! NOTES 1. K. L. v. Peru concerned a 17-year-old girl denied an abortion even though her fetus was determined to be anencephalic, and doctors knew the baby would live only a few days after birth. Paulina Ramirez v. Mexico concerned a 13-year-old rape victim who was denied an abortion when even Mexico’s law allows abortion in rape cases. Tysiac v. Poland concerned a woman denied an abortion even though doctors warned that the continued pregnancy would worsen her medical condition and lead to blindness (Goldberg, 2009). 2. Marianismo, which is based on Catholic principles and the idealization of the Virgin Mary, encourages women to strive to display characteristics associated with Mary and other female saints, such as virginity, virtue, self-abnegation, and self-sacrifice (Yeager, 1994). 3. Pesantren are Islamic boarding schools.
REFERENCES Afghanistan ‘‘rape’’ law puts women’s rights front and center. (2009). Accessed April 7, 2009, at www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/04/06/afghanistan.law/index.html Austria, C. S. R. (2004). The church, the state, and women’s bodies in the context of religious fundamentalism in the Philippines. Reproductive Health Matters, 12, 96–103. Barrett, J., & Buckley, C. (2007). Constrained contraceptive choice: IUD prevalence in Uzbekistan. International Family Planning Perspectives, 33, 50–57. Birenbaum-Carmeli, D., & Dimfeld, M. (2008). In vitro fertilization policy in Israel and women’s perspectives: The more the better? Reproductive Health Matters, 16, 182–191.
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Boland, R., & Katzvie, L. (2008). Developments in laws on induced abortion: 1998–2007. International Family Planning Perspectives, 34, 110–119. Bosmans, M., Nasser, D., Khammash, U., Claeys, P. & Temmerman, M. (2008). Palestinian women’s sexual and reproductive health rights in a longstanding humanitarian crisis. Reproductive Health Matters, 16, 103–111. Burnett, V. (2009, April 11). Spain steps into battle with itself on abortion. New York Times, pp. A4, A7. Burstin, F. (2007, September 20). Same-sex couples priced out of IVF. Herald Sun, p. 9. Butt, R. (2009). Condom use could make HIV/AIDS situation worse in Africa, says pope: Controversy over Catholic Church’s stance reignited—Policy divides some clergy working with patients. Guardian, p. 18. Center for Reproductive Rights. (n.d.). Are reproductive rights human rights? Retrieved January 28, 2009, from http://reproductiverights.org/en/feature/are-repro-rights-human-rights Chrisler, J. C. (2001). Gendered bodies and physical health. In R. Unger (Ed.), Handbook on the psychology of women and gender (pp. 289–302). New York: Wiley. Chrisler, J. C. (2008). Fear of losing control: Power, perfectionism, and the psychology of women. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 32, 1–12. Chrisler, J. C., & Ferguson, S. (2006). Violence against women as a public health issue. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1087, 235–249. Chrisler, J. C., & Johnston-Robledo, I. (2000). Motherhood and reproductive issues. In M. Biaggio & M. Hersen (Eds.), Issues in the psychology of women (pp. 199–225). New York: Plenum. Chrisler, J. C., & Johnston-Robledo, I. (2002). Raging hormones? Feminist perspectives on premenstrual syndrome and postpartum depression. In M. Ballou & L. S. Brown (Eds.), Rethinking mental health and disorder (pp. 174–197). New York: Guilford. Cosgrove, L. (2004). The aftermath of pregnancy loss: A feminist critique of the literature and implications for treatment. Women & Therapy, 27, 107–122. Countdown Coverage Writing Group. (2008). Countdown to 2015 for maternal, newborn, and child survival: The 2008 report on tracking coverage of interventions. Lancet, 371, 1247–1258. Department of Health, Philippines. (n.d.). Family planning: A brief description of the program. Retrieved on April 7, 2009, from http://www.doh.gov/ ph/programs/family_planning/profile. Diop-Sidibe, N., Campbell, J. C., & Becker, S. (2005). Domestic violence against women in Egypt: Wife beating and health outcomes. Social Science & Medicine, 62, 1260–1277. Dotson, L. A., Stinson, J., & Christian, L. (2003). ‘‘People tell me I can’t have sex’’: Women with disabilities share their personal perspectives on health care, sexuality, and reproductive rights. Women & Therapy, 26, 195–209. Ewig, C. (2006). Hijacking global feminism: Feminists, the Catholic Church, and the family planning debacle in Peru. Feminist Studies, 32, 632–659. Fanslow, J. L., & Robinson, E. (2004). Violence against women in New Zealand: Prevalence and health consequences. Journal of the New Zealand Medical Association, 117, 1173–1206.
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Finer, L., & Henshaw, S. K. (2006). Disparities in rates of unintended pregnancies in the U.S. Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, 38, 90–96. Gelb, J., & Shogan, C. (2005). Community activism in the USA: Catholic hospital mergers and reproductive access. Social Movement Studies, 4, 209–229. Goldberg, M. (2009). The means of reproduction: Sex, power, and the future of the world. New York: Penguin Press. Greenhalgh, S. (2001). Fresh winds in Beijing: Chinese feminists speak out on the one-child policy and women’s lives. Signs, 26, 847–887. Gribble, J. N., Sharma, S., & Menotti, E. P. (2007). Family planning policies and their impacts on the poor: Peru’s experience. International Family Planning Perspectives, 33, 176–181. Hardee, K., Xie, Z., & Gu, B. (2003). Family planning and women’s lives in rural China. International Family Planning Perspectives, 30, 68–76. Hawkins, J., Matteson, P. S., & Tabeek, E. S. (1995). Fertility control. In C. I. Fogel & N. F. Woods (Eds.), Women’s health care: A comprehensive handbook (pp. 281–322). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Henderson, H. (2007, April 14). Sexuality and disability as social policy. Toronto Star, p. L03. Hessini, L. (2007). Abortion and Islam: Policies and practice in the Middle East and north Africa. Reproductive Health Matters, 15, 75–84. Hindin, M. J. (2007). Contraception, safe abortion, and maternal morbidity. Lancet, 370, 1294–1297. Hunt, M. (1996). Good sex: Women’s religious wisdom on sexuality. Reproductive Health Matters, 8, 97–103. International Conference on Population and Development. (1994). Programme of action. Retrieved April 7, 2009, from http://who.int/reproductive-health/ gender/glossary.html Izugbara, C. O., & Undie, C. (2008). Who owns the body? Indigenous African discourses of the body and contemporary sexual rights rhetoric. Reproductive Health Matters, 16, 159–167. Johnston-Robledo, I., & Barnack, J. (2004). Psychological issues in childbirth: Potential roles for psychotherapists. Women & Therapy, 27, 133–150. Jones, A. (2009, March 2). Rules eased for second parent in IVF births. Guardian, p. 10. Keyfitz, N. (1986). The family that does not reproduce itself. Population and Development Review, 12, 139–154. Kort, M. (2008). Are U.S. policies killing women? Retrieved on November 12, 2008, from http://www.alternet.org/story/74469/ Koss, M. (1994). The negative impact of crime victimization on women’s health and medical use. In A. J. Dan (Ed.), Reframing women’s health: Multidisciplinary research and practice (pp. 189–200). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. McGinn, T., Casey, S., Purdin, S., & Marsh, M. (2004). Reproductive health for conflict-affected people: Policies, research, and programmes. London: Humanitarian Practice Network, Overseas Development Institute. Merrick, T. (2002). Population and poverty: New views on an old controversy. International Family Planning Perspectives, 28, 41–46. More Catholic bishops deny communion to pro-choice politicians. (2004, October). Church & State, 19–20.
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Nader, C. (2007, December 19). No Medicare for lesbians’ IVF: Health: Canberra rejects funding, despite baby law overhaul. Age, 4. Obaid, T. A. (2007). Breaking the cycle of poverty in achieving the MGDS: Investing in reproductive heath and rights. UN Chronicle, 44, 19–20. Papreen, N., Sharma, A., Sabin, K., Begum, L., Ahsan, S. K., & Baqui, A. H. (2000). Living with infertility: Experiences among urban slum populations in Bangladesh. Reproductive Health Matters, 8, 33–44. Petchesky, R. P. (2008). Conflict and crisis settings: Promoting sexual and reproductive rights. Reproductive Health Matters, 16, 4–9. Pettifor, A. E., Measham, D. M., Rees, H. V., & Padian, N. S. (2004). Sexual power and HIV risk, South Africa. Emerging Infectious Diseases. Retrieved April 2, 2009, from http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/EID/vol10no11/ 04-0252.htm Pillai, V. K., & Wang, G. (1999). Social structural model of women’s reproductive rights: A cross-national study of developing countries. Canadian Journal of Sociology, 24, 255–280. Roth, R. (2003). Sexual and reproductive life of women: Gender equality in women’s reproductive health in western Europe and the U.S. Psychological Science, 45, 123–134. Rubin, L., & Russo, N. F. (2004). Abortion and mental health: What therapists need to know. Women & Therapy, 27, 69–90. Sawer, P. (2008, March 23). ‘‘Miracle’’ first baby for IVF mother at 57. Sunday Telegraph, p. 6. Schafer, A. (2009, February 9). The case for postmenopausal mothers. Globe and Mail, p. A13. Schenker, J. G. (2005). Assisted reproductive practice: Religious perspectives. Reproductive BioMedical Online, 10, 310–319. Sciortino, R., Matsir, L. M., & Mas’udi, M. F. (2006). Learning from Islam: Advocacy of reproductive rights in Indonesian Pesantren. Reproductive Health Matters, 8, 86–96. Spector, A. R. (2004). Psychological issues and interventions with infertile patients. Women & Therapy, 27, 91–105. Speizer, I. S., Whittle, L., & Carter, M. (2005). Gender relations and reproductive decision-making in Honduras. International Family Planning Perspectives, 31, 131–139. Stafford, N. K. (2008). Permission for domestic violence: Marital rape in Ghanaian marriages. Women’s Rights Law Reporter, 29, 63. Sullivan, A. (2009). Shhh: Obama repeals the abortion gag rule, very quietly. Retrieved January 26, 2009, from http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,183794,00.html Taylor, S. E., & Brown, J. D. (1988). Positive illusions and well-being revisited: Separating fact from fiction. Psychological Bulletin, 116, 21–27. United Nations. (2008). The millennium development goals report. Retrieved May 1, 2009, from www.un.org/milleniumgoals/maternal.shtml Wacker, J. L., Parish, S. L., & Macy, R. J. (2008). Sexual assault and women with cognitive disabilities: Codifying discrimination in the states. Journal of Disability Studies, 19, 86–94. Wakabi, W. (2007). Africa battles to make female genital mutilation history. Lancet, 369, 1069–1070.
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Weinstein, N. D. (1984). Why it won’t happen to me: Perceptions of risk factors and susceptibility. Health Psychology, 3, 431–457. West, C. M. (2002). Battered black and blue: An overview of violence in the lives of Black women. Women & Therapy, 25, 5–27. World Health Organization (WHO). (2008). Fact sheet on female genital mutilation. Retrieved May 1, 2009, from www.who.int/mediccentre/factsheets/fs241/en/ Yeager, G. M. (Ed.). (1994). Confronting change, challenging tradition: Women in Latin American history. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources.
Chapter 7
Pay Equity as Justice: United States and International Perspectives Michele A. Paludi Jennifer L. Martin Carmen Paludi, Jr. Sarah Metzgar Boggess Kristina Hicks Lindsey Speach
Women should have equal pay for equal work and they should be considered equally eligible to the offices of principal and superintendent, professor and president. So you must insist that qualifications, not sex, shall govern appointments and salaries. —Susan B. Anthony
This statement by Susan B. Anthony was made in 1903. However, the fact is that in the United States, women still do not earn the same salary as men for identical work. Since the passage of the Equal Pay Act into law in 1963, the pay gap between women’s and men’s wages is still a major issue (Gibelman, 2003; Graddy & Pistaferri, 2000; Ostroff & Atwater, 2003; Petersen & Saporta, 2004; Rudin & Byrd, 2003). When the Equal Pay Act was passed in 1963, full-time employed women earned an average of 59 cents for every dollar paid to men. Census statistics released on August 26, 2008, Women’s Equality Day, indicated that average, full-time employed women earn 77.8 cents to every dollar earned by full-time employed men (National Committee on Pay Equity, 2009). This gap only changed by less than 1 percent from 2006 to 2007.
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Women’s average earnings for full-time employment were $35,102; men’s were $45,113. Dey and Hill (2007) reported that wage differences begin directly after college graduation: women who earned a bachelor’s degree in 1999–2000 were paid 80 percent of their male colleagues’ wages one year after graduation. However, 10 years after college graduation, women lag further behind and earn approximately 69 percent of men’s salaries. Gattiker and Cohen (1997) reported that men earn higher wages than women in general but also earn more than women in occupations populated by women, e.g., nurse, biochemist). Reilly and Wirjanto (1999) also reported that the proportion of women in the discipline had an impact on wages. They found a negative wage premium associated with the proportion of women in the discipline even after controlling for experience, education, tenure, industry, and so forth. As Ostroff and Atwater concluded, in their review of the literature: These consistent significant negative effects of female representation on pay or rewards can be taken as evidence that the work done by women is valued and rewarded at lower rates than that done by men. (p. 728)
Furthermore, this wage gap is more severe for women of color (Browne & Askew, 2006; Gee, 2006; Kim, 2006). For example, the earnings for African American women were $31,009; for Asian women, $40,374; and for Latinas, $26,612. African American women with undergraduate degrees make only $1,545 more per year than white men who have only completed high school (Richardson & Sandoval, 2007). This is more startling when we take into account the fact that African American women account for approximately 30 percent of all female-headed families in the United States. Their median income is $18,244 annually. Single families in the United States headed by white men have a median income of $39,240. In addition, when we consider the annual income of Latinas working full time ($17,837) with white men’s income over a 30-year career span, Latinas earn $510,000 less than white men (Barbezat, 2002; Gee, 2006; Kim, 2006; National Committee on Pay Equity, 2009). Women of color in the United States suffer from both sex and race wage inequalities (Richardson & Sandoval, 2007). Men of color do not earn as much as white men earn (Browne & Askew, 2006; Coleman, 2003). Thus, salary discrimination reduces total career lifespan earnings, reduces benefits from Social Security and pension plans, and inhibits the ability to save money for retirement, to purchase a home, to pay for college education for children and/or for themselves, and to cover medical expenses throughout their lives, especially during their elderly years (Greene, 2006). In this chapter, we review the legal issues involved in wage discrimination, including the Equal Pay Act and more recent legislation
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aimed at guaranteeing closure of the wage gap. In addition, we offer an overview of pay equity issues in countries throughout the world. We also address contributing factors from research in the social sciences to the continued disparity in wages by sex and race. Finally, we provide recommendations for workplaces in ensuring they are committed to equal pay for equal work for both sexes and all races and ethnic groups. LEGISLATION: EQUAL PAY FOR EQUAL WORK If you say, ‘‘I’m for equal pay,’’ that’s a reform. But if you say, ‘‘I’m a feminist,’’ that’s . . . a transformation of society. —Gloria Steinem A girl should not expect special privileges because of her sex but neither should she adjust to prejudice and discrimination. —Betty Friedan
The struggle for equal pay for equal work has a long history in the United States. A chronology of pay equity legislation in the United States is summarized below (also see Barbezat, 2002). We address equal pay legislation in the European Union in the subsequent section. FEDERAL ECONOMIC ACT The Federal Economic Act was passed in 1932 to prohibit wives of federal employee from working in government positions. This act also declared that women with husbands also employed shall be the first on the list for firing. NATIONAL RECOVERY ACT The National Recovery Act of 1935 demanded that women who worked in government jobs receive 25 percent less pay than men in the identical job. In 1942, the War Labor Board ruled women must be paid the identical job rate as men (who were serving in the War) were paid. However, the war ended before this rule could be enforced. In fact, women had to leave the workplaces so returning veterans could resume work. EQUAL PAY LEGISLATION: 1950s Legislation requiring equal pay for women was introduced in the 1950s by Senator Wayne Morse (D-OR) and Rep. Edith Green (D-OR). Versions of this legislation by Republican members Katherine St.
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George and Jessica Weis (both of New York) also were introduced. The legislation was not passed. In addition, prior to the 1960s in the United States, separate job listings were published for each sex, for example, ‘‘Help Wanted Female’’ and ‘‘Help Wanted Male.’’ Occasionally, the identical job advertisements were listed under both categories with one difference: the pay scales were not identical (Brunner, 2009). EQUAL PAY ACT OF 1963 However, in 1961 when labor activist Esther Peterson directed the Women’s Bureau, the Equal Pay Bill was introduced. With President Kennedy’s initiative and support, the Equal Pay Act was passed in 1963 (effective June 11, 1964), giving women equal pay for equal work. The Equal Pay Act of 1963 requires that women and men doing essentially identical work requiring substantially equal skill, responsibility, and effort must initially be paid the same wage. Differences in wages later on may be due to performance, merit systems, seniority, and so on. Thus, the focus of equal work is on the duties performed. Job descriptions, job classifications, and job titles are not all that should be considered in assigning wages. According to the Equal Pay Act, equal skill, responsibility, and effort are defined as follows (EEOC, 2009): . Skill—Measured by factors such as the experience, ability, education, and training required to perform the job. The key issue is what skills are required for the job, not what skills the individual employees may have. . Effort—The amount of physical or mental exertion needed to perform the job. . Responsibility—The degree of accountability required in performing the job.
The Equal Pay Act applies to all employers covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. Employers must prove they are using valid, not discriminatory criteria, in paying wages. In addition, the Equal Pay Act bans employers from reducing the wages of men or women in order to comply with this legislation. This legislation also covers professional employees and includes professionals and teachers in elementary and secondary schools. This legislation was the first federal law to ban discrimination by private employers on the basis of sex. TITLE VII OF THE 1964 CIVIL RIGHTS ACT In 1964, the Civil Rights Act passed Congress. Title VII of this legislation also bans employment discrimination against women and men. According to Title VII:
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It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer 1. to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his [sic] compensation, terms or conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin; or 2. to limit, segregate, or classify his employees or applicants for employment in any way which would deprive or tend to deprive any individual of employment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect his [sic] status as an employee, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
EQUAL EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITY COMMISSION With the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) was established to enforce equal employment opportunity legislation. The EEOC investigates job discrimination charges related to disability, race, national origin, color, religion, sex, pregnancy, age, sexual harassment, and retaliation (EEOC, 2009). In 2007, the EEOC received 818 complaints of pay inequity, 796 of which were resolved and totaled 9.3 million in monetary benefits to complainants (EEOC, 2009).
AGE DISCRIMINATION IN EMPLOYMENT ACT The right of employees to be free of wage discrimination is also protected under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) of 1967, which stated: It shall be unlawful for an employer (1) to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual or otherwise discriminate against any individual with respect to his [sic] compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s age; (2) to limit, segregate, or classify his employees in any way which would deprive or tend to deprive any individual of employment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect his [sic] status as an employee, because of such individual’s age; or (3) to reduce the wage rate of any employee in order to comply with this chapter.
NATIONAL COMMITTEE ON PAY EQUITY In 1979, the National Committee on Pay Equity was founded. This Committee is a coalition of women’s and civil rights organizations,
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professional organizations, labor unions, educational associations, and individuals working to eliminate sex- and race-based salary discrimination (National Committee on Pay Equity, 2009). This coalition includes International Union of Electronic, Electrical, Salaried, Machine, and Furniture Workers (IUE), Business and Professional Women, League of Women Voters, Women’s Legal Defense Fund, National Organization for Women, Coalition of Labor Union Women, American Library Association, and the National Commission on Working Women. The Equal Pay Day began in 1996 by the National Committee on Pay Equity as a public awareness event to highlight wage disparities between women and men. The event is held annually on a Tuesday in April. Tuesday was selected since it is the day of the week on which women’s wages are equal to men’s wages from the previous week.
AMERICANS WITH DISABILITIES ACT Another federal law bans wage discrimination of employees: the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990. According to Title I of this legislation: General rule: No covered entity shall discriminate against a qualified individual with a disability because of the disability of such individual in regard to job application procedures, the hiring, advancement, or discharge of employees, employee compensation, job training, and other terms, conditions, and privileges of employment.
PAYCHECK FAIRNESS ACT Senator Hillary Clinton and Representative Rosa DeLauro introduced the Paycheck Fairness Act in March 2007. The goal of this act was to strengthen the Equal Pay Act of 1963. This act also proposes voluntary guidelines to show employers how to evaluate jobs and eliminate wage discrimination. Furthermore, this act would prohibit employers from retaliating against employees for sharing salary information with coworkers. This bill was passed by the House of Representatives in July 2008 on a 256 to 163 vote. The bill is awaiting passage in the Senate at the time of this writing. LILLY LEDBETTER FAIR PAY ACT OF 2009 I am deeply heartened by the Senate passage of the bill that bears my name. It is an enormous victory for the women across the country who are victims of pay discrimination. —Lily Ledbetter
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The Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 was designed to overrule a 2007 United States Supreme Court decision in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company (550 U.S. 618), which removed individuals’ rights to use the protections of civil rights laws to remedy pay discrimination. This Fair Pay Act passed the United States Senate on January 22 by a vote of 61 to 36. The United States House of Representatives passed the Fair Pay Act by a vote of 225 to 199. Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), Dean of the Senate Women, stated the following at the passage of this legislation: We say to women today who earn only 77 cents for every dollar her male counterpart makes, it’s time for a new day. We say to women of color who make even less it’s time for a new law. And we say to all who have suffered wage discrimination, it’s truly time for a change.
President Obama signed this bill on January 29, 2009. The Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that Ledbetter should have filed her claim within 180 days after the discriminatory decision was made, which in her case was 20 years previous. The new legislation will allow employees 180 days to sue every time they are paid. COMPARABLE WORTH As we subsequently discuss in more detail, social science research has suggested for some time that individuals view occupations as being female-oriented or male-oriented (Mednick & Thomas, 1993, 2008; Steinberg, True, & Russo, 2008). For example, occupations that are helping-oriented, for example, secretary, teacher, nurse, social worker, and librarian are typically associated with women, whereas occupations such as police officer, truck driver, and manager are associated with men (Betz, 1993, 2008). In fact, research has indicated that an awareness of occupational stereotypes related to gender begins in the preschool years and is well developed by first grade (Betz, 2008; Heyman & Legare, 2004; Liben, Bigler, & Krogh, 2001; Raag & Rackliff, 1998). Children’s ranges of occupations are difficult to change once they are set (Betz, 2008). Furthermore, research has found that as the percentage of women entering a field becomes larger, fewer men enter this field four to seven years later (England et al., 2004). England (1992) has interpreted this result in the following way: as men perceive an occupation to be ‘‘feminine’’ they avoid majoring in the field and applying for positions since they believe the pay associated with this field will decline. Glen and Feldberg (1977) noted that during the nineteenth century, clerical work was primarily a male-populated occupation that earned men good salaries and high status. However, during the twentieth century, women
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were dominant as clerical workers, and the status accruing from this work has dropped significantly, as have the wages. This research has supported Bergmann’s (1974) theory of ‘‘overcrowding.’’ In general, there are more trained women employees than there are jobs available, especially in segregated occupations. Furthermore, occupations populated by women have lower pay scales than those populated by men. Thus, traditional female-populated occupations tend to garner significantly less compensation than occupations that are male-populated. This finding has created concern about ‘‘comparable worth,’’ that is, gender-based pay systems. Two occupations may be comparable in terms of skill needed, stress associated with the job, education required for the position, and training for the position. However, the jobs are not paid equally because of the belief that male-populated occupations should pay more than female-populated occupations, for example, firefighter and nurse. Comparable worth proponents want to take into account certain factors present in each occupation, that is, skills, working conditions, effort, and responsibilities so that jobs equivalent in these factors are paid identically (McArthur & Obrant, 2006). As Bernstein and Russo (2008) conclude: We have gone beyond the time when gender stereotyping and discrimination were merely lamentable. We have a body of law that makes overt discrimination, sexual harassment, and hostile working environments illegal. However, overt discrimination, documentable in courts of law, has mutated into more subtle forms of discrimination—with their damage just as potent. (p. 24)
In President Carter’s administration, enforcement regulations related to comparable worth were proposed. These regulations would have mandated comparable worth for federal contractors. However, these regulations were identified as too controversial under President Reagan’s administration. Thus, they were removed from the agenda (Gibelman, 2003). PAY EQUITY: INTERNATIONAL COMPARISONS Many countries have taken legislative action to reduce discrimination and pay inequity. Despite widespread attention to the issue, there are disparities across countries—even though those countries may appear to be equally committed to eradicating inequities. For example, Maata (2008), in a study of nine countries that all had ratified the International Labor Organization Equal Renumeration Convention, found wide disparities when reviewing their progress in equal pay between 1919 and 2000. She studied four developing countries (i.e., Ghana, India, the Philippines, and Zambia) and five developed countries
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(Australia, Canada, Finland, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom). She found that although all of the countries had ratified the Convention, their progress on equal pay was quite varied. For example, during the time period under study, the developed countries had broadened the scope of equal pay to include the principle to work of equal value, but most of the developing countries had not. In addition, the developing countries were much slower to achieve a ‘‘dual breadwinner’’ mindset and continued to embrace a male-dominated mindset even in 2000. Maata (2008) concluded that that most of the countries, while expressing support for equal pay in theory, did not invest enough in the implementation of equal pay and had inadequate systems in place for enforcement to ensure compliance. Countries that ratify the ILO Convention are not legally bound to enact and enforce laws that are consistent with the principles of the Convention, she points out, so that the actual behavior of some countries was not consistent with the Convention principles. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (2002), an organization of 30 countries committed to democracy and healthy market economies, conducted a 19-country study in 2002 in which it found that the United States had one of the largest gender earnings gap, behind only Austria and Switzerland. Equal treatment between women and men is a fundamental principle of the European Union. In fact, unlike the United States, the European Union considers comparable worth in its legislation. According to the Directorate-General for Employment, Social Affairs and Equal Opportunities, adopted in 1975: The principle of equal pay for men and women . . . hereinafter called ‘‘principle of equal pay,’’ means, for the same work or for work to which equal value is attributed, the elimination of all discrimination on grounds of sex with regard to all aspects and conditions of remuneration. In particular, where a job classification system is used for determining pay, it must be based on the same criteria for both men and women and so drawn up as to exclude any discrimination on grounds of sex.
The Treaty of Amsterdam adopted in 1997, states that: Each Member State shall ensure that the principle of equal pay for male and female workers for equal work or work of equal value is applied.
Equal pay without discrimination based on sex means: (a) that pay for the same work at piece rates shall be calculated on the basis of the same unit of measurement; (b) that pay for work at time rates shall be the same for the same job.
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67 percent 79.4 percent 70.1 percent 82 percent 82 percent 75.8 percent 75.8 percent 70.4 percent 80 percent 84.5 percent 81.7 percent 85 percent 77 percent 76.5 percent 76.9 percent 82 percent 80.6 percent
for blue-collar workers for white-collar workers
for blue-collar workers for white-collar workers
However, wage differentials still exist between men and women in the Member States of the European Union. For example, women’s average pay as a percentage of men’s is the following for some of the member states of the European Union (European Industrial Relations Observatory On Line, 2002). In the 2002 Employment Guidelines of the European Union, equal pay is stressed. These guidelines state: The significant level of the pay gap between women and men in many Member States has been identified as a potential disincentive for women to take up work or to remain at work. . . . The Member States, where appropriate with the social partners, are thus called on to ‘‘adopt a multifaceted strategy to achieve gender pay equality in both the public and private sectors, and consider the setting of targets to tackle the pay gap. Such a strategy could include inter alla a review of job classification and pay systems to eliminate gender bias, improving statistical and monitoring systems, and awareness training and transparency as regards pay gaps.
However, comparable to the United States, legislation does not mean pay equity will occur. As Soumeli and Nergaard (2002) stated: . . . at least in theory, employers are bound by law to comply with the relevant legislation and not to conclude contracts that constitute direct or indirect discrimination against women. However, in practice we have seen that the legislation has still not achieved the necessary impact. (p. 16)
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To achieve pay equity, some countries in the European Union have adopted legislation of their own. But these initiatives have been met with opposition from employers (Soumeli & Nergaard, 2002). In France, for example, according to Article L.432.3.1 of their Labour Code, all employers are required to submit an annual report indicating wages of women and men and how employers have ensured equality at work. In May 2001, a law on gender equality at work was passed that requires employers to negotiate at the organization and sector levels the objectives of occupational gender equality. Sweden passed the Act of Equality between Men and Women, which mandates employers to produce yearly plans and reviews of the wages for women and men. This act states that the main purpose of the annual plans is to identify and correct wage discrimination. Pay inequities tend to be more pronounced in Asia than Europe. In a 2008 study of eight countries in East Asia (i.e., China and the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region [SAR], Japan, the Republic of Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam), researchers found a pronounced gender pay gap. The researchers found that women earned less than or just half of men’s rates of pay in Japan, Malaysia, the Republic of Korea, and Singapore; approximately 60 percent in Hong Kong SAR, the Philippines and Thailand; and about two-thirds in China and Vietnam. The level of pay inequity was found to be unrelated to the country’s level of economic development, but was tied to age—specifically, the pay gap was wider between older women and their male peers (Haspels & Majurin, 2008). In East Asia, gender inequality is entrenched and high numbers of women work as unpaid family workers and in agriculture. Many women in East Asia are discriminated against through inadequate maternity protection; laws that are in place to protect women against jobs that are believed to be unsuitable or hazardous to them; and laws that require women to retire at an earlier age than men (Haspels & Majurin, 2008). Blau and Kahn (2000) noted that decentralized pay-setting practices in America contribute to wage disparities between women and men. Furthermore, Blau and Kahn (2000) noted that among the member nations of the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development, ‘‘the United States stands at an extreme with an especially low rate of collective bargaining coverage’’ (p. 22). Countries with more heavily unionized economies, such as many in Western Europe, have centralized collective bargaining processes and enjoy lower overall wage dispersion. Indeed, in many countries, labor unions have been a driving force in demanding pay equity. According to Public Services International (2009), an organization that represents public sector unions globally, public-sector unions in Norway, Germany, Finland, France, the United
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States, Canada and Ecuador, the Philippines, and New Zealand have been instrumental in recent years in successfully campaigning for equal pay for their members. We discuss additional institutional factors to account for wage disparities in the next section.
EXPLANATION FOR WAGE DISCRIMINATION: THE VIEW FROM SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH I know we can’t abolish prejudice through laws, but we can set up guidelines for our actions by legislation. —Belva Ann Lockwood
Women experience wage discrepancies for several reasons, according to research in management including (1) being viewed by employers as having less leverage, (2) the fact that men are more likely to change jobs more frequently than women, enabling them to be promoted to higher level jobs over women with more seniority, (3) salary increases for women in professional positions do not reflect their above-average performance while men with equal performance receive larger raises, and (4) women in blue-collar jobs are placed in departments with lower-paying jobs (DeCenzo & Robbins, 2007; Mock, 2004; National Committee on Pay Equity, 2009; Society for Human Resource Management, 2009; Woo & Khoo, 2006). However, research has indicated that wage discrepancies between men and women are not only explained by these factors related to educational level or job (Acker, 1989; Agars, 2004; Ostroff & Atwater, 2003; National Committee on Pay Equity, 1995; Rynes, Gerhart, & Parks, 2005). As Fields and Wolff (1993) noted, ‘‘. . . even after adjusting for productivity related characteristics of workers . . . there still remains a substantial wage gap at the industry level between genders’’ (p. 118). Rather, discrimination in wages can be explained by bias toward female employees (Rudin & Byrd, 2003). According to Steinberg et al., (2008): Gender stereotyping has long been linked to distinct employment issues for women, who must deal with evaluation bias, greater pressure on their performance, exclusion from certain jobs and promotional opportunities, incivility and harassment, unequal employment rewards, and gender segregation between and within occupations. (p. 657)
Soumeli and Nergaard (2002) noted that while many factors have been offered to explain wage differentials in Member States of the European Union, ‘‘. . . there is an unexplained difference in wages, which
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is presumed to be due to discrimination’’ (p. 1). Similar findings were reported by The European Commission (2007): According to the 2007 ‘‘Annual report on equality between women and men,’’ women are driving EU job growth, but still face barriers to equality. The majority of these barriers are generated by the discrimination of women on the grounds of sex based on gender stereotypes (p. 1).
In this section we address several research areas in the social sciences that have helped us to understand the devaluation of women’s work: gender stereotyping, performance evaluation, causal attribution for success and failure, and job segregation. While we address each of these issues individually, we note they are interrelated in explaining women’s wage disparity. GENDER STEREOTYPING The emotional, sexual, and psychological stereotyping of females begins when the doctor says, ‘‘It’s a girl.’’ —Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm
In 2005, Harvard president Lawrence Summers argued that innate differences between women and men explain women’s inability to succeed in math and science. In 1984, Clarence Pendleton, Chair, U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, referred to pay equity as ‘‘the looniest idea since Looney Tunes’’ (National Committee on Pay Equity, 2009). Stereotypes such as these statements refer to individuals’ thoughts/ cognitions that typically do not correspond with reality. Stereotypes occur when individuals are classified by others as having something in common because they are members of a particular group or category of people (e.g., women employees, women CEOs). Psychological research has identified that stereotypes have the following characteristics (Fiske & Stevens, 1993): 1. Groups that are targeted for stereotypes are easily identified and relatively powerless. 2. There is little agreement between the composite picture of the group and the actual characteristics of that group. 3. This misperception is difficult to modify even though individuals who hold stereotypes have interacted with individuals of the group who disconfirm the stereotypes. 4. This misperception is the product of a bias in individuals’ informationprocessing mechanisms.
Gender stereotyping is a psychological process that describes individuals’ structured set of beliefs about the personal attributes of men
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and women (e.g., nurturant, aggressive, independent, lacking leadership qualities). Psychologists have identified an emotional component to stereotypic cognitions: prejudice as well as behavioral component to individuals’ cognitions, that is, discrimination. Thus, individuals’ statements and nonverbal gestures toward women and men provide insight into their structured set of beliefs and emotions about each sex (Kite, Deaux, & Haines, 2008; Paludi, 2002; Steinberg et al., 2008). In the United States, much of the discrimination against women earning the same as men can be traced to stereotypes about women, women and work, and the meaning of money for women (Crampton & Mishra, 1999; Doyle & Paludi, 1998; Konrad, Goldberg, Sullivan, & Yang, 2005; Martin, 2008). Betz (2008) noted that stereotypes have existed concerning the reasons why women work outside the home: . . . it was assumed that when women ‘‘worked’’ . . . it was because their labor was needed by the economy, as was the case with Rosie the Riveters of World War II . . . that they were working until they could ‘‘land’’ a husband, or that they were the most pitiable of characters—the spinster. (p. 716)
In addition, ‘‘pin money’’ is the euphemism for a small amount of money that a woman earned to be used for ‘‘extras’’ for her family. It has always been considered nonessential money because it is the husband’s salary that provides for the family financially. As Doyle and Paludi (1998) noted: The idea of pin money devalued a woman’s financial contribution to the family’s economic well-being and soothed a husband’s pride that rested to a large degree on the knowledge that his salary was the family’s primary income. (p. 185)
Thus, part of the inequity in salaries is due to the cultural stereotype that men must earn more than women because men are the primary ‘‘breadwinners’’ of the family (Lepak & Gowan, in press). However, the reality is that more than 50 percent of all married women whose husbands are present in the home are employed. In addition, the largest category of employed women in the United States are single women, who have only one income (Doyle & Paludi, 1998; Paludi et al., 2007). Furthermore, there has been a substantial increase in maternal employment in the United States (Gilbert & Kearney, 2006; Hill, Waldfogel, Brooks-Gunn, & Han, 2005; Paludi et al., 2007; Strassel, Cogan, & Goodman, 2006). In fact, women are now as likely to be employed when they have infants as they are when they have preschool-aged children. Strassel et al. (2006) reported that of women who put in
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overtime work, 40 percent have children under six years of age. As Hyde (1985) commented more than 20 years ago: ‘‘The working woman then is not a variation from the norm, she is the norm’’ (p. 169). Stereotypes depict men, but not women, as having the requisite skills and characteristics for managerial and leadership positions (Cejka & Eagly, 1999; Kite et al., 2008). Business professionals indicate a strong preference for male applicants for a stereotypically masculine job, even when similar information on the resumes of women and men applicants had led to perceptions of similar personality traits (Betz, 1993, 2008). These stereotypes persist even though gender differences are not found in leadership ability or job performance (Duff-McCall & Schweinle, 2008; Frank & Belasen, 2008; Sinangil & Ones, 2003; Werhane et al., 2006). These stereotypes get expressed behaviorally in discriminatory treatment of women in terms of wages, pay increases, and promotions (Bem, 1981; Cleveland, Stockdale, & Murphy, 2000; Fiske, 1998; Heilman, Wallen, Fuchs, & Tamkins, 2004; Paludi, Martin, Stern, & DeFour, 2009; Powell, Butterfield, & Parent, 2002; see Martin, volume 1 of this book set). In addition, Heilman, Wallen, Fuchs, and Tamkins (2004) reported that women who do not maintain gender role stereotypes are socially censured and experience personally directed negativity. As they stated: ‘‘. . . the mere recognition that a woman has achieved success on a traditionally male task produces inferences that she has engaged in counternormative behavior and therefore causes similarly negative consequences’’ (p. 3). Furthermore, successful achievement for women is costly. Wiley and Eskilson (1985) found that successful women are described as ‘‘cold’’ vis-a-vis men. Research (e.g., Heilman, Block, Martell, & Simon, 1989) also reported successful women managers to be depicted as ‘‘bitter,’’ ‘‘quarrelsome,’’ ‘‘deceitful,’’ and ‘‘devious’’ vis-avis successful men managers. PERFORMANCE EVALUATION Gender stereotypes have also been found to be operating in research on evaluations of identical performance by men and women by Goldberg (1968). In the original study, college students evaluated (in terms of persuasiveness, writing style, intellectual depth of article, competence of author) supposedly published journal articles on linguistics, law, art history, education, dietetics, and city planning. For each article, half of the research participants saw a woman author’s name; half saw a man’s. Results indicated that individuals rated the article more favorably when it was attributed to a man than a woman (even in fields considered sex-appropriate for women).
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Subsequent research used this research paradigm with noncollege students as well and indicated a promale bias for paintings, job applicants, magazine articles, and scientific journal articles (e.g., Deaux & Taynor, 1973; Judiesch & Lyness, 1999; Martel, 1996; Nieva & Gutek, 1980; Swim, Borgida, Maruyama, & Myers, 1989; Ward, 1979). Nieva and Gutek’s (1980) meta-analysis indicated a promale bias occurs when men are rated more favorably than women given identical performance. Adolescents and young children were also found to have evaluation biases against women (Etaugh & Brown, 1975). Research has also noted that women are as likely to be evaluated as being as competent as men when their performance is acknowledged by authoritative individuals (Issacs, 1981; Jacobson & Effertz, 1974; Taynor & Deaux, 1975; Ward, 1981).
CAUSAL ATTRIBUTIONS FOR SUCCESS AND FAILURE The only way to solve the problem of women’s subordination is to change people’s mindset and to plant the new idea of gender equality into every mind. —Qingrong Ma
Weiner, Frieze, Kukla, Reed, Rest, and Rosenbaum (1971) proposed a cognitive attribution theory of achievement motivation to explain differences between high- and low-achievement individuals. Highachievement oriented individuals believe themselves to be the cause of their successes because of their ability and hard work. On the other hand, low-achievement oriented individuals attribute their successes to external causes (e.g., ease of task, luck) and attribute their failures to internal ones (e.g., lack of ability). Gender comparisons have been observed in causal attributions for success and failure. For example, Deaux and Emswiller (1974) noted that equivalent performances by women and men are explained by different attributions. Performance by a man on a ‘‘masculine’’ task is typically attributed to his skill, whereas an equivalent performance by a woman on the same task is attributed to her being lucky. In addition, Feldman-Summers and Kiesler’s (1974) research indicated that men attributed more ability to a male physician than to a female physician. They also attributed a female physician’s success to the ease of her coursework and a large amount of effort. Betz (1993, 2008), for example, reported that women were more likely to attribute their success to luck and their failures to low ability. Men’s successes and women’s failures were attributed to personal dispositions; men’s failures and women’s successes were attributed to environmental factors. Betz (1993, 2008) noted that in work settings, men are rated higher than equivalent women in performing certain tasks and in job
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qualifications. Women receive lower recognition and economic rewards for their work than men, and lower prestige, knowledge, and expertise are attributed to them as well (Martell, 1996; Seta & Seta, 1993; Swim & Sanna, 1996). JOB SEGREGATION When we talk about equal pay for equal work, women in the workplace are beginning to catch up. If we keep going at this current rate, we will achieve full equality in about 475 years. I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait that long. —Lya Sorano
Blau (1975) and Doyle and Paludi (1998) noted that job segregation is one of the major causes for women’s lower wages. Certain occupations (e.g., elementary school teacher, server, household worker) are nearly totally female-populated and account for the majority of employed women in the United States. These occupations represent an occupational ghetto for women and are referred to as the ‘‘pink collar’’ ghetto (Doyle & Paludi, 1998). Three explanations have been offered to account for job segregation: (1) the belief that women’s biology prevents them from competing in the work force for higher-paying jobs, (2) the socialization of young girls to avoid higher status positions, and (3) the various social or institutional forces that build barriers to prevent women from entering high-paying and high-status occupations.
We will discuss two of these explanations in more detail: the socialization of women out of the marketplace and social and institutional barriers to women in higher paying occupations. SOCIALIZATION OF WOMEN TO AVOID HIGH-STATUS OCCUPATIONS Kerr’s research with gifted girls (e.g., Kerr, Foley-Nicpon, & Zapata, 2005) showed that although the girls’ career aspirations are as high as their male peers, gifted girls are pressured to do an ‘‘about face’’ during adolescence, that is, to shift their goals from academic achievement to romance. As Betz (2008) stated: . . . by the sophomore year of college, gifted young women have likely changed their majors to less challenging areas, by their senior year they have reduced the level of their career goals, and by college graduation they have given up their former career dreams altogether, all because of the pervasive ‘‘culture of romance.’’ (p. 719)
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Kerr’s research supports earlier studies, for example, by Golombok and Fivush (1994). These researchers reported that by fourth or fifth grade, approximately 90 percent of positive feedback boys receive from their teachers concerns their academic performance; less than 80 percent of positive feedback for girls is for their academic excellence. In addition, Golombok and Fivush (1994) found that less than 33 percent of the negative feedback boys receive from their teachers is related to their academic performance. However, more than 66 percent of the negative feedback for girls is related to their academic performance. Golombok and Fivush interpreted these results as follows: From this pattern of praise and criticism, boys may be learning that they are smart, even if they are not very well behaved. Girls, on the other hand, are learning that they may not be very smart, but that they can get rewards by being ‘‘good.’’ (p. 173)
The American Association of University Women (2009; Haag, 1999) found that secondary school systems direct girls and boys into different courses by a differential ‘‘tracking system’’ whereby girls are taught to think in terms of becoming nurses, secretaries, and mothers while boys are taught to think about becoming physicians and engineers. Levy, Sadovsky, and Troseth (2000) reported that a stereotypic view of the world reinforces many of the common gender-role stereotypes and is a major factor in prompting young boys’ interest in more than twice as many occupations as that of young girls. Girls restrict their occupational aspirations. Furthermore, girls have a more limited concept than boys do of the career possibilities available to them in STEM careers (i.e., science, technology, engineering, and mathematics; Bernstein & Russo, 2008). They focus on careers that are associated with less status, less satisfaction, and less pay than careers considered by boys (Heymann, 2000; Richardson & Sandoval, 2007). Hall and Sandler (1982) referred to this tracking as a ‘‘chilly climate’’ for girls and women. Chilling behaviors include: Undermining girls’ and women’s confidence. Discouraging girls’ and women’s participation in class discussions. Interrupting girls and women in class. Dampening career aspirations of girls and women. Preventing girls and women from seeking help outside of class.
Since the passage of Title IX, the gender gap at all grade levels has decreased significantly since 1970 in nationwide assessments of science and math performance (Feminist Majority Foundation, 2009). In addition, women’s share of undergraduate degrees in natural sciences and engineering has more than doubled. Women’s share of doctoral
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degrees in these fields has more than quadrupled. However, women still earn 20 to 25 percent of degrees in physics, computer sciences, and engineering (Bernstein & Russo, 2007, 2008). The culture of STEM fields still isolates and excludes girls and women, which is directly related to women’s lack of access to economic opportunity compared to men (Bernstein & Russo, 2007; 2008). Women represent less than one in five faculty members in STEM fields. In engineering in particular, women account for just over one in ten faculty members (Bernstein & Russo, 2007, 2008). SOCIAL AND INSTITUTIONAL BARRIERS Women are typically excluded from informal networks that are crucial to career advancement within the organizational culture. In addition, women tend to be viewed stereotypically within such organizations, making it difficult for them to obtain important assignments that are required for advancement (Bagilhole & White, 2003). Thus, male managers select men over comparably qualified women for upper-level managerial positions (Hitt & Barr, 1989). Women are perceived as less valuable than men as a consequence of greater power, status, and authority attributed to men (Kanter, 1977). Some (e.g., Keefe, 2003; Shakeshaft, Brown, Irby, Grogan, & Ballenger, 2007) argue there is disparity about who receives mentoring; mentors tend to mentor those most like them: ‘‘In a department dominated by white males, white men get most of the mentoring. Women and minorities too often fall through the cracks’’ (p. 34). Furthermore, advancement inequity exists between women and men. Women in academics and business are underrepresented in senior positions and are promoted and tenured more slowly than men. In the medical field, only 12 percent of women have achieved the rank of full professor; this figure has increased only 2 percent in the last 20 years. The figure for men is 30 percent (Mayer, Files, Ko, & Blair, 2008). In engineering, the figure is even lower; one percent. Mayer et al. (2008) reported that, according to Harvard Business Review, women make up only 6 percent of high ranking positions in Fortune 500 companies. As Martin (2008) stated: It is easier for men, with their informal informational networks, to successfully acclimate themselves. Women often have to compensate simply for being women. . . . Women often face tremendous obstacles to gain acceptance in an organizational culture, especially in non-traditional fields. They must deal with negative expectations, gender-role stereotypes, and doing more than is expected to be seen as competent. They must try to find a mentor or a way into the informal networks that are often closed
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to them so that they can learn to navigate the hostile waters of organizational culture. (p. 172)
In addition, women may find it difficult to secure a male mentor because they find them difficult to approach. Women also fear the presumption of a sexual relationship by others in the organization. Potential male mentors, on the other hand, may be hesitant to seek out or accept a female protege because of the fear of a presumption of a sexual relationship and/or the belief that women are not capable of advancing on par with their male counterparts. If women are in fact deemed as capable and worthy of mentoring, male mentors may still choose men to mentor because it is simply more comfortable and easier (Paludi, Martin, Stern, & DeFour, 2009). More difficulties may ensue when racialized gendered stereotypes interact with race and gender roles and add additional barriers for women of color (Buchanan, 2005). As Ostroff and Atwater (2003) concluded: . . . individuals prefer to associate with and identify with ‘‘winners’’. . . . the winners are those with status, power and higher salaries (i.e., men). As such, those who find themselves surrounded by women are not among the winners and thus may be seen as less valuable. (p. 727)
ENFORCING PAY EQUITY LEGISLATION IN THE WORKPLACE: HUMAN RESOURCE RESPONSES I was told Indian women don’t think like that about equality. But I would like to argue that if they don’t think like that they should be given a real opportunity to think like that. —Amartya Sen The only way to solve the problem of women’s subordination is to change people’s mindset and to plant the new idea of gender equality into every mind. —Qingrong Ma
As this review of research from the social sciences suggests, the existence of a wage gap between women and men exists even when controlling for demographics, performance, and other human capital factors (Ostroff & Atwater, 2003). Empirical support is overwhelming for gender and occupational stereotypes being expressed in managers’ behavior, including beliefs that women should not earn as much as men because men are the primary breadwinners, that women are not as committed to their careers as are men and women are less productive than are men. In addition, women are viewed as laissez faire with respect to negotiating salaries and wages (Holzer & Neumark, 2000).
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Furthermore, Ostroff and Atwater’s (2003) research found that individuals who work with women have lower wages. Thus managers who supervise more women than men have lower wages than managers who supervise more men than women. As Kim (2006) questioned: Title VII has had an enormous impact in providing employment opportunities for women and allowing them to advance. Now, four decades after Title VII, gender inequality in the U.S. labor market persists across racial and ethnic groups, raising the question of whether true gender-based workplace equality is possible. (p. 284)
However, the empirical findings we discussed highlight the necessity for training programs for administrators and employees regarding these stereotypes and the realities of women employees’ careers and life responsibilities. Such training programs, identified as ‘‘culture change strategies’’ (Brewer, 2000) would include several issues related to exhibiting behaviors toward both sexes and to eradicating stereotypes about women and work. In addition, administrators must take into consideration the items discussed here. PAY INEQUITY AND POVERTY ERADICATION It is important to train employees and managers in understanding that pay equity is a family issue. Research indicates that working families lose approximately 200 billion dollars in income each year due to the wage gap between the sexes. In addition, if married women were paid identically to men for identical work, they would have a 6 percent increase in their family’s income. Family poverty rates would fall from 2.1 percent to 0.8 percent (American Association of University Women, 2009). Furthermore, single employed women would gain an increase in family income; their families would have 17 percent more income annually. The poverty rate for single employed women would therefore be cut in half. Thus, pay equity is associated with poverty eradication. PAY EQUITY AND ENGAGED WORKFORCE An engaged employee is an individual who is fully involved in and enthusiastic about their work (Lockwood, 2007). Engaged employees care about the growth of the organization and invest in assisting this growth (Konrad, 2006). Employees who are engaged are those who believe they have choices, and consequently they will act in a way that furthers their organization’s goals and values. Pay equity helps ensure
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a highly engaged and motivated workforce. The National Committee on Pay Equity (2000) noted that organizations where women’s wages match their value creates a positive work environment. A positive work environment is associated with increased morale, increased productivity, reduced absenteeism, decreased turnover rate, and reduced sick leave.
WORK/LIFE INTEGRATION Organizations that recognize the need and adapt work to employees’ lives will win employees’ loyalty and thus have a competitive edge (Eastman, 1998). Organizations with family-friendly policies report less stress for employees, lower absenteeism, higher morale, positive publicity, improved work satisfaction, lower turnover rate, staffing over a wide range of hours, child care hours that conform to work hours, and access to quality infant, child, and elder care (Frone & Yardley, 1996; Paludi & Neidermeyer, 2006). Examples of family-friendly policies include flextime, job sharing, part-time work, telecommuting, intranet work, on-site child care, onsite health services, time off/career break, compressed work week, and eldercare referral services. Examples of such policies are found in Paludi and Paludi (2006). A relatively new program to assisting employees with dealing with integrating work and life roles is total life planning (Lockwood, 2003); that is, to assess their relationships, emotional health, careers, religiosity, financial situation, and parenting skills. Both Lockwood (2003) and Martinez (1997) have found that total life planning is related to increased employee energy, enthusiasm for work, and increased productivity. Miller (2005) identified that the top work/life programs utilized by employees in the United States companies include the following: employee assistance programs, leave for school functions, wellness programs, flu shot programs, and fitness facilities. Miller (2005) also noted that the following work/life programs are rated highest by human resource specialists for reducing unscheduled absences: Alternative work arrangements Flu shot programs Leave for school functions Telecommuting Compressed workweek On-site child care Emergency child care Employee assistance programs
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Wellness programs On-site health services Fitness facility Satellite workplaces Job sharing Eldercare services
HUMAN RESOURCE RECOMMENDATIONS Recommendations have been offered to assist organizations in enforcing equal pay legislation (e.g., Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Glass Ceiling Commission, 2000; DeCenzo & Robbins, 2007; Mock, 2004; National Committee on Pay Equity, 2009; Society for Human Resource Management, 2009; Woo & Khoo, 2006) including having organizations: a. Examine their compensation system to ensure that women and people of color are paid identically to men and white employees for identical work. According to the Equal Pay Act, employers are required to establish salaries based on skill, responsibility, effort, and working conditions. b. Examine job grades to ensure that all employees have equal opportunity for advancement. c. Compare the compensation system with market values, taking into account the market has undercompensated several occupations. Verify that the data is accurate and match the data to the specific job descriptions to appropriately value each position. d. Conduct job evaluations to determine the value of a position within an organization with the goal of creating a more defined wage structure. e. Develop job descriptions and position titles. f. Post job openings with salary ranges within the workplace. g. Encourage employees to openly discuss compensation issues with coworkers rather than fostering an organizational culture that intimidates employees by making it taboo to discuss salaries. h. Frequently conduct organizational cultural climate surveys in which employees are anonymously asked to describe their perceptions and experiences of discriminatory treatment with respect to compensation. i. Conduct audits of all aspects of the organization, including compliance with Equal Employment Opportunity, Americans with disabilities, and Equal Pay Act regulations. j. Dissemination of policies and procedures related to Equal Pay Act, ADA and EEO regulations. k. Facilitation of training on Equal Pay, EEO, and ADA policies and procedures.
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m. Compliance with an established grievance channel for employee concerns or complaints.
The audit will provide information for administrators on ways discrimination is operating in the organization. The next step is to understand the reason for the discriminatory treatment and to correct the injustices (Ostroff & Atwater, 2003). In his review of gender and justice with respect to pay equity, William Gaedert (2004) concluded that ‘‘Although continued research on gender, racial and ethnic biases is warranted, meaningful solutions are most likely to be based on political action’’ (p. 216). And as Mary Anderson once stated: ‘‘Equal pay for women is a matter of simple justice.’’ NOTE 1. The authors would like to acknowledge Eros DeSouza, Michelle Strand, and Anthony Ferrari, Jr., who provided comments on earlier drafts of this chapter.
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Seta, J. J., & Seta, C. E. (1993). Stereotypes and the generation of compensatory and noncompensatory expectancies of group members. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 19, 722–731. Shakeshaft, C., Brown, G., Irby, B., Grogan, M., & Ballenger, J. (2007). Increasing gender equity in educational leadership. In S. Klein (Ed.), Handbook for achieving gender equity through education (2nd ed., pp. 103–129). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Sinangil, H. K., & Ones, D. S. (2003). Gender differences in expatriate job performance. Applied Psychology: An International Review, 52, 461–475. Society for Human Resource Management. Retrieved April 3, 2009, from http://www.shrm.org Soumeli, E., & Nergaard, K. (2002). Gender pay equity in Europe. European Industrial Relations Observatory On-line. Retrieved April 3, 2009, from http://www.eiro.eurofound.ie/2002/01/TN0201101S.html Steinberg, J., True, M., & Russo, N.F. (2008). Work and family roles: Selected issues. In F. Denmark & M. Paludi (Eds.), Psychology of women: A handbook of issues and theories (pp. 652–700). Westport, CT: Praeger. Strassel, K., Colgan, C., & Goodman, J. (2006). Leaving women behind: Modern families, outdated laws. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Swim, J., Borgida, E., Maruyama, G., & Myers, D. G. (1989). Joan McKay versus John McKay: Do gender stereotypes bias evaluations? Psychological Bulletin, 105, 409–429. Swim, J., & Sanna, L. (1996). He’s skilled, she’s lucky: A meta-analysis of observers’ attributions for women’s and men’s successes and failures. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 22, 507–519. Taynor, J., & Deaux, K. (1975). Equity and perceived sex differences: Role behavior as defined by the task, the mode, and the actor. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 32, 381–390. U.S. Bureau of the Census (2008). Retrieved April 1, 2009, from http:// www.census.gov/compendia/statab. Ward, C. (1979). Differential evaluation of male and female expertise: Prejudice against women? British Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 18, 65–69. Ward, C. (1981). Prejudice against women: Who, when and why? Sex Roles, 7, 163–171. Weiner, B., Frieze, I., Kukla, A., Reed, L., Rest, S., & Rosenbaum, R. (1971). Perceiving the causes of success and failure (pp. 173–177). Morristown, NJ: General Learning Press. Werhane, P., Posig, M., Gundry, L., Powell, E., Carlson, J., & Ofstein, L. (2006). Women leaders in corporate America: A study of leadership values and methods. In M. F. Karsten (Ed.), Gender, race and ethnicity in the workplace: Issues and challenges for today’s organizations (pp. 2–29). Westport, CT: Praeger. Wiley, M. G., & Eskilson, A. (1985). Speech style, gender stereotypes, and corporate success: What if women talk more than men? Sex Roles, 12, 993–1007. Woo, D., & Khoo, G. (2006). Corporate culture and leadership: Traditional, legal and charismatic authority. In M. F. Karsten (Ed.), Gender, race and ethnicity in the workplace: Issues and challenges for today’s organizations (pp. 80–111). Westport, CT: Praeger.
Chapter 8
Rape: A Global Perspective Michelle McKenzie Patricia Rozee
Rape is a global pandemic, existing in every culture around the world (Rozee, 1993). Many social structures continue a pattern of rape and often excuse the practices as normative sexual behaviors. Rape is a manifestation of women’s subordinate status to men. When communities strictly define gender roles in which masculinity is associated with dominance, toughness, and male honor, sexual assault is reinforced (Heise, Ellsberg, & Gottemoeller, 2002). In cultures where men have ‘‘ownership’’ of women, and men must control their environment, rape is often condoned (Heise et al., 2002; Sanday, 1981). Other factors associated with violence against women include economic inequality, physical violence to resolve conflicts, male authority over decision making in the home, and divorce restrictions on women (Heise et al., 2002; Levinson, 1989). Cultures with lower rates of rape and acceptance of rape exhibit more equality between the sexes, where the sexes are complementary and dependant on each other (Sanday, 1981). When women are considered subservient to men, rape continues its pervasive pattern of psychologically, economically, and physically injuring women and their families. In an international effort to combat rape and other forms of violence against women, legal reform and funding for community prevention has been implemented within the past 15 years. In 1993, The United Nations (UN) Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women defined violence against women as: Physical, sexual and psychological violence occurring in the family, including battering, sexual abuse of female children in the household,
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dowry-related violence, marital rape, female genital mutilation and other traditional practices harmful to women, non-spousal violence and violence related to exploitation; physical, sexual and psychological violence occurring within the general community, including rape, sexual abuse, sexual harassment and intimidation at work, in education institutions and elsewhere, trafficking in women and forced prostitution; physical, sexual and psychological violence perpetrated or condoned by the State, wherever it occurs. (UN, 1993, Article 3)
More recently, in June 2008, the UN Security Council officially stated that sexual violence is a threat to international peace and security. Even though many definitions of sexual violence exist, a comprehensive definition would incorporate all forms of sexual assault: Any sexual act, attempt to obtain a sexual act, unwanted sexual comments or advances, or acts to traffic, or otherwise directed, against a person’s sexuality using coercion, by any person regardless of their relationship to the victim, in any setting, including but not limited to home and work. (Krug, Dahlberg, Mercy, Zwi, & Lozano, 2002)
This chapter explores the prevalence of sexual assault worldwide and is organized according to an ecological model that forces us to consider the dynamic interplay between the individual and the environment. Ahrens and Rozee (2007) stress that social issues such as rape cannot be accurately examined without considering how the context of individual, family and small group, organizational, community, and societal levels impact on both etiology and intervention. Thus, the chapter is divided into sections that address violence based on the three levels that maintain a culture of rape. Individual, organizational, and cultural factors that maintain a culture of rape will be addressed, including topics such as rape in the military, armed conflict, and sex trafficking. The main objective of this chapter is to raise awareness of the widespread human rights issue of rape and discuss prevention measures involving community, social, and global solutions. This chapter will not discuss children as victims of sexual assault or the psychological, social, or physical impact on rape survivors, which is addressed by Waits and Lundberg Love in Volume II.
PREVALENCE Rape prevalence varies among countries and cultures. No communities are completely rape free, but some have significantly higher rates than others. Specific types of rape can have higher incidence depending on the cultural ideology, economic disparity, or current political situation. Certain regions may have high rates of rape by strangers due
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to armed conflict, while others have higher rates of marital rape due to cultural structures. Garcia-Moreno, Jansen, Ellsberg, Heise, and Watts (2005) conducted a cross-cultural study of 10 countries to determine the prevalence of violence against women. They found a vast difference among the countries based on the percentage of women who had experienced sexual abuse by an intimate partner: Ethiopia (59 percent), Bangladesh (50 percent), the United Republic of Tanzania (31 percent), Thailand (30 percent), Peru (23 percent), Samoa (20 percent), Namibia (16 percent), Brazil (14 percent), Serbia and Montenegro (6 percent), and Japan (6 percent). Sexual violence by nonpartners was reported at a much lower rate: Peru, Samoa, and the United Republic of Tanzania ranged from 10 to 12 percent, but levels as low as 1 percent were reported in Bangladesh and Ethiopia (Garcia et al., 2005). Common nonintimate perpetrators were male family members, teachers, boyfriends, strangers, and male friends of the family (Garcia et al., 2005). Ethnographic studies of nonindustrial societies show different prevalence rates depending on how rape is defined, ranging from 42 to 90 percent of cultures (Rozee, 1993; Rozee-Koker, 1987). Rozee (1993) defines non-normative rape as rape that is illicit, not condoned, against the will of the woman, and in violation of social norms. Most studies have used Western common law definitions of rape, which tend to underestimate rapes that do not fit that legal definition. Most studies do not include normative rape, which are rapes that are not defined as rape because they are accepted within the normative practices of the culture. The first study to use a broadened definition of rape so as to rate the behavior independently of social sanctions found a prevalence rate of 90 percent (Minturn, Grosse, & Haider, 1969). The most comprehensive cross-cultural study to expand previous definitions by including rapes that occur in the context of ceremonies (such as ritual defloration) and rape of enemy women found rape in 53 percent of the sample societies (Sanday, 1981). Sanday’s rate was lower partly because she coded societies where rape was reported as rare, as ‘‘rape-free’’ cultures. Rozee studied rape in 35 world cultures and found that rape occurred in all cultures when normative rape was included in the statistics. She also found that in a majority of cultures normative and nonnormative rape occur concurrently, concluding that rape is therefore regulated, not prohibited, in most cultures. One form of normative rape is rape as a form of punishment for social transgression or as used in a disciplinary manner. Punitive rape generally occurs as a male response to females who behave in ways considered solely the prerogative of males, for violations of male authority, for rejecting a male who has legitimate sexual access to her (such as a husband), or sometimes as the instrument of punishment for
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a husband’s transgressions (Rozee, 1993). Rozee reports punitive rape as present in 14 percent of cultures. Punitive rape is also used as punishment for crimes such as adultery, public drunkenness, or political affiliation (Amnesty International, 2004; Krug et al., 2002). In Peru, women who were believed to be affiliated with the opposition armed group, Sendero Luminoso, were sexually assaulted by their opposer and then encountered further incidents of sexual assault in jail (Amnesty International, 2004). In Zimbabwe, certain cultures allow a man who has committed a crime against a family or raped a woman to either pay compensation or marry the woman instead of receiving punishment for the crimes (Equality Now, 1998). Rape is often practiced as a part of various cultural ceremonies, such as ritual deflorations or virginity rituals. Virginity tests often contain an element of force and may entail hasty and painful penetration of a virgin to meet the requirement of public demonstration of the hymenal blood as proof of virginity (Olson, 1981). Rape as a form of exchange is another ritualized form of rape practiced in many world cultures. In this case sexual access to females is granted as a bargaining tool, gesture of solidarity, or conciliation. Among the Kaska of Canada, a man would often offer his wife if he lost in betting and she would be required to stay with the winner until the debt was repaid (Honigman, 1954). Collier and Rosaldo (1981) report the common practice of according sexual access to women as a gesture of goodwill or solidarity. Normative rapes are rarely reported as rape. Even within the relatively narrow (non-normative) Western legal definition of rape, sexual assault remains one of the most underreported crimes globally. Studies in South Africa show that only 15 percent of women report their assault to the police (Jewkes & Abrahams, 2002). This percentage tends to be much lower in cultures that ascribe strictly to patriarchal structures. Other factors are also involved in whether women report rape. Jewkes and Abrahams (2002) also found that women with post-school education were eight times more likely to report rape to the police, and younger women were more likely to report their assault to the police. Since underreporting is the norm and many women still do not disclose in research interviews, statistics given in this report are likely to be underrepresented.
INDIVIDUAL FACTORS ASSOCIATED WITH RAPE Women’s Vulnerability to Rape Rape can happen to women of all ages, racial backgrounds, and socioeconomic statuses. It is important to note that the main predictor of being a rape victim is gender—being a woman (Rozee & Koss,
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2001). However, research has identified several factors that can increase a woman’s vulnerability to sexual assault, such as youth, poverty, previous sexual abuse, multiple sexual partners, or alcohol use. Understanding that rape prevalence is higher among certain groups of women can assist in focusing prevention programs and resistance training. Although women can be raped at any age, young women are at a higher risk of rape in countries around the world (Garcia-Moreno et al., 2005). Statistics from Chile, Malaysia, Mexico, New Guinea, Peru, and the United States show that anywhere from one-third to two-thirds of sexual assaults are committed against women under 17 years old (Heise, Pitanguy, & Germain, 1994). In the United States, Pazzani (2007) found that younger women were more likely to be sexually assaulted than older women by both strangers and acquaintances. Although marital rape is a considerable problem, sexual assault survivors in the United States are less likely to be married, which may also correspond with age (Avakame, 1999; Golding, Wilsnack, & Cooper, 2002). Young women are also at particular risk for certain types of sexual violence, including sex trafficking, female genital mutilation, and school related sexual assault. Poverty has been linked to many rape situations. Women with lower economic status are more likely to be coerced in sex trafficking, victimized in armed conflict and refugee camps, and raped by their partners (Krug et al., 2002; U.S. Department of State, 2005). Yodanis (2004) found that rates of sexual assault were significantly higher in countries where women had lower educational and occupational status than in countries where women had higher status. Byrne, Resnick, Kilpatrick, Best, and Saunders (1999) reported that American women living at or below the poverty level were at heightened risk for victimization. Additionally, they observed that women living above the poverty level were more likely to drop below the poverty level after revictimization. Education seems to be a good economic buffer from rape. GarciaMoreno et al. (2005) found that in many countries, women with higher education confronted less violence, and in certain countries, such as urban Brazil, Namibia, Peru, Thailand, and the United Republic of Tanzania, the lowered risk of sexual violence is evident for women who continue their education beyond secondary school. In the United States, working women and women with higher income are also less likely to be sexually assaulted by a stranger or an acquaintance (Avakame, 1999; Pazzani, 2007). Survivors of sexual assault are also at a greater risk of revictimization. Studies in the United States reported that childhood physical or sexual assault could lead to adult sexual assault (Cloitre, Tardiff, Marzuk, & Leon, 1996; Maker, Kemmelmeier, & Peterson, 2001; Messman-Moore & Long, 2000). Pazzani (2007) found that the relationship
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between revictimization and previous childhood or adulthood sexual assault was primarily present when women were raped by acquaintances. In an experiment on prevention education, American college women with a history of sexual assault had substantially more reports of rape at three months follow-up, whether they received prevention education or not (Gidycz et al., 2001). Many factors may contribute to this cycle of revictimization, including self-blame (Miller, Markman, & Handley, 2007), delayed response to danger cues (Messman-Moore & Brown, 2006), acceptance of rape myths (Messman-Moore & Long, 2000), low self-esteem, and learned helplessness (Finkelhor & Browne, 1985). Survivors also report less frequent contact with friends and family, as well as less emotional support (Golding et al., 2002), which may make them more vulnerable to repeated sexual coercion. Prevention efforts should be aware of this pattern in order to reach women who may not be seeking help but nonetheless may need it. Finally, alcohol consumption is a major situational factor that has been identified in U.S. studies to be connected to rape. Norris and Cubbins (1992) found that women were less likely to believe stories of rape if both parties involved were intoxicated. Yet, if the woman only was intoxicated, participants’ perceptions of the incident shifted toward rape. In a study by Cue, George, and Norris (1996), women did not perceive alcohol to increase their risk or other women’s risk for rape. However, approximately half of sexual assaults include alcohol consumption by the survivor, perpetrator, or both (Abbey, Zawacki, Buck, Clinton, & McAuslan, 2004). In a study by Harrington and Leitenberg (1994), 55 percent of women reported being somewhat intoxicated when sexually assaulted, and many of the women engaged in consensual sexual activities prior to the rape. More than 20 percent of American college women reported that they were raped while under the influence of alcohol or drugs (Kalof, 1993). In the same study, 47 percent of sorority women reported rape while under the influence of alcohol, although many factors, such as attending more drinking events or affiliating with fraternity men who hold rape-congruent attitudes, may be related to this large difference. The effects of alcohol can create an environment where perpetrators can take advantage of women’s alcohol-induced passivity and loss of control. Survivors who were raped while heavily intoxicated report lower levels of assertive and cautious responses to sexual advances (Macy, Nurius, & Norris, 2007). In a study by Norris et al. (2006), intoxicated female participants were asked to project their behaviors into a rape scenario. Alcohol consumption increased their level of consent and passivity to a sexually aggressive man. Furthermore, when women were perceived to be in a relationship, they were more likely to be passive at the onset of rape, as opposed to those who were perceived to be in initial stages of dating. With the inhibiting qualities of alcohol
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consumption, women may be at a higher risk of rape because they react more slowly and men can use this vulnerability to commit rape. Characteristics of Male Perpetrators Men rape for many different reasons, influenced by their attitudes, personality characteristics, and life experiences (Abbey et al., 2004). Internationally, sexual assault is linked to men and communities that strictly define and enforce gender roles that associate masculinity with dominance, honor, and toughness (Heise, 1998). A shocking 35 percent of U.S. college men revealed they would rape if there was no fear of punishment, which indicates that a lot of men have an attraction to sexual aggression (Malamuth, 1981; Malamuth, 1989), but men also may be able to act on these aggressive attitudes more often in communities where men are rarely accountable for raping women. False beliefs about rape or about rape victims seem to contribute to rape acceptance. ‘‘Rape myths are attitudes or beliefs that are generally false but are widely and persistently held, and that serve to deny and justify male sexual aggression against women’’ (Lonsway & Fitzgerald, 1994, p. 134). Many different measurement scales have been used to evaluate rape myth acceptance. Some myths imply that women deserve rape, such as, ‘‘A woman who goes to the home or apartment of a man on the first date is implying that she wants to have sex’’ (Payne, Lonsway, & Fitzgerald, 1999, p. 50). Other myths support the claim that men are unable to control themselves, for instance, ‘‘When a man is very sexually aroused, he may not even realize that the woman is resisting’’ (p. 49). Finally, myths may blame women for rape, like in this statement, ‘‘Usually, it is only women who do things like hang out in bars and sleep around that are raped’’ (p. 49). Men with greater acceptance of rape myths are more likely to engage in sexually coercive behaviors (Senn, Desmarais, Verberg, & Wood, 2000). Studies of rape myths have delved into the attitudes related to sexual aggression, yet personality characteristics help to further understand these attitudes. Factors that increase the proclivity of men to rape include life experiences (childhood sexual abuse, witnessing family violence, or having a rejecting father), preference for impersonal sex, hostility toward women, antisocial tendencies, coercive sexual fantasies, and alcohol or drug use (Heise et al., 2002; Krug et al., 2002; Malamuth, Linz, Heavey, Barnes, & Acker, 1995; Malamuth, Sockloskie, Koss, & Tanaka, 1991). In the United States, Malamuth and his colleagues (Malamuth et al., 1991; Malamuth et al., 1995) demonstrated an additive effect, which reveals that each factor alone may not influence a man to rape, but several factors together can increase the likeliness of rape. The Confluence Model of sexual aggression identifies two major paths that influence sexual aggression (Malamuth et al., 1991; Malamuth et al., 1995). The
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first, ‘‘hostile masculinity’’ path is defined as an ‘‘insecure, defensive, hypersensitive, and hostile-distrustful orientation, particularly toward women, and gratification from controlling or dominating women’’ (Malamuth et al., 1995, pp. 353–354). This path assesses personality characteristics related to coercion of women, such as negative masculinity, hostility toward women, and adversarial sexual beliefs. The second path, ‘‘impersonal sex’’ is a ‘‘noncommittal, game-playing orientation in sexual relations’’ (p. 354), including variables such as early sexual experiences, number of sexual partners, extramarital affairs, and sexual fantasies. When men were characterized by both of these paths, they expressed the highest levels of sexual aggression in cross-sectional (Malamuth et al., 1991) and longitudinal studies (Malamuth et al., 1995). Similar studies in Spain show results in support of the Confluence Model (Martin, Vergeles, de la Orden Acevedo, del Campo Sanchez, & Visa, 2005). Their study also found that men who were low in empathy reported more sexually coercive behaviors. Yost and Zurbriggen (2006) found that men with many sexual partners who endorsed casual sex were more likely to hold negative and stereotypical attitudes about women. As these coercive and stereotypical attitudes increased, men were more likely to perpetrate sexual aggression. In a longitudinal study, American men who perpetrated at two time points had more hostility toward women, past sexual experiences, adolescent delinquency, and drinking in sexual situations (Abbey & McAuslan, 2004). Abbey and McAuslan also found that perpetrators only at the initial time point showed more remorse about what they did, claimed that they learned from the experience and blamed the women less than the repeat offenders. Although the attitudes and personalities of perpetrators have been examined, changing their mindset is a daunting task. ACTIONS FOR MEN Although the majority of men are not perpetrators of sexual violence, their role in eliminating rape is fundamental. Men act as role models for other men and boys through their many responsibilities such as father, teacher, friend, coworker, or boss. They can have a strong impact on ending gender inequality through their words and actions, particularly social scripts that endorse sexual violence, but also through direct dialogue with other men about the detrimental effects of violence against women. Although these themes should resonate in community organizations, the focus on stopping men from sexual violence should not be fear of punishment, but the desire for women and men to have healthy relationships and mutual respect. Prevention programs need to include men’s organizations, churches, male community representatives, and governments, institutions where
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men tend to have dominating roles. Many different male-focused groups have formed around the world concentrating on changing gender norms, including attitudes related to masculinity, hostility toward women, and interpersonal violence. In Latin America, especially men’s associations in Nicaragua, men work to reduce violence against women by confronting issues of masculinity and aggression (Ward, 2002). In Uganda, the Be a Man Campaign has many forums to connect men with other men to discuss violence against women (Widyono, 2006). They facilitate discussion meetings within communities, hold public debates, and sponsor television, radio, and other media events to develop positive male attitudes, and encourage healthy relationships, responsible fatherhood, and nonviolent means for resolving conflict. These organizations make men allies with women in the fight for gender equality and can have major impact within communities.
ORGANIZATIONAL SUPPORTS OF RAPE Organizational supports for rape add to the complexity of identifying and eliminating rape in all societies. In this section, we discuss sex trafficking, military rape, rape of enemy women in wartime, and rape of refugees. Each presents organizational challenges that will require organization-wide commitments to prevent and eliminate. Sex Trafficking Sex trafficking involves cooperation among various segments of society and across cultures, each with financial incentives that make it particularly difficult to eradicate. The trafficking of women and children for sexual exploitation is a form of exchange rape. It is the third most lucrative criminal activity in the world, following illegal drugs and arms, generating approximately $7 to $32 billion annually (U.S. Department of State, 2009). These widespread human rights violations are a form of modern-day slavery. It is difficult to accurately assess the number of women being trafficked internationally or within their own countries, but government agencies and field workers estimate anywhere between 700,000 and 2 million women and children annually (Richard, 2000). The UN’s human trafficking definition states: ‘‘Trafficking in persons’’ shall mean the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of the position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation.
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Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs. (UN, 2000, Annex II, Article 3)
The extent of involvement varies between countries, but in 2006, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime Database (UNODC) reported trafficking from 127 source countries to 137 destination countries. Source countries with the highest rates of trafficking include Albania, Bulgaria, China, Lithuania, Nigeria, Romania, Russia, Thailand, and Ukraine (UNODC, 2006). These source countries tend to be economically or politically unstable, where women have few employment opportunities. Through many different recruiting practices, women are transported to the wealthiest countries in the world. The highest reported destination countries are Belgium, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Thailand, Turkey, and the United States of America (UNODC, 2006). Women are also trafficked within their own countries, from rural areas to cities. Trafficking within the country is common in Argentina, China, Cote d’Ivoire, Cuba, Guinea, India, Republic of Congo, Russian, South Africa, and Zimbabwe (Central Intelligence Agency, 2008). The different trafficking routes are numerous and continuously changing. The only consistency is that women from poverty-stricken countries are most at risk of being trafficked to primarily wealthy Western countries. Traffickers use different means for coercing their victims, usually abusing women’s economic vulnerability. Steven Galster, of Global Survival Network, reports in a hearing before the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (1999) that he witnessed three types of women being trafficked for sex. Some women are completely unaware that they were being trafficked for sexual exploitation; others thought they would be doing something related to the industry, such as stripping; and others knew that they were going to be prostitutes. None of the women had any idea of the impeding abuse or that slavery would be imposed on them. Influences that make women more susceptible to trafficking are poverty and lack of education, but also the desire for a better life for themselves and their families (U.S. Department of State, 2005). Most women believe the promises of good paying jobs, such as nannies, models, secretaries, dancers, and maids, while some families believe they are marrying their daughter to a wealthy, honest man (Farr, 2005). Farr (2005) describes how structural closeness of the recruiter to the woman encourages her trust in his promises (e.g., the recruiter is a relative or family friend). Other forceful means of obtaining women are used, such as kidnapping or drugging (Farr, 2005). A study in China showed the main methods for trafficking recruitment were through fraud and
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deception, 37 percent; kidnapping, 26 percent; abuse of power or a position of vulnerability, 17 percent; and physical violence, 5 percent (UN Inter-Agency Project on Human Trafficking, 2008). Once women are recruited, captors utilize many means to psychologically and physically detain their victims. Since most captors have the same cultural background as their victims, this puts them at an advantage to exploit their vulnerabilities. In Italy, Nigerian women believing they are being sponsored for work are trafficked into prostitution. Their exploiters are their countrymen who use their knowledge of Nigerian culture to psychologically trap them. These Nigerian women are forced to perform black magic rites referred to as juju rites where different bodily fluids or pieces of clothing are placed before an altar, while the women make vows to never reveal their captors and pay off their debts without any problems (Aghatise, 2004). The way that their captors use these juju rites enforce major psychological control over these women, who believe that great harm will come to them or their families if they dishonor their vows (Aghatise, 2004). In other cultures where psychological control will not work, violence and threats become the main tactic for keeping women in fear. Violence used against these women includes the following: severe verbal and physical abuse, rape, burning, forced prostitution even when ill, menstruating, or pregnant, and murder (Aghatise, 2004; Farr, 2005). Since most trafficked women originate from underdeveloped or poor countries, where corruption can be rampant among government officials, many of these women distrust law enforcement officials. Their captors will often withhold passports, and with little or no knowledge of the laws and customs of their destination, they fear being caught by the authorities and imprisoned for prostitution. They also believe that their families will be in danger of retaliation by their captors if they run away. Many solutions are underway to prevent sex trafficking. Numerous laws have been passed by the UN in the past decade in a collaborative effort between countries to not only become aware of this human rights violation but to assure women’s protection when rescued. The main goal of recent legislation is to work together in order to support victims and convict traffickers. Since the pressure of keeping up with other types of criminal activity is burdensome for certain governmental sectors, specialized task forces for sexual trafficking would give the issue more direct attention. Training courses for police officers, immigration authorities, customs officers, government officials, and media personnel are also necessary to educate workers who come into contact with survivors of trafficking. Besides legislation and trafficking detection, community efforts are being made to prevent sex trafficking. Mu Sochua, Cambodia’s former Minister of Women’s and Veterans’ Affairs, has made crucial efforts to
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fight against sex trafficking in Cambodia. Since many trafficked women in Cambodia come from rural areas, she visited these regions to discuss with poverty-stricken families the problems of selling their teenage daughters (Mithers, 2004). Sochua put together a major media campaign to change the way people view gender equality by changing a Cambodian proverb from ‘‘A man is gold, a woman is a white piece of cloth’’ to ‘‘Men are gold, women are precious gems’’ (Mithers, 2004). When women were referred to as white pieces of cloth, a metaphor that promotes virginity, men defined their status. Changing the proverb promotes gender equality and reduces the importance of female virgin status. When Mu Sochua visits rural areas, she says to the villagers: ‘‘Your children are precious. If you let your daughters go, your family heritage is gone. They are your gems. Love them. Educate them. Protect them.’’ Everywhere I go, women come up to me and say, ‘‘Now I realize what you mean. Find my daughter!’’ When that happens, we try to get word out. Maybe 10 percent of those girls we find. (Mithers, 2004)
This type of education is necessary to inform women and their families about sex trafficking. Prevention campaigns need to target the cultural values that reinforce sexual exploitation. The media can play an important role in graphically depicting the reality of the ‘‘dream jobs’’ that women find and giving access to resources to protect themselves. MILITARY RAPE In this section we discuss the rape of women serving in the military, rape of civilian women in warring countries, the rape of civilian women to enforce group cohesion, and the use of women to provide comfort for soldiers. In each case women seem to be the pawns of wars caused and carried out by men. Women have served in militaries around the world for centuries. Their historical roles, which were confined to medical or administrative support, have extended to active duty in the past 50 years. Even though most countries have regulations regarding tasks women can hold, such as not engaging in active combat positions, women are still alongside men in dangerous combat zones. Women have continually increased their representation in military forces globally. Within the military dynamic, rape is commonplace and survivors are pressured to remain silent, principally to protect group morale and cohesion. Despite this compelling force, women in the military have spoken out about sexual assault by their fellow soldiers and commanders. In most countries, rape prevalence rates are difficult to ascertain for women active in the military. Research is limited, with most available data coming from the U.S. military. In 2008, the Chair of the Homeland
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Security Intelligence Subcommittee, Jane Harman said, ‘‘Women serving in the U.S. military are more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire in Iraq’’ (Harman, 2008). In the U.S. military, rape prevalence is higher than in the general population, yet reporting and prosecution of perpetrators is lower (Harman, 2008). The West Los Angeles Veterans Association Health Center informed Harman that 41 percent of women soldiers receiving health care at their facilities were survivors of sexual assault, and 29 percent were raped during their military service (Harman, 2008). Study results range from 23 to 30 percent of women in the military reporting rape by other military members, including 5 percent of women experiencing repeated rapes and 5 percent experiencing gang rapes (Hankin et al., 1999; Sadler, Booth, & Doebbeling, 2005; Sadler, Booth, Nielson, & Doebbeling, 2000; Skinner et al., 2000). In the U.S. Air Force, military perpetrators accounted for 14 percent of first-time rapes and 26 percent of most recent rapes (Bostock & Daley, 2007). These statistics are higher than the general population, yet the actual numbers are probably much higher. Underreporting rape is a common trend in society but is even more likely in the military. Female soldiers have many concerns that prevent them from reporting, including lack of trust for the criminal justice system, fear of reprisal from their offender, fear that the chain of command will not believe their complaint or act upon it, and reports will have a negative impact on their reputation and career advancement (Embrey et al., 2004). Militaries promote collective attitudes, comradeship, and group cohesion. Ironically, reporting rape may be viewed as undermining the group morale or failing the group (Jeffreys, 2007) yet the rape itself is not! Most of these women’s fears represent the reality of military responses to rape. Reported sexual assaults increased to 2,908 in 2008, an 8 percent rise from 2007, and almost half of reports that were referred to commanders to take action on behalf of the survivor resulted in no responses by the commanders (Department of Defense, 2008, 2009). Only 15 percent of reported rapes were referred to Court Martial in which a judge or committee would hear survivors’ cases and perpetrators could receive adequate punishment. However, instead of referring rape reports to Court Martial, commanders have the authority to administer other forms of punishment directly. Of the total reports of rape, 11 percent resulted in nonjudicial punishment including extra duty, restrictions of freedom, or loss of a portion of their pay, and 12 percent resulted in administrative action including a letter of admonition. Half of reported cases were excused because of insufficient evidence, recanted allegations, or death of the survivor or perpetrator before investigation commenced (Department of Defense, 2009). When survivors’ reports of rape are devalued to the point where rapist’s punishment involves a small fine or a letter of admonition, the atmosphere
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in the military continues to perpetuate sexual assault and force women to remain silent. Skinner et al. (2000) found that survivors of military rape reported more problems during active duty, including stronger feelings of isolation, loneliness, and group exclusion than other female soldiers. As a means to investigate and prosecute perpetrators of sexual assault in the military, Jane Harman proposed a bill for the Department of Defense to implement several measures. All military factions would have to uphold the following: Commanders to be held accountable for assaults that occur in their units and provide justification for disposing of sexual assault cases through non-judicial punishment and other administrative actions; The Secretary of Defense to review current training methods for all military investigations staff, including Judge Advocates, and implement any improvements that are necessary; Notification of local civilian law enforcement officials of any military protective order issued on base to provide for continuity of protection of victims; An opportunity for a base transfer once a service member has notified her or his command that she or he has been sexually assaulted or raped. (Harman, 2008)
These modifications to the military procedures will not be enough to eliminate rape in the military, but they would help set precedence for authority figures. They would also allow survivors to receive support and protection when speaking out about rape. In addition to raping women serving in the military, soldiers also rape civilian women in warring countries as well as civilians they are charged with protecting. Van Woudenberg (2005) cites cases of sexual assaults perpetrated by UN peacekeepers in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and other countries. Among different types of sexual assault that are inflicted, coercive rape as a means for survival for the victim is common. Survival rape involves a transfer of food, money, protection, documentation, or another commodity in exchange for sex. Even though the UN has a zero-tolerance policy for these actions, they have done little to prevent or prosecute perpetrators (Van Woudenberg, 2005). Pornography and prostitution have long been associated with the military. Aggressive masculinity is enhanced with the use of pornography, and in wartime can help male soldiers distinguish themselves from women. The Pakistani army used pornography to enhance their soldiers’ masculinity before the attack on Bangladesh in 1971, in which soldiers subsequently committed thousands of rapes against Bangladeshi women (Jeffreys, 2007). Another way to enhance sexual aggression is through the thousands of brothels located near military bases around the world. The U.S.
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government makes agreements with foreign countries, such as Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, Korea, Philippines, and Japan for R&R services for soldiers (Farr, 2007). These bases draw in thousands of prostitutes; some women are poverty stricken locals while the majority of women are specifically trafficked into these brothels. With the arrival of UN peacekeeping forces in Cambodia in 1993, the number of prostitutes increased from an estimated 1,500 to 20,000 (Farr, 2007). Similar situations have occurred in Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Liberia, Guinea, Sierra Leone, and East Timor (Farr, 2007). Women from neighboring countries and locals were reported to be kidnapped or coerced into sexual slavery in the brothels near peacekeeping forces (Farr, 2007). During World War II, an estimated 200,000 Asian women, so called ‘‘comfort women,’’ primarily from Korea, were trafficked into Japan by the Japanese Imperial Army to work as sex slaves in ‘‘comfort stations’’ set up for soldiers (Amnesty International, 2004). Holtzman (1994) reports that Southeast Asian women are often sexually exploited and victimized by sexual tourism and so-called ‘‘R&R’’ for male U.S. military personnel and the female sex slave trade is flourishing in that region. Further violence continues as soldiers who frequent military base brothels demand that women submit to their desires. Farr (2007) explains how women who refuse to have anal sex, oral sex, or insert objects into their vagina are often subject to physical abuse and rape by soldiers. The UN made rape a war crime by passing The Military Domestic and Sexual Violence Response Act, including implementation of UN Security Council 1325 and The Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, as well as utilization of the International Criminal Court. Many countries, including the United States, have not signed these acts, nor do they participate in the International Criminal Court. These countries claim that they can better punish the actions of their soldiers, which as previously stated, amounts to little or no punishment when dealing with rape. Attitudes by the military that promote masculinity and the degradation of women encourage rape of military women and trafficking of women for soldiers’ pleasures as well as the rape of ‘‘enemy’’ women. Military organizations, starting from the top authorities, need to deconstruct their demeaning views of women in order to diminish rape by soldiers. RAPE DURING ARMED CONFLICT Rape is used in warfare as the ultimate weapon to destroy cultures. In fact rape has frequently been called ‘‘the spoils of war.’’ The systematic sexual violence during armed conflict can serve many functions, such as destabilizing populations, destroying bonds within communities and families, advancing ethnic cleansing, expressing hatred for the
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enemy, or supplying combatants with sexual services (Ward, 2002). Serbian soldiers reported that they were ordered to rape so that the military morale would be higher and they would fight better (Stiglmayer, 1993). Former UN Ambassador, Stephen Lewis, spoke about the growing practice of rape during armed conflict: Sexual violence was escalated from a battle tactic to a systematic strategy of war. Where from the outset, it’s understood by military commanders, by military factions, by military marauders, the cheapest and easiest way to destabilize and dismember a village, a community, a province, is to rape the women and girls. Sexual torture eviscerates the women and it terrorizes and traumatizes their children as well, and their partners and their extended families, the communities themselves. It’s the ultimate sabotage of human health. In the darkness and depth of the trauma, physical and emotional, the women are rendered incapable of playing the roles that society has assigned to them. They are lost as parents who take their children to health clinics and schools. Lost as the mainstays of family life, as the gathers of wood, the drawers of water, the providers of meals, as the farmers who maintain agricultural productivity, as the bearers of children, because in so many instances, they can no longer bear children. (Lewis, 2008)
The explanation by Lewis expresses the goal that many raping armies seek: the ethnic cleaning of populations. Rape is used in war to express many power dynamics, but the massive onset of rape as a means for ethnic cleansing has become rampant in past decades. Women become the focal point of attack in order to eliminate the next generation of the ‘‘enemy,’’ oftentimes by enhanced violence including vaginal mutilation, cutting out fetuses, or forced pregnancy by the enemy (Amnesty International, 2004). In several countries, including Sudan, mutilated genitals were flaunted as trophies of war (Amnesty International, 2004). Rape as a form of genocide has become a normal means of warfare and rhetoric among militaries. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, between 30,000 and 50,000 women were raped during the conflict (Stiglmayer, 1993). Serbian soldiers frequented rape camps where Muslim and Croat women were held as sex slaves (Stiglmayer, 1993). The underlying mission of these rapes was ethnic cleansing. Serbians would also impregnate Muslim women and detain them until they gave birth to Serbian babies. Other atrocities included brutal gang rapes and the rape of young women in front of their families (Stiglmayer, 1993). In Bangladesh, the 1971 war for independence led to the rape of 250,000 to 400,000 women in nine months, resulting in an estimated 25,000 pregnancies (Swiss & Giller, 1993). During the 1994 Rwanda genocide, soldiers raped 250,000 to 500,000 women, one third of whom were gang raped (Amnesty International,
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2004). In certain villages in Uganda, more than 70 percent of the women are rape survivors (Swiss & Giller, 1993). In Sierra Leone, as many as 90 percent of women are believed to be rape survivors, some with additional brutalization, including amputation (Amnesty International, 2004). The horrific suffering being inflicted on women during armed conflicts is devastating. Major General Patrick Cammart, the former Commander of Congo’s peacekeeping force said, ‘‘It has probably become more dangerous to be a woman than a soldier in an armed conflict’’ (Lewis, 2008). Women have little means of protecting themselves and men are ill-equipped for fighting back. The shame of rape is heightened when husbands abandon their families, partially from cultural stigmas associated with rape, but also due to their personal blame for failing to protect their wives. Therefore, the militias accomplish their task of tearing apart families and communities, successful at ethnic cleansing and clearing lands of all inhabitants. After being raped or having their family members sexually assaulted, women have no choice but to leave their homes to seek safety and medical assistance. As they travel to refugee camps or hide out in remote areas, they are once again at risk of rape. Often, their own military or bandits scavenging through the lands will assault women, and the threat of attack from militias is still present. Once women find security in refugee camps, they will soon realize that protection during an armed conflict does little to safeguard women from the atrocities of war. RAPE OF REFUGEES AND INTERNALLY DISPLACED WOMEN Women who are internally displaced, refugees, or living in postconflict settings are at high risk of sexual assault. Refugees are also at a greater risk for rape related to domestic violence, survival sex, involuntary prostitution, sex trafficking, and forced marriage (Human Rights Watch, 2009; Ward, 2002). The vast range of perpetrators includes military soldiers, insurgents, border guards, host communities, peacekeeping forces, humanitarian workers, husbands, and other refugees (Ward, 2002). Of the 40 million people displaced from their homes due to armed conflict or natural disaster, an estimated 80 percent are women and children (Amnesty International, 2004). Similar to conflict regions, sexual assault is prevalent in refugee camps. Rates of reporting rape to authorities remains low, which is more indicative of inadequate systems for reporting or documenting incidents, as well as cultural norms that degrade survivors (UN Refugee Agency, 2006). The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR, 2006) reported 7,600 cases of sexual assault in 104 refugee camps during 2006, an increase of 77 percent from 2005. These increases are believed to be the outcome of procedural implementation
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for reporting sexual violence, as well as increased training of refugee personnel (UNHCR, 2006). However, the reality of sexual assault incidence in refugee camps is much higher. In 2003, the Ministry for Social Protection in Colombia reported that 36 percent of the internally displaced Colombian women were sexually assaulted (Amnesty International, 2004). A survey by the International Rescue Committee found that 27 percent of Burundi refugees experienced sexual violence after they became refugees (Hynes & Cordozo, 2000). Another study in West Timor found there was a significant correlation between sexual violence and moving to a refugee camp compared to women who did not displace to a camp (Hynes, Ward, Robertson, & Koss, 2003). Richard Mollica (1986) reports that 95 percent of the Cambodian refugee women he interviewed as clients had experienced some type of sexual assault, but it took the trust gained through three years of therapy before they would speak of it. Cambodian women escaping the Pol Pot regime by crossing the border to Thai refugee camps found that their lives were defined by forced labor, torture, starvation, beatings, and rape. In the camps it was said that rape was ‘‘as common as the night’’ (Rozee & Van Boemel, 1989; Van Boemel & Rozee, 1992). Accurate statistics for refugee sexual violence are difficult to establish, since many cultures not only blame survivors of rape, but the social stigma and societal blame pressures husbands to leave their wives, or families disowning their daughters, if it is revealed that they’ve been raped. In many traditional cultures a woman who loses her virginity, even by rape, is considered used goods, soiled, and a matter of shame to her family (Rozee & Van Boemel, 1989). To encourage a culture of speaking out against sexual violence, several UN resolutions were initiated. The UNHCR Executive Committee Conclusion on Refugee Protection and Sexual Violence No. 73 (XLIV) of 1993 and the Executive Committee Conclusion on Women and Girls at Risk No. 105 (LVII) of 2006 require that sexual assault survivors in refugee environments receive adequate medical and psychosocial care, including culturally appropriate counseling facilities (UNHCR, 2006). In 2005, of the camps that reported data, 62 percent met UNHCR requirements, including legal, psychosocial, health or safety, and security, increasing to 88 percent in 2006 (UNHCR, 2006). The International Rescue Committee launched a project on sexual violence among Burundian refugee women housed in camps in Tanzania (Heise et al., 1999). The project opened four drop-in centers that offered counseling, 24-hour medical services, and emergency contraception (Heise et al., 1999). These centers are vital to survivors, especially those who are no longer allowed to live with their families and become at heightened risk for revictimization. Along with opening support centers for survivors, an emphasis needs to be made on informing women
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of their rights and services available. Multi-media campaigns within refugee communities, involving television, radio, and print, are necessary to inform survivors about the availability of health, social services, and legal aid, as well as conducting prevention campaigns (Ward, 2002). The psychological and physical impact of sexual assault is extensive, and women who have not been raped also live in constant fear of the repercussions of rape (Rozee, 1993). This fear of rape prevents women from collecting firewood for cooking, which has aggravated malnutrition among Ethiopian refugee families living in Sudanese refugee camps (Heise et al., 1994). In fact, this phenomenon is evident in refugee camps worldwide. Studies in Kenya and Tanzania also found that the majority of rapes were committed after women leave their camps to collect firewood, vegetables, or seek employment from local villages (Human Rights Watch, 2000; UN, 2006). For men, leaving the camps means capture or death, so the responsibility falls on the women. With few opportunities for income generation in the camps and no fuel to cook their food, women have no option but to put themselves in danger for the survival of their families. The Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children (Woman’s Commission, 2006) conducted a comparison study between two refugee camps with significantly different rates of sexual assault outside of the camp: . . . one camp in Darfur with high rates of sexual assault and one camp in Nepal with low rates of sexual assault. They found that in Nepal, the women used kerosene instead of firewood, so they did not have to endanger their lives by leaving the camp for firewood collection (Woman’s Commission, 2006). The Women’s Commission reported several ways to supply women in refugee camps worldwide with alternative means of fueling their stoves, including sources that could simultaneously create jobs for both women and men in the camps. (Woman’s Commission, 2006)
Revictimization is a constant threat to survivors in refugee camps. Survivors are deemed disgraced or dishonored by their communities, oftentimes unable to get married or keep their husband. Their victim status exposes them to revictimization by other refugee men and police officers who coerce them to have sex for protection or force them to become their unofficial wives (Human Rights Watch, 2005). Isolation can also put women in a position of forced prostitution or sex trafficking. Some male refugees and humanitarian workers are connected with trafficking rings, which place women in refugee settings at increased vulnerability. In 2000, UN Resolution 1325 specifically stressed the importance of women’s participation in post-war reconstruction efforts (Amnesty
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International, 2004). Areas of involvement include decision-making role, UN field-based operations, military observers, civilian police, humanitarian personnel, design of refugee camps, processes of repatriation and resettlement, mine-clearance, and disarmament (Amnesty International, 2004). The UNHCR and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have banded together to find prevention solutions to rape in refugee-like settings. They encourage women refugee involvement in leadership structures at the camps and decision-making positions in order to better address the needs of women (UNHCR, 2000). Women holding these positions can help produce an environment within the refugee camp that is safe for women, as well as increase gender equality in the community. Affirmative action measures were implemented in Tanzania refugee camps, leading to women holding 50 percent of the decisionmaking roles (UNHCR, 2001). Other solutions for reducing rape by men with power would promote female recruitment into peacekeeping and police forces (Ward, 2002). Currently, most peacekeeping forces are almost entirely men. By creating a gender balance within these forces, women’s needs will be better served. CULTURAL SUPPORTS OF RAPE Many cultures worldwide support rape through patriarchal structures and gender inequality. Communities are defined by gender ideologies, which endorse what is appropriate and accepted within that culture. The attitudes and behaviors of criminal justice systems, religions, and the media hold women as subordinate citizens and perpetuate rape within societies. Criminal Justice System To end violence against women, governmental policy must severely admonish rape. If laws do not take a firm stance to protect its citizens, a pattern of inequality and rape justification will continue. International policy frameworks were put in place to set precedence with concern to sexual assault. The UN (Tananta, 2008) outlined a framework for developing or amending legislation that emphasized prevention of violence against women, punishment of perpetrators, and protection and support of survivors. Unfortunately, as of 2006, only about half of UN Member States had laws addressing violence against women and many of those laws were still limited: defining rape by the use of force, sexual violence as a crime against family honor, impunity from punishment if the perpetrator marries the victim, and lacking laws that address marital rape, forced marriage, and sex trafficking (Tananta, 2008). Without a framework that specifically protects women from
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sexual assault, criminal justice systems will not be able to deter and punish these crimes. In countries where laws exist, women still express low levels of satisfaction when dealing with criminal justice systems. Survivors of partner violence reported less satisfaction with police officers, prosecutors, judges, and victim assistance workers than survivors of nonpartner violence (Byrne, Kilpatrick, Howley, & Beatty, 1999). Perpetrators of intimate partner violence were significantly more likely to be allowed to plead guilty to a lesser crime (Byrne, Kilpatrick, Howley, & Beatty, 1999). Of these women, only 37 percent of partner violence survivors and 52 percent of nonpartner violence survivors were satisfied with the criminal justice system. To assure sexual assault survivors the ability to seek legal retribution, criminal justice systems must be set up to hold men accountable for sexual assault. This includes governmental laws that cover specific crimes related to various forms of sexual violence, implementation of those laws by police and judicial authorities, and women’s awareness of their rights. Some countries have begun special educational campaigns focused on the beliefs and values of the people. Violence against women is a serious problem in Nigeria, including many forms of violence such as female genital mutilation, marital rape, sex trafficking, and stateendorsed rape. To pass their Violence against Women Bill, which aimed at criminalizing the many condoned practices related to gender violence in Nigeria, a collaborated tribunal was organized in 2001 (Nwankwo, 2008). Thirty-three women and girls spoke about their experiences with violence, including rape and trafficking, to hundreds of attendants including government officials, police officers, religious leaders, schools, judges, and media personnel (Nwankwo, 2008). This mock trial broke the silence and shame often associated with sexual assault and other forms of violence, helping create public awareness of this major problem (Nwankwo, 2008). The use of public forums such as those in Nigeria where women, leaders, and citizens can come together to learn about the widespread problems of sexual assault is a dynamic way to help people form a personal connection and responsibility for the problem, as well as encourage legal and social change. Implementation of specific laws against all forms of sexual assault is vital, but they will not be enough to convict perpetrators or prevent rape. Laws are important to create equality in the framework of nations. Implementing these laws will be an even larger task. Since men are in positions of power to apply new laws or maintain old ones, specific training for personnel working in the criminal justice system must focus on attitude and awareness training. It is also essential to inform women of their rights, so they will be able to feel safe in looking to the criminal justice system for help.
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Religion Religion has been used to justify many actions, including sexual assault. Many world religions hold beliefs that are misogynistic, therefore holding women at a lesser status than men. They may directly support violence against women through doctrine that condones it, or indirectly through the ways in which religious organizations are structured, placing men in power and women in subservient roles. These patriarchal traditions maintain oppressive control over women and promote violence against women (Farr, 2005). In the Koran, rape is condoned in war through the following passage, ‘‘We have made lawful to you your wives whom you have given their dowries, and those whom your right hand possesses out of those whom Allah has given to you as prisoners of war’’ (33:50). The Old Testament also accepts similar behaviors. After plundering many towns that disobeyed God, Moses is angry that his officers allowed unrighteous women to live, and said, ‘‘Kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man’’ (Numbers 31:7-18). These statements support the rape of women during armed conflict. With the ever-present use of rape in war today, this type of ideology appears to remain a part of our culture. The Old Testament also explains rules for rape by fellow neighbors. If there is a young woman, a virgin already engaged to be married, and a man meets her in the town and lies with her, you shall bring both of them to the gate of that town and stone them to death, the young woman because she did not cry for help in the town and the man because he violated his neighbor’s wife. (Deuteronomy 22:23)
This statement blames women for rape if they do not put up enough resistance to rape that it could be witnessed by people living nearby. This corresponds with many rape myths that suggest if a woman cannot prevent rape, then she is to blame. Furthermore, the man is only punished for violating another man’s property and not for the violation of a woman. It continues, If a man meets a virgin who is not engaged, and seizes her and lies with her, and they are caught in the act, the man who lay with her shall give fifty shekels of silver to the young woman’s father, and she shall become his wife. (Deuteronomy 22:28)
The woman once again is not the subject of victimization; it is the father who must be paid. This similar tradition of impunity for men who rape if they marry their victim is still present in many countries globally.
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Hindu text also makes astonishing statements on the way in which a husband should initiate sex with his wife. In the Brhadrankyaki Upanishad scripture, it reads: When she has changed her clothes at the end of her menstrual period, therefore, one should approach that splendid woman and invite her to have sex. Should she refuse to consent, he should bribe her. If she still refuses, he should beat her with a stick or with his fists and overpower her, saying: I take away the splendor from you with my virility and splendor.
Religious texts, especially those dating back hundreds or thousands of years, can be interpreted in different ways. Not all believers take each doctrine as a guide or law for their lives to follow, while others who consider themselves fundamentalists, may be more inclined to take each doctrine as the official word of God. Religious fundamentalism may encourage misogynist values and blame women for rape. In a study of Israeli high school students, Geiger, Fischer, and Eshet (2004) found that students with more conservative religious orientation were more likely to believe in stereotypes justifying sexual coercion and attributing sexual coercion to a woman’s behavior on a date. Sheldon and Parent (2002) had similar findings with Christian clergy. Clergy with fundamentalist religious beliefs blamed rape survivors more often and had more negative attitudes toward rape survivors than clergy that did not characterize themselves as fundamentalists (Sheldon & Parent, 2002). Women attending churches that are considered fundamentalist may need additional outreach support, since they are more inclined to seek support within their church and be exposed to more victim blaming reactions. In addition, Aosved and Long (2006) found that American college students with higher religious intolerance had greater rape myth acceptance. In southern India, girls and women of poor, low-caste families are offered to deities of Brahmanic temples (Chattoraj, 2002). These women, known as devadasi, are married to a deity or temple, therefore cannot enter into marriage of their choice, and are subjected to lifetime prostitution to upper-caste men, often times being sold in sex trafficking (Chattoraj, 2002). Prevention programs and economic empowerment programs now offer women susceptible to devadasi to work as weavers, basket makers, and vegetable vendors (Dadian, 1997). Yet, regulation of these practices is still difficult, since the men in power are the men continuing the devadasi practice. The Trokosi tradition in Ghana requires families to give virgin girls to priests to appease the gods for crimes committed by family members (Equality Now, 2002). Girls become slaves for the priest, as well as
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having forced intercourse (Equality Now, 2002). This practice was made illegal in 1998, but the government has not prosecuted anyone under the law and many women are still in servitude (Equality Now, 2002). The Trokosi tradition dates back more than 300 years, but many emerging religions promote female subordination and sexual abuse. The Children of God/The Family, a religious movement founded in the 1960s in the United States, reached a height of more than 10,000 followers worldwide where sexual assault was an accepted practice (Boeri, 2002). Any male member of this group was allowed to have sex with any female, despite her age, marital status, or desire (Boeri, 2002). Many other religious groups have victimized women in the name of God or spiritual fulfillment. Fortune (2000) expresses how religious institutions can act as either ‘‘resources’’ or ‘‘roadblocks’’ for women healing from violence. Since religious organizations are important support systems for women and possibly the only support for some women, clergy and other religious personnel need to be educated on rape myths and the best practices for supporting survivors. When religious organizations fail to support survivors, their repercussions can be damaging. As Fortune stated, ‘‘Many women have been abandoned by their faith communities, left to experience shame or guilt, whereas their perpetrators have had license to continue their abusive behavior’’ (Fortune, 2000, p. 372). By holding a firm stance against sexual assault, religious organizations can be in a position to prevent violence against women. Media The public media, including television, Internet, film, video games, radio, and print media, has widespread range and powerful impact of cultural ideology. International research supports claims that the media can encourage rape in communities through the depiction of gender inequality, male-dominated sexual relationships, and the eroticism of rape. In an Indian study, Derne (1999) found that the male interviewees, from regions in India known for dowry deaths and sexual harassment, had similar beliefs to the gender relationships depicted in Hindu films. Almost all of these films depicted scenes of rape or attempted rape, often between married couples (Derne, 1999). In a U.S. study by Apanovitch, Hobfoll, and Salovey (2002), participants watched a film about gang rape and were then asked to rate the men in the film for their responsibility of the rape. Men and women who had dialogue about the film before giving their ratings put more responsibility on the men than participants who did not discuss the video. The video ‘‘challenged a number of popular rape myths’’ (Apanovitch et al., 2002, p. 456), which seemed to make it difficult for participants to evaluate. Considering that most viewers do not discuss
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material from different media portals, depictions of violence against women can endorse already preexisting rape myths. Educating media personnel, including journalists, broadcasters, and advertisers, of the root causes of violence against women can encourage acceptable representations of men and women in the media. This is also a valuable resource for extending survivor rights and awareness directly to women. In Spain, as part of their Integral Protection Measures against Gender Violence, the media are encouraged to promote gender equality and remove stereotyped images, messages, and content from all media portals (Mendez, 2008). Even though media materials will be monitored during a transition process, their goal is for media personnel to maintain self-regulation of these issues (Mendez, 2008). CONCLUSION Sexual assault is a pervasive and deep-rooted problem, established as it is within the very cultural structures charged with preventing it. Effective prevention needs to challenge cultural beliefs and social structures that perpetuate rape. They must fight against sexist views that underlie male violence. Both women and men are needed to change gender dynamics and promote rape prevention. Even though sexual assault pervades cultures throughout the world, social stigmas keep women from discussing the issue. Public awareness campaigns should counter stereotypical viewpoints of sexual assault and direct blame toward the perpetrator. If the responsibility is put on perpetrators, women will be more inclined to speak out. In addition, rape crisis centers need to be set up as safe establishments for women to speak about rape and those in need of physical, psychological, and legal support. Medical personnel are often in useful positions to help survivors of violence. Women may not report their assaults to police but can still seek medical attention. In some countries, medical personnel are mandated to report sexual violence. This can endanger the lives of women and force women in those countries to remain silent even in the care of their doctor. With appropriate training and confidentiality rights, medical personnel can be sensitive to these issues and assist women with necessary referrals that could help them financially, psychologically, or emotionally. Rape is one of the biggest human rights violations that the global community faces today. Efforts to fight against the ideology that perpetuates rape have begun in communities worldwide. For this process to function, painstaking efforts must be made at all organizational and societal levels that influence gender equality. As men stand up to end violence against women and women become equal partners in their
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communities, work environments, and families, we can expect to see rape diminish across the globe. REFERENCES Abbey, A., & McAuslan, P. (2004). A longitudinal examination of male college students’ perpetration of sexual assault. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 72, 747–756. Abbey, A., Zawacki, T., Buck, P. O., Clinton, A. M., & McAuslan, P. (2004). Sexual assault and alcohol consumption: What do we know about their relationship and what types of research are still needed? Aggression and Violent Behavior, 9, 271–303. Aghatise, E. (2004). Trafficking for prostitution in Italy: Possible effects of government proposals for legalization of brothels. Violence Against Women, 10, 1126–1155. Ahrens, C. E., & Rozee, P. D. (2007). Using an ecological perspective to understand and address rape on campus. In G. B. Stahly (Ed.), Gender identity, equity, and violence: Multidisciplinary perspectives through service learning (pp. 159–180). Sterling, VA: Stylus. Amnesty International. (2004, December 4). Lives blown apart: Crimes against women in armed conflict. London: Amnesty International Publications. Retrieved January 22, 2009, from http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/ info/ACT77/075/2004 Aosved, A. C., & Long, P. J. (2006). Co-occurrence of rape myth: Acceptance, sexism, racism, homophobia, ageism, classism, and religious intolerance. Sex Roles, 55, 481–492. Apanovitch, A. M., Hobfoll, S. E., & Salovey, P. (2002). The effects of social influence on perceptual and affective reactions to scenes of sexual violence. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 32, 443–464. Avakame, E. (1999). Females’ labor force participation and rape: An empirical test of the backlash hypothesis. Violence Against Women, 5, 926–949. Boeri, M. W. (2002). Women after the utopia: The gendered lives of former cult members. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 31, 323–360. Bostock, D. J., & Daley, J. G. (2007). Lifetime and current sexual assault and harassment victimization rates of active-duty United States Air Force women. Violence Against Women, 13, 927–944. Byrne, C. A., Kilpatrick, D. G., Howley, S. S., & Beatty, D. (1999). Female victims of partner versus nonpartner violence: Experiences with the criminal justice system. Criminal Justice and Behavior, 26, 275–292. Byrne, C. A., Resnick, H. S., Kilpatrick, D. G., Best, C. L., & Saunders, B. E. (1999). The socioeconomic impact of interpersonal violence on women. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 67, 362–366. Central Intelligence Agency. (2008). The 2008 World Factbook. Retrieved December 29, 2008, from https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/ the-world-factbook/index.html Chattoraj, S. (2002). The Devadasi System. Retrieved January 26, 2009, from http://iml.jou.ufl.edu/projects/Spring02/Chattaraj/index2.html
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Impact on attitudes, sexual aggression, and sexual victimization. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 16, 1120–1138. Golding, J. M., Wilsnack, S. C., & Cooper, M. L. (2002). Sexual assault history and social support: Six general population studies. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 15, 187–197. Hankin, C. S., Skinner, K. M., Sullivan, L. M., Miller, D. R., Frayne, S., & Tripp, T. J. (1999). Prevalence of depressive and alcohol abuse symptoms among women VA outpatients who report experiencing sexual assault while in the military. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 12, 601–612. Harman, J. (2008, July 29). Harman introduces bipartisan bill to halt rape and sexual assault in the military. Retrieved January 1, 2009, from http:// www.house.gov/list/press/ca36_harman/July29_MST.shtml Harrington, N. T., & Leitenberg, H. (1994). Relationship between alcohol consumption and victim behaviors immediately preceding sexual aggression by an acquaintance. Violence and Victims, 9, 315–324. Heise, L. L. (1998) Violence against women: An integrated, ecological framework. Violence Against Women, 4, 262–290. Heise, L., Ellsberg, M., & Gottemoeller, M. (1999). Ending violence against women. Population Reports. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, L(11). Heise, L., Ellsberg, M., & Gottemoeller, M. (2002). A global overview of gender-based violence. International Journal of Gynecology and Obstetrics, 78 (suppl.1), S5–S14. Heise, L. L., Pitanguy, J., & Germain, A. (1994). Violence against women: The hidden health burden. World Bank Discussion Paper #255. Washington, DC: World Bank. Henry, N., Ward, T., & Hirshberg, M. (2004). A multifactorial model of wartime rape. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 9, 535–562. Holtzman, C. G. (1994). Multicultural perspectives on counseling survivors of rape. Journal of Social Distress and the Homeless, 3, 87–97. Honigman, J. J. (1954). The Kaska Indians: An ethnographic reconstruction. Yale University Publications in Anthropology, 51, 1–163. Human Rights Watch. (2000, October). Seeking protection: Addressing sexual and domestic violence in Tanzania’s refugee camps. Retrieved January 22, 2009, from http://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports/2000/tanzania/ Human Rights Watch. (2005, April 12). Sexual violence and its consequences among displaced persons in Darfur and Chad. Retrieved January 23, 2009, from http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2005/04/12/sexual-violence-andits-consequences-among-displaced-persons-darfur-and-chad Human Rights Watch. (2009, January 14). World Report. Retrieved January 23, 2009, from http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2009/01/14/world-report2009 Hynes, M., & Cordozo, B. L. (2000). Sexual violence against refugee women. Journal of Women’s Health & Gender-based Medicine, 9, 819–823. Hynes, M., Ward, J., Robertson, K., & Koss, M. (2003, July). A determination of the prevalence of gender based violence among conflict-affected populations in East Timor. Report for The Reproductive Health for Refugees Consortium and International Rescue Committee. Retrieved January 22, 2009, from http://www.rhrc.org/resources/index.cfm?sector¼gbv
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Chapter 9
Sexual Harassment Laws’ Impact on Women Joseph Solberg
This chapter explores court decisions related to sexual harassment and the impact those decisions have had or may have on women in the workplace. It will first set out the component of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that made workplace discrimination based on gender unlawful. Next, it will discuss federal appellate court decisions that followed passage of the act leading up to the U.S. Supreme Court’s first decision related to sex harassment in the workplace. It will explore in some detail that first decision, Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson, which was decided by the Court in 1986, 22 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. The chapter will then detail the case of Harris v. Forklift Systems, a 1993 Supreme Court decision that will provide the backdrop for a discussion of an issue that still affects women today: whether courts should utilize a reasonable person or a reasonable woman/victim test in deciding sexual harassment cases. Following the Harris discussion, the impact of two other Supreme Court decisions on working women will be analyzed. In the companion cases of Faragher v. City of Boca Raton (1998) and Burlington Industries v. Ellerth (1998), the Court, in addressing a company’s liability for sex harassment committed by a supervisor, set out an affirmative defense that generally requires the victim to report the harassment to be successful in a sex harassment claim. The impact on women due to this requirement will be discussed. Finally, the chapter will discuss the degree of sexual conduct required before courts are likely to label the behavior sexually harassing under the law.
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TITLE VII BACKGROUND Congress passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964. One element of the act was Title VII, which prohibits discrimination in the workplace based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. In 1980, the federal agency that oversees the enforcement of Title VII, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), promulgated rules that define sex harassment as follows: Unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature constitutes sexual harassment when (1) submission to such conduct is made either explicitly or implicitly a term or condition of an individual’s employment, (2) submission to or rejection of such conduct by an individual is used as the basis for employment decisions affecting such individuals, or (3) such conduct has the purpose or effect of interfering with an individual’s work performance or creating an intimidating, hostile, or offensive work environment. (Code of Federal Regulations, 2000, p. 186)
Sections one and two of the definition describe a type of sexual harassment commonly known as quid pro quo. The third describes what is most often referred to as hostile environment harassment. The first federal court decision to recognize the concept of sexual harassment in the workplace was Williams v. Saxbe (1976). Williams, a Washington, DC, Circuit case, involved a female employee who alleged that she was terminated after refusing the sexual advances of her supervisor. It was followed by Bundy v. Jackson, a 1981 case that held that an employer could be liable for sexual harassment based on sexual insults and propositions, even if the employee suffered no tangible loss of a job benefit. Building on Bundy and its acceptance of a hostile environment theory of recovery, the DC Circuit, in Henson v. City of Dundee (1982), expanded the concept of hostile environment sex harassment, writing: Sexual harassment which creates a hostile or offensive environment for members of one sex is every bit the arbitrary barrier to sexual equality in the workplace that racial harassment is to racial equality. Surely, a requirement that a man or a woman run a gauntlet of sexual abuse in return for the privilege of being allowed to work and make a living can be as demeaning and disconcerting as the harshest of racial epithets. (p. 902)
Finally, in yet another case decided by the DC federal court, it was ruled that workplace violence that is not sexual in nature may still be considered to be sex-based harassment if it can be demonstrated that the conduct would not have taken place but for the victim’s sex (McKinney v. Dole, 1985).
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McKinney (1985) was followed by the Supreme Court’s decision in Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson (1986). In Meritor, the victim, Michelle Vinson, filed a sex harassment claim against her supervisor and the bank where she worked after having been terminated from her job as an assistant branch manager. Her claim alleged that her supervisor fondled her, had intercourse with her (she refused at first but testified that she eventually agreed out of fear of losing her job), exposed himself to her, and forcibly raped her on several occasions. The Court ruled that sex harassment was a type of sex discrimination and therefore in violation of Title VII. The Meritor case is important for several reasons, in addition to its determination that sex harassment is a Title VII (1964) violation. First, the Court ruled that voluntariness is not a defense to a claim of sex harassment. The more appropriate question is whether the conduct was unwelcome. In addition, the Court noted that not all offensive conduct, for example, a single epithet, is sex harassment. Finally, the Court determined that for harassment to be actionable it must be ‘‘sufficiently severe or pervasive to alter the conditions of the victim’s employment and create an abusive working environment’’ (p. 67). The Meritor decision is also of significant relevance for what it did not decide. It did not precisely describe what types of behaviors might constitute actionable harassment. Nor did it provide guidelines through which to analyze alleged conduct. Finally, it did not set out a clear objective standard by which to judge conduct such as a reasonable person or reasonable victim. The chapter will now address this issue. REASONABLE PERSON/VICTIM ISSUE To be successful in a hostile environment sexual harassment claim it is incumbent upon the victim to prove various elements. As set out in McWilliams v. Fairfax County Board of Supervisors (1996), they include the following: (1) The conduct in question was unwelcome. (2) The harassment was because of sex. (3) The harassment was sufficiently severe or pervasive enough to create an abusive working environment. (4) Some basis for imputing liability to the employer. (p. 1195)
The third element, which is the focus of this discussion, involves subjective and objective components. To establish the subjective element the victim must prove that the conduct in question offended him or herself (Harris v. Forklift Systems, 1994). Next, the plaintiff must demonstrate that the behavior would have affected a reasonable
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person/victim (Andrews v. City of Philadelphia, 1990). This is referred to as the objective component. The question of which objective standard to utilize, person or victim, has received much comment (Almony, 1992; Ashraf, 1993; Bennet-Alexander & Hartman, 2009; Cahn, 1992; Epstein, 2004; Gettle, 1993; Glidden, 1992; Newman, 2007) and U.S. courts are split on the issue. Because of its historical and current importance, the chapter will now discuss the issue at length. According to official EEOC statistics, women filed approximately 85 percent of the sexual harassment cases brought before the agency in 2008 (EEOC, 2009). In addition, it has been demonstrated that women generally view sexual conduct through a different lens than men (Ehirenreich, 1990; Glidden, 1992). This combination has led some to conclude that workplace harassment of women by men is unlikely to be curtailed to any great degree if women are required to prove that the conduct in question would have offended a reasonable ‘‘person’’ (Ellison V. Brady, 1991). Some suggest that the behavior should be analyzed from the point of view of a reasonable ‘‘victim,’’ who in the vast majority of cases will be a woman, rather than from that of a reasonable person (Abrams, 1989; Glidden, 1992). This would serve to compel management, which is often dominated by males, to consider harassment from the viewpoint of the victim (Glidden, 1992) or risk increased liability. It would, therefore, help women achieve greater workplace equality. Currently, two of the 12 federal circuits, the Ninth and the Third, have clearly adopted the reasonable victim standard. Four circuits, the Fifth, Sixth, Eighth, and Eleventh, have rejected the standard. The Supreme Court has not issued a definitive ruling (Newman, 2007). There are a number of reasons why some courts have failed to follow the lead of the Third and the Ninth circuit courts. Some question whether it is appropriate to have separate standards based solely on the sex of the plaintiff (Glidden, 1992; Johnson, 1993). Under identical factual situations, should it be easier for a woman to prevail in a sex harassment case than a man? There is also a concern that the use of separate standards in sex harassment cases will lead to their use in harassment cases based on race, religion, national origin, disability, and so forth (Radtke v. Everett, 1993). Yet another concern is related to the makeup of jury pools. Can a gender-conscious standard realistically be enforced by a jury made up of members of both sexes (Gettle, 1993)? Finally, will the use of a separate, lesser standard serve to make women seeking equality appear unable to survive in the workplace without special help (Radtke v. Everett, 1993)? The chapter will now move to a detailed discussion of arguments in favor and against the reasonable victim standard. A Note published in the Harvard Law Review in 1984, two years before Meritor, endorsed the reasonable victim standard as follows:
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Such a standard would protect women from the offensive behavior that results from the divergence of male and female perceptions of appropriate conduct, but it would not penalize defendants whose victims were unusually sensitive. Courts could further protect sensitive employees by finding liability whenever a defendant persisted in sexually related conduct after the plaintiff had notified him that she found it offensive. (Note: Harvard Law Review, 1984, p. 1459)
This standard would ideally accomplish two purposes. First, by allowing jurors to evaluate behavior from a gender-conscious perspective, it would make it easier for women to prove sexual harassment claims. Second, it would maintain the needed protections afforded to defendants in cases involving a ‘‘supersensitive’’ plaintiff by still requiring plaintiffs to overcome a reasonableness threshold (Solberg, a&b, 1995). A number of articles have been written in support of the reasonable victim standard. Kathryn Abrams (1989) citing a study that concluded that 53 percent of working women believed they had experienced harassing behavior, reasons, ‘‘(o)ne principal reason for the pervasiveness of sexual harassment in the workplace is that men regard conduct, ranging from sexual demands to sexual innuendo, differently than women do’’ (p. 1202). One well known survey determined that 67 percent of women find sexual propositions at work to be insulting, while the same percentage of men receiving similar propositions would be flattered (Gutek, 1985). Elizabeth Glidden, writing in the Iowa Law Review, also believes that men and women perceive sexual behaviors differently (Glidden, 1992). She favors the use of the reasonable victim standard because the gender neutral standard fails to address psychological problems faced by working women and ‘‘(i)f courts continue to use the reasonable person standard . . ., sexually harassing environments might not be changed or challenged precisely because men in male-dominated workplaces find such environments normal and acceptable’’ (p. 1839). Finally, Patricia J. Almony, in a 1992 Villanova Law Review article, argues that the reasonable victim standard reflects reality and therefore, can address the problem of sexual harassment most accurately, writing: (t)he standard recognizes the different perspectives of men and women and attempts to reconcile them with legal reality. It also deals fairly with the complainant and the alleged harasser by ensuring that valid, reasonable claims are redressed. And regardless of whether the standard can be practically applied, it has the preventive impact of encouraging employers to implement a harassment policy and educate their employees about what conduct is appropriate in the workplace. (p. 221)
After the Harvard Law Review Note (1984), some courts began to consider using the reasonable victim standard in sex harassment cases. In
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a 1986 case, Rabidue v. Osceola Refining Co., Judge Damon J. Keith, in his dissenting opinion, disagreed with the reasonable person test employed by the majority. He referenced the Harvard Law Review (1984) article and argued that the standard used by the majority did not fairly consider the differences between men and women regarding their perceptions of sexual conduct. He agreed with the Note’s thesis that a reasonable victim standard would maintain employer protection against overly sensitive employees yet permit courts to consider the differences between men and women with respect to their perceptions of sexual behavior. He concluded with a word of caution, writing, ‘‘(m)oreover, unless the outlook of the reasonable woman is adopted, the defendants as well as the courts are permitted to sustain ingrained notions of reasonable behavior fashioned by the offenders, in this case, men’’ (p. 626). The Sixth Circuit adopted Judge Keith’s reasoning in Yates v. AVCO Corp. (1987). The case involved constructive discharge based on sex harassment. In acknowledging the argument set out by Judge Keith in his dissent one year earlier, the court wrote: In a sexual harassment case involving a male supervisor’s harassment of a female subordinate, it seems only reasonable that the person standing in the shoes of the employee should be ‘‘the reasonable woman’’ since the plaintiff in this type of case is required to be a member of a protected class and is by definition female (p. 637).
In a reference to Judge Keith’s Rabidue dissent, the court acknowledged that ‘‘men and women are vulnerable in different ways and offended by different behavior’’ (p. 637). The Third Circuit followed the Sixth in adopting the reasonable victim standard in Andrews v. City of Philadelphia, decided in 1990. The plaintiffs in Andrews, Pricilla Kelsey Andrews and Debra Ann Conn, worked for the Philadelphia Police Department. They claimed that they were the victims of harassment involving abusive language, property destruction, and anonymous phone calls. Andrews also claimed that she was physically harmed. The court focused on the objective element of proof and determined that to be successful a plaintiff must establish that ‘‘the discrimination would detrimentally affect a reasonable person of the same sex (emphasis added)’’ (pp. 1482–1483). The court justified its position by noting that the purpose of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was, at least in part, to permit women to become part of the workforce more freely. To do this, they must be able to work without fear of harassment. The court concluded that the reasonable victim standard was the appropriate method of alleviating those fears. The Ninth Circuit became the last to adopt the reasonable victim standard. In Ellison v. Brady (1991), the plaintiff, Kerry Ellison, was employed by the Internal Revenue Service as a revenue agent. She
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accepted a date with a coworker, Sterling Gray, and afterward she alleged that he began to hang around her desk and ask her for dates, which she declined. He also gave her a note that troubled her to the extent that she showed it to her supervisor, who also happened to be Gray’s supervisor. Eventually, Ellison filed a sex harassment claim and her case reached the appellate level. The appellate court first analyzed Gray’s behavior, which it determined was more severe than an inappropriate comment but not as egregious as rape. The former would not amount to harassment under the law (Meritor, 1986), while the latter surely would be considered to violate Title VII. To analyze Gray’s conduct the court adopted the reasonable victim test because ‘‘a sex-blind reasonable person standard tends to be male-biased and tends to systematically ignore the experiences of women’’ (p. 879). Viewed through this gender-conscious perspective, the court concluded that ‘‘(a) reasonable woman could consider Gray’s conduct, as alleged by Ellison, sufficiently severe and pervasive to alter a condition of employment and create an abusive work environment’’ (p. 880). Not all commentators and judges favor a gender-conscious objective standard. Several arguments have been provided in favor of the reasonable person standard and against the use of the reasonable person model. One proponent of the reasonable person standard (Cahn, 1992) writes that it ‘‘appears to provide a neutral and abstract standard so that the law is not interpreted according to the whims of individual judges or juries, but instead on a societal consensus’’ (p. 1431). Cahn raises a second argument, noting that even among women, behaviors may be perceived differently, writing ‘‘(s)ome women accept as normal operating behavior actions that other women would equate with harassment’’ (p. 1416). Concerns have also been raised regarding the possibility that a gender-based standard may lead to other groups desiring their own standard based on race (Ashraf, 1993), national origin, religion, or whatever protected category they belong to (Radtke v. Everett, 1993). These and other arguments are fleshed out below. Glidden, in her 1992 article in favor of the reasonable victim standard, acknowledged some of the issues inherent in its adoption. She noted that it may seem to be a lesser standard than the gender neutral standard. She understood that it might ‘‘perpetuate the stereotype of an overly sensitive female who cannot survive in the workplace without the aid of special treatment’’ (pp. 1848, 1849). Despite these concerns, she defended the reasonable victim standard because she believed that hostile environments would not change without it. Others are not as certain as Glidden and raise additional concerns. One problem with a gender-conscious standard, alluded to earlier, relates to the difficulty that would ensue with requiring male jurors to analyze behavior as a reasonable woman (Gettle, 1993). Johnson (1993)
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elaborates; stating that under such a standard men would need to rely on stereotypes of women in trying to think like one. He continues: (t) he reasonable woman standard . . . falls short because it demands the impossible: that male triers of fact understand and apply the perspective of a reasonable woman, even though men are, by definition, presumed unable to do so because of the allegedly characteristic male view that sexual harassment is harmless amusement and the supposed male bias that systematically ignores the experiences of women. (p. 642)
Johnson also noted that reliance on expert testimony regarding the perceptions of a reasonable woman would be inappropriate. In 1993, the Michigan Supreme Court provided perhaps the most detailed judicial argument against the use of the reasonable victim standard. In Radtke v. Everett, Tamra Radtke, the plaintiff, began working in 1984 as a veterinary technician for Clark-Everett Dog and Cat Hospital. On May 29, 1988, a Sunday, she was working alone with Dr. Stuart Everett. It was not uncommon to have such a short staff on weekends, when only emergency care was provided. While taking a break in the lounge at the end of the day Ms. Radtke alleged that Dr. Everett engaged in inappropriate behavior and made inappropriate comments. She resigned the next day and began psychological counseling a short time later. In December of 1988, Ms. Radtke filed a lawsuit against the hospital and Dr. Everett alleging in part that she had been sexually harassed by Dr. Everett in violation of Michigan’s Civil Rights Act (Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act, 1976). Eventually, the case reached the Michigan Supreme Court. In an opinion written by Justice Dorothy Riley, the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that the reasonable person standard was the appropriate legal test for the objective component of a sexual harassment claim. The Justice first noted the parallels between the Michigan Civil Rights Act and Title VII. Next, she acknowledged the necessity of an objective reasonableness test to protect employers from overly sensitive employees in sexual harassment cases. Once she had established that some type of objective test was necessary she began her discussion of what that test should be. The opinion approached the issue from several perspectives. It first pointed to the act’s legislative history. The act was passed in 1976 at a time when the only objective standards of conduct existing in Michigan were those of the reasonable person as had been the case for more than a century. Justice Riley wrote that if the legislature in 1976 intended to adopt a new standard of reasonableness, it would have done so explicitly. The fact that it had done indicated they never intended to adopt the standard. The court then considered the use of the reasonable person standard in the context of sexual harassment claims and concluded
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that it is ‘‘sufficiently flexible to incorporate gender differences’’ (p. 166). Next, the court quoted from Prosser and Keeton on Torts (1984), which stresses the importance of uniform rather than specific norms of conduct: The standard of conduct which the community demands must be an external and objective one, rather than the individual judgment, good or bad, of the particular actor and it must be, so far as possible, the same for all persons, since the law can have no favorites. (p. 173)
After concluding its discussion of the legislative intent and extolling the virtues of the reasonable person standard, Judge Riley considered the merits of the reasonable victim, or woman, standard. She echoed Prosser and Keeton (1984) with her concern that a gender-conscious standard places ‘‘Undue emphasis on gender . . . while it inappropriately deemphasizes society’s need for uniform standards of conduct’’ (p. 166). She also felt that if the logic behind the reasonable victim standard were extended that it would ‘‘inexorably lead to the fragmentation of legal standards to the detriment of society’’ (p. 166). The Justice concluded with strong language related to the idea that a genderconscious standard, while intending to help women in the workplace, would do just the opposite by ‘‘reintrench(ing) the very sexist attitudes it is attempting to counter’’ (p. 167). She summed up as follows: Courts utilizing the reasonable woman standard pour into the stereotypic assumptions of women which infer women are sensitive, fragile, and in need of a more protective standard. Such paternalism degrades women and is repugnant to the very ideals of equality that the act is intended to protect. (p. 167)
Justice Riley’s opinion also explored the concern that the use of a gender-conscious standard will lead to a legal slippery slope, with other groups desiring their own standard (Radtke, 1993). These fears proved to be warranted. In Harris v. International Paper (1991), a federal court ruled in a racial harassment case that the proper objective standard was that of a ‘‘reasonable black person’’ (p. 1516). Also cited by Justice Riley was Stingley v. State of Arizona (1992), which referred to Ellison v. Brady (1991) and held that its rationale in favor of the reasonable victim standard could easily be applied to racial harassment cases. Finally, she noted a 1993 case, Duplessis v. Training Development Corp., which involved allegations of discrimination based on national ancestry made by a man of Franco-Canadian ancestry. In Duplessis, the district court ruled that ‘‘the appropriate standard to be applied in determining whether Mr. Duplessis was subjected to hostile environment harassment is that of a ‘reasonable Franco-American’ ’’ (p. 677).
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Interesting perspectives on the reasonable person/victim issue are provided by feminist theorists. Some feminists oppose the genderconscious reasonable victim standard because it reinforces the stereotype that women are not as capable as men in the workplace (Cahn, 1992; Newman, 2007). They believe that women are the equal of men in all ways and that the use of the reasonable person standard best reflects that reality (Epstein, 2004). They also note that all women do not perceive the same conduct as harassment and that a gender-specific standard would ignore these differences (Cahn, 1992). The U.S. Supreme Court has not definitively ruled on the reasonable victim standard (Newman, 2007), though it initially appeared to be leaning against its use in sex harassment cases. This is illustrated in Harris v. Forklift Systems (1993), in which the Court dealt with the issue of whether the plaintiff in a sexual harassment case needed to establish psychological harm as an element of proof. The Court, in an opinion written by Justice O’Connor, decided that such a showing was not necessary, but in the context of doing so it laid the groundwork for what is still a matter of dispute among the federal circuits: which objective standard to use. The plaintiff, Teresa Harris, worked for Forklift Systems. The president of the company was Charles Hardy. She filed a sexual harassment claim alleging that Mr. Hardy engaged in numerous behaviors that she found unwelcome. The conduct included calling her a derogatory name in front of her coworkers, requesting that she retrieve coins from the front pocket of his pants, asking her to pick up items off of the floor that he had thrown in front of her, and suggesting that the two of them go to a hotel to discuss her raise. She eventually complained to him, and he apologized. After the behavior began again, she sued. The case eventually reached the Supreme Court on the psychological harm issue. The Supreme Court determined that victims do not need to establish psychological harm in a sex harassment claim with Justice O’Connor writing, ‘‘Title VII comes into play before the harassing conduct leads to a nervous breakdown’’ (p. 22). The Court then set out factors that lower courts should consider in deciding whether conduct caused an abusive or hostile environment. They include ‘‘the frequency of the conduct; its severity; whether it is physically threatening or humiliating, or a mere offensive utterance; and whether it unreasonably interferes with an employee’s work performance’’ (p. 23). Even though the question of which objective standard to use was not before the justices, Justice O’Connor’s opinion and the dissenting opinions of Justices Scalia and Ginsburg used language that seemed to indicate that the reasonable person standard would prevail over that of the reasonable victim (Solberg, a&b, 1995). In her discussion of Title VII (1964) Justice O’Connor wrote, ‘‘(c)onduct that is not severe enough
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to create an objectively hostile or abusive work environment—an environment that a reasonable person would find hostile or abusive—is beyond Title VII’s purview’’ (emphasis added; p. 21). She then added that the act ‘‘(c)ertainly . . . bars conduct that would seriously affect a reasonable person’s well-being’’ (emphasis added; p. 22). Justices Scalia and Ginsburg, in separate concurring opinions, both make reference to the reasonable person. At first blush, it would appear that the references to the reasonable person by the three justices would decide the issue of which standard to utilize in sexual harassment cases. And, a short time later, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals did follow the language from Harris (1993). In Dey v. Colt Construction & Development Company (1994), that court, in a sex harassment case involving a female victim, quoted the reasonable person language from Justice O’Connor’s opinion in reaching its decision. A district court case out of New York, however, Currie v. Kowalewski (1994), illustrates the lack of clarity in Harris (1993). Dorris Currie’s sexual harassment claim against the defendant alleged that she was the victim of unwelcomed hugging and sexual talk, along with improper touching and advances. The court ruled in her favor, but made note of the uncertainty left in the wake of Harris with respect to which objective test to follow. Ultimately, the court decided that it was irrelevant to the case at hand because ‘‘(a)lthough the Harris case did not explicitly decide whether a reasonable person or reasonable woman (or victim) standard applies, certainly any reasonable woman or person would have found the defendant’s behavior to be offensive and repulsive’’ (p. 63). The Supreme Court further added to the confusion in Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Services, Inc., (1998). Oncale dealt with the issue of whether same-sex harassment was actionable under Title VII. In deciding that question affirmatively the Court used language that once again left unclear what objective standard should be followed in sex harassment cases. The Court first quoted the reasonable person language from Justice O’Connor’s Harris opinion (1993). Shortly thereafter, however, the opinion states ‘‘the objective severity of harassment should be judged from the perspective of a reasonable person in the plaintiff’s position, considering all of the circumstances’’ (emphasis added; p. 81). The juxtaposition of the above has some scholars arguing that the Court is implicitly encouraging the gender/victim conscious standard (Newman, 2007; Hill, 2005). The federal circuits remain divided on the issue. In conclusion, while there are good arguments on both sides of the reasonable person/reasonable victim debate, if the goal is to eliminate sexual harassment in the workplace, courts should adopt the reasonable victim standard. If 85 percent of victims are women (EEOC, 2009), it makes sense, despite legitimate concerns to the contrary, to use a standard more likely to curtail the conduct that society wants to reduce.
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AFFIRMATIVE DEFENSE REQUIREMENT TO REPORT ISSUE A second issue that has had a major impact on women in sexual harassment cases is concerned with the ability of an employer to escape liability for harassment between a supervisor and an employee due to the employee’s failure to report the behavior (Burlington Industries v. Ellerth, 1998; Faragher v. City of Boca Raton, 1998). This section will discuss the Supreme Court’s opinions in both cases and then focus on the impact they have had on the sexual harassment landscape. It will address the difficulty inherent in victims, more particularly female victims, with respect to reporting harassment (De Souza & Solberg, 2004; Fitzgerald, Swan, & Fischer, 1995; Gruber, 1989; Gruber & Smith, 1995; Hebert, 2007) and discuss cases in which courts have determined whether proffered reasons provided by plaintiffs as to why they failed to report harassment passed judicial muster. Kimberly Ellerth worked for Burlington Industries for fifteen months as a salesperson, beginning in March 1993. She alleged that during the course of her employment her supervisor, Ted Slowik, subjected her to constant sexual harassment, mostly involving offensive threats and gestures. Ellerth refused all of Slowik’s advances and faced no tangible retaliation from him, even though he did have the authority to make hiring and promotion decisions with the approval of his supervisor. In May 1994 Ellerth quit. In her letter of resignation, which she faxed to the company, she made no mention of Slowik’s behavior. Three weeks later, however, she sent a second letter that indicated that her resignation was related to Slowik’s harassment. While employed by Burlington, Ellerth was aware that the company had a sexual harassment policy, but she never reported Slowik’s behavior to anyone in authority while she was employed there. Faragher v. City of Boca Raton (1998) involved Beth Ann Faragher, who worked part-time as a lifeguard for the Marine Safety Section of the City of Boca Raton between 1985 and 1990. In 1992, she filed a sex harassment action against her former supervisors, Bill Terry and David Silverman, and also against the city. She alleged in part that Terry and Silverman violated Title VII by creating a sexually hostile environment by engaging in behaviors with her and other women that included uninvited and offensive touching, lewd remarks, and speaking of women in offensive terms. Faragher never reported the behavior to higher management. The city had a sexual harassment policy in place during Faragher’s term of employment but failed to disseminate it among employees working in the Marine Safety Section. Burlington (1998) and Faragher (1998) were decided by the Supreme Court on the same day in 1998. In both cases, the Court addressed the issue of whether companies should be strictly liable in hostile environment cases involving a supervisor and an employee when no tangible
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action was taken against the employee as a result (Faragher, 1998: Burlington, 1998). Companies had long been subject to strict, or automatic liability, in quid pro quo cases, those involving ‘‘some type of sexual activity from the harassee as a condition of employment or workplace benefits’’ (Bennet-Alexander & Hartman, 2009, p. 408). In hostile environment cases, however, along with establishing that the behavior was unwelcome, based on sex, and created a hostile or abusive work environment (McWilliams, 1996), the plaintiff had to prove that the company knew of the harassment, or at least should have known about it and failed to take appropriate remedial action (Katz v. Dole, 1983). Because plaintiffs were more likely to prevail in quid pro quo cases, courts slowly began to expand the definition to include more and more cases (Burlington). Part of the Supreme Court’s rationale for hearing the cases was to help define the ‘‘relevant standards of employer liability’’ (Burlington, p. 751). The Court first considered the differences between quid pro quo and hostile environment sexual harassment. It did not find the distinction to be significant except for the different proof required for the respective causes of action. In quid pro quo cases it must be established that a tangible aspect of the plaintiff’s job was affected due to his/her reaction to the harassment (Lindemann & Kadue, 1992). In a hostile environment case, it must only be established that the defendant company was aware of the conduct or should have been aware and failed to act appropriately (Katz, 1983). In Burlington, the Court wrote that ‘‘the issue of real concern is whether Burlington has vicarious liability for Slowik’s alleged misconduct, rather than liability limited to its own negligence’’ (p. 753). If liability attached under a negligence theory, it would be incumbent upon a plaintiff to establish that the defendant acted unreasonably (Katz, 1983). For vicarious, or strict liability to attach, it would be enough that the supervisor was acting in his official capacity (Lindemann & Kadue, 1992). The Supreme Court looked to its Meritor (1986) opinion when considering the extent to which employers should be held liable in harassment cases involving supervisors. Meritor held that agency principles should guide courts in determining whether companies should be held liable for harassment. This made it rather easy for courts to attach liability in cases involving a tangible job benefit loss. In such cases, the supervisor was acting for the company and liability attached to the employer (Burlington). The more difficult question, which the Court addressed in Burlington and Faragher, concerned employer liability when no tangible benefits are involved. This is because supervisors harassing employees without attempting to attach a benefit to it are most often acting beyond the scope of their employment (Burlington). This makes it more difficult to attach their behavior to the company for liability purposes.
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In its Burlington decision, the Court set out a detailed analysis of agency law principle and concluded that there are qualitative differences between coworker harassment and harassment instigated by a supervisor, even without the threat of a tangible loss of a job benefit. Therefore, the Court reasoned, the two harassment types should be treated differently with respect to potential employer liability. In reaching its conclusion the Court first reiterated that a company is strictly liable when tangible employment action is taken by a supervisor against a subordinate in a harassment case. Justice Souter’s majority opinion in Faragher (1998) then fully explained why supervisor harassment is different in kind from co-worker harassment, even without tangible threats. Two of the three reasons relate to the power difference between supervisors and subordinates. First, employees may find it more difficult to report supervisor misconduct than that instigated by a coworker. Second, it is more difficult for a subordinate to walk away from or tell off a supervisor than it typically would be an equal. Justice Souter’s third argument is that employers have a greater opportunity to screen, educate, and monitor supervisors than they do traditional employees, thereby allowing them to better guard against harassment (Faragher, 1998). After determining that the use of vicarious liability in supervisor sex harassment cases was appropriate, the Court turned its attention to the Meritor’s agency requirements. It resolved that it would be inappropriate to hold companies strictly liable for harassment committed by a supervisor with anything less than the loss of a tangible job benefit. The Court then formulated a middle ground in such cases, one with the potential of holding companies strictly liable, yet also permitting them to avoid liability altogether through an affirmative defense. The Court set out the test as follows: An employer is subject to vicarious liability to a victimized employee for an actionable hostile environment created by a supervisor with immediate (or successively higher) authority over the employee. When no tangible employment action is taken, a defendant employer may raise an affirmative defense to liability or damages, subject to proof by a preponderance of the evidence. The defense comprises two necessary elements: (a) that the employer exercised reasonable care to prevent and correct promptly any sexually harassing behavior, and (b) that the plaintiff employee unreasonably failed to take advantage of any preventive or corrective opportunities provided by the employee or provide harm otherwise (Burlington, 775; Faragher, p. 807).
The goals of the Court were to provide companies with an incentive to adopt measures likely to prevent sexual harassment from occurring
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and to encourage employees to report harassment prior to it becoming overly pervasive or severe (Burlington). In applying the law to the facts of Burlington (1998) and Faragher (1998), the Court ruled that the company should be permitted to raise the affirmative defense in Burlington, but that the City of Boca Raton failed to demonstrate reasonableness in its actions, which was demonstrated in part by its failure to disseminate its sex harassment policy (Faragher, 1998). Due to this failure to pass the first prong of the affirmative defense, the Court ruled that the defendant could not raise the affirmative defense. The Court’s two-pronged affirmative defense seems to make good sense. Companies wishing to avoid liability will no doubt, if they have not already done so, develop antiharassment policies, train their employees, promptly and thoroughly investigate claims, and take appropriate remedial action. Likewise, harassed employees will hopefully report harassment early on so as to protect their legal rights (De Souza & Solberg, 2004). Any unreasonable failure to report may lead to their losing all hope of recovering damages from their employer. The difficulty with the affirmative defense, which will likely impact female victims of harassment, lies in the requirement that employees must report the harassment. It is not typically the first response of a victim (Fitzgerald et al., 1995). Gruber (1989) reports that as few as 10 percent to 15 percent of women respond assertively or report harassment. Gruber and Smith (1995) elaborate in a 1995 study, reporting that the responses by victims that the public finds most appropriate, directly confronting the harasser or reporting the harassment, are unlikely to occur in reality. A number of reasons are proffered as to why victims of harassment are reluctant to report the behavior. Those cited by Fitzgerald et al. (1995) include fear of retaliation, a belief that nothing will be done, a desire to not harm the harasser, a fear of not being believed and thus labeled a liar, embarrassment, and possible harm to one’s own career. In addition to these concerns, Fitzgerald et al. (1995), discuss internal coping mechanisms as well, such as denial, self-blame, reattribution, endurance, and detachment. Victims also resort to avoidance, appeasement, requests to stop, and threats to expose the harasser (Fitzgerald et al., 1995). In direct opposition to the reporting requirement of Burlington (1995) and Faragher, (1995), Fischer et al. state that ‘‘by far the most infrequent response is to seek institutional/organizational relief (i.e., notifying a supervisor, bringing a formal complaint, and filing a lawsuit). Victims apparently turn to such strategies only as a last resort when all other efforts have failed’’ (p. 121). Hebert (2007) reviewed the literature related to the likelihood that victims would report harassment and concluded that women are less likely to report harassment than men. She commented on the impact this would have on females in the workplace, writing:
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The different ways in which women and men react to sexual harassment are particularly problematic for the legal rights of women because women are more likely to invoke informal means of trying to resolve problems of sexual harassment, while judges considering the reasonableness of the victim’s reaction to harassing conduct place a premium on formal means of resolving sexual harassment claims. (p. 733)
Because relatively few women report harassment in the manner that would be satisfactory to the courts, Hebert (2007) suggests that courts deciding whether a failure to report or delay in reporting was reasonable, should apply the reasonable women/victim standard when addressing the issue. The studies noted indicate that a victim will typically not report harassment. Since the vast majority of victims are likely to be female (EEOC, 2009), the impact of the reporting requirement is likely to have a greater impact on female victims than male victims of harassment. In essence, assuming that the purpose of Title VII is in part to protect women in the workplace, the Supreme Court’s Burlington (1998) and Faragher (1998) rulings may have harmed the very victims Title VII is attempting to protect (De Souza & Solberg, 2004). Federal courts have attempted to determine what it means for an employee to unreasonably take advantage of opportunities provided by an employer to prevent or correct harassment as required by the Court in Burlington (1998) and Faragher (1998). A number of cases are illustrative. First, if an employer has an appropriate policy in place, it is incumbent upon the plaintiff to follow it. In Madray v. Publix (2000), the victim, Connie Lynn Madray, informed mid-level managers of alleged harassment. Publix’s policy required that employees should report harassment to the store manager, district manager, or divisional personal managers. Since Madray reported the alleged harassment to the wrong party and because once the employer was made aware of the harassment it took appropriate corrective actions, she lost her case. The Madray (2000) decision may be considered a mere technical defeat for the plaintiff. Other cases, however, dealt more directly with the juxtaposition of the requirement that employees need to report harassment with the psychological difficulty in doing so. The first set of such cases relates to the timeliness of the plaintiffs reporting of the harassment to the appropriate parties. In Watts v. Kroger (1999) the alleged supervisor harassment began near the end of 1993 and escalated in 1994. Watts did not complain of the harassment when it first occurred, but did complain to a store manager within three months of the escalation in 1994. The court concluded that her reporting as she did was timely and thus not unreasonable. On the other hand, in Jackson v. Arkansas (2001), the plaintiff waited nine months to make a report of harassment and offered no
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explanation as to why she delayed. The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the inexplicable nine-month delay in reporting was unreasonable and her harassment claim was defeated. Similarly, in Gawley v. Indiana University (2001), the victim waited seven months to report a pattern of alleged harassment, which included inappropriate comments and touching directed at her by her supervisor. The Seventh Circuit ruled against Gawley, writing that her ‘‘neglect of the university’s formal procedures during seven months of escalating harassment . . . constitute an unreasonable failure to take advantage of the university’s corrective procedures’’ (p. 312). The court also noted that she failed to report even though her numerous attempts to directly confront her supervisor had not stopped the behavior. The above cases illustrate one of the difficulties women face in their desire to not be harassed. As indicated above (Fitzgerald et al., 1995; Gruber, 1989; Gruber & Smith, 1995; Hebert, 2007; Swan & Fischer, 1995) victims of harassment are reluctant to report and will engage in a number of behaviors that stop well short of reporting harassment to the proper parties at work. These behaviors take time, and time, as the above cases indicate, is the enemy of a successful sexual harassment claim. Victims of harassment who fail to report the conduct have attempted to explain their reticence in several ways, all of which make sense in light of the psychological literature, but which often fail to convince courts that the delay was reasonable. One telling example is Mativa v. Bald Head Island (2001). When Mativa was allegedly harassed by her supervisor, she adopted a number of delaying tactics and did not report the harassment. First, she attempted to collect evidence to support her claims because she was concerned that she might not prevail in a he said/she said type of situation. Second, she wanted to be certain that her supervisor was acting inappropriately and was not simply a person who was interested in her. After determining that his motivation was improper, Mativa still did not report the behavior due to a general fear of retaliation by her co-workers. Based on the psychological literature, Mativa acted as one might expect her to under the circumstances (De Souza & Solberg, 2004; Fitzgerald et al., 1995; Gruber, 1989; Gruber & Smith, 1995; Hebert, 2007). In essence, she struggled with dealing with the behavior directed toward her, perhaps in the hope it would cease without her having to go forward. The Fourth Circuit appellate court, however, easily concluded that her delay was unreasonable, and the defendant successfully established the affirmative defense to her harassment claim. In discussing her fear of retaliation and the discomfort victims may have incoming forward, the court wrote ‘‘(w)hile such events might cause an employee stress, the unpleasantness cannot override the duty to report sexual harassment’’ (p. 270).
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In Barrett v. Applied Radiant Technology (2001) and Leopold v. Baccarat (2001) courts reached the same conclusion as Mativa (2001). The victim in Leopold was afraid to tell anyone about the alleged harassment. Despite no evidence indicating that she would be mistreated for filing a report she still feared potential negative repercussions. The court ruled that her general fear was not a sufficient excuse for not reporting, writing ‘‘a credible fear must be based on more than the employee’s subjective belief. Evidence must be produced that to the effect that the employer has ignored or resisted similar complaints or has taken adverse actions against employees in response to such complaints’’ (p. 246). In Barrett the victim had a more understandable reason for not reporting harassment. She feared retaliation and doubted that she would be taken seriously because all of the managers were friends with the alleged harasser. The employer had a harassment policy that allowed employees to report harassment to any manager with whom they felt comfortable. The Court, in ruling against Barrett, reasoned that allowing a complainant’s subjective fears to control whether a failure to report was reasonable would undermine Title VII’s (1964) policy of encouraging both employers and employees to act to eliminate sexual harassment. One case decided in 1999 (Shaw v. AutoZone, Inc.) and two more current cases decided in 2003 (Reed v. MBNA Marketing Systems, Inc.) and 2009 (Monteagudo v. Asociacion de Empleados), respectively, provide good examples of the difficulty in deciding whether a victim’s failure to report is reasonable. Shaw is demonstrative of just what a plaintiff should not do under the law. Tiffany Shaw worked for AutoZone as an assistant manager from February until June of 1995. Her manager was Donald Noble. After being hired, Shaw was provided with the AutoZone Handbook and Safety Booklet, which she was required to read and learn. The booklet discussed the company’s sex harassment policy that emphasized that all harassment should be reported. In addition to the policy, managers at AutoZone also received periodic training sessions related to sex harassment and other company policies. Shaw alleged that during her first week at AutoZone, Noble began making comments about her physical attributes. Later, his comments became more explicit as he would ask her questions about pornographic movies and her sex life. While employed at AutoZone, Shaw never complained about Noble’s behavior, nor did she ever ask him to stop. She claimed that she never made a formal report because she did not feel comfortable with anyone at the company. The court ruled against her. While it appreciated the understandable discomfort that people in Shaw’s situation no doubt feel, it concluded ‘‘. . . an employee’s subjective fears of confrontation, unpleasantness or retaliation do not alleviate the employee’s duty under Ellerth to alert the employer to the allegedly hostile environment’’ (p. 813).
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Reed (2003) involved the alleged harassment of a young woman, Bobbi-Lyn Reed, by her supervisor, William Appel. Ms. Reed began working for the defendant company in June of 1999 as a telemarketer. She was 17 years old at the time. According to Reed, Appel almost immediately began making comments to her of a sexual nature, although none were too severe. In August 1999, however, Reed alleged that Appel’s behavior turned more aggressive. She claimed that after babysitting his two-year-old at Appell’s house, he pressured her into performing oral sex on him. He told her to not tell anyone because they would both be fired. He also told her that his family had influence with the head of the company. Reed did not report the incident. She ignored him at work for a few days, but the sexual comments began anew as did a request to babysit. Reed left the company during the fall of 1999. At the time she left, she had yet to tell anyone about the behavior. Reed returned to MBNA in May 2000 and was reassigned to Appel’s team. In August 2000, Appel asked Reed to babysit and told her she looked like she needed to wrestle. She refused. On August 28, 2000, Reed complained to MBNA officials about Appel’s behavior, including the 1999 assault. Eventually, she filed a Title VII (1964) claim. The First Circuit Court of Appeals focused on the second prong of the affirmative defense. It pointed out that there is no bright-line rule regarding when a failure to file a complaint becomes unreasonable. It cited Mativa v. Bald Head Island (2001) for the proposition that more than ordinary fear and embarrassment is needed to justify a delay in reporting harassment. The court concluded that ‘‘where there is a truly credible threat of retaliation that the complaint mechanism will not prevent, the employee’s position is more hazardous and inaction more easily explained’’ (p. 36). The appellate court then focused on the two incidents in which Reed failed to report harassment. It first addressed the minor comments made by Appel prior to the August 1999 incident. It concluded that the comments and behavior exhibited up to that point may not have triggered Title VII (1964) liability, and therefore it was not unreasonable for Reed to fail to make a report. The court found the failure to report the August 1999 incident a more difficult issue to resolve, especially since it would arguably have put an end to all future misconduct. It felt that Appel’s statement that they would both be fired in conjunction with his comment that his family had influence with the head of the company did not clearly indicate a direct threat to Reed’s job. Nonetheless, the court held that ‘‘we cannot say that a jury would be acting irrationally if (as the record stands) it resolved factual doubts in her favor and concluded that Reed was actually cowed by the threat and reasonably so’’ (p. 37). This case contains much of what has been discussed thus far. It initially involved moderately bad behavior, which may or may not trigger the second prong’s reporting requirement. It then escalated into egregious
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behavior, which should be reported right away under most circumstances. Finally, the victim was understandably scared to take action because of her age and her uncertainty as to whether the comments made by her supervisor regarding losing her job and his family’s relationship to the owner of the company were truly threats. Can the Supreme Court in Burlington (1998) and Faragher (1998) have possibly intended this personal and judicial uncertainty? It appears that the appellate court could have decided this case either way with respect to the affirmative defense. Would the result have been different, for example, if the plaintiff had been twenty-five rather than seventeen? And, if so, is that a desirable outcome? (Henkels & Solberg, 2005). Monteagudo v. Asociacion de Empleados del Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico (AEELA), decided by the First Circuit Court of Appeals in 2009, provides an interesting fact pattern. Michelle Monteagudo began working as a substitute secretary in the human resources department at AEELA in 1999. She was supervised by Juan Francisco Arce-Diaz (Arce). During her initial term of employment as a substitute at AEELA, Ms. Monteagudo felt that Arce was looking at her in a way that made her feel she was being appraised. She did not, however, view the behavior as overly serious. Monteagudo left the position she was in for a time when the woman she was substituting for returned from maternity leave. In October 2000, she returned to the human resources department as a permanent employee. Upon beginning her second term at AEELO in the human resources department, Ms. Monteagudo alleged that Arce started to act inappropriately toward her at work. She claimed that he would stop by her work station every day and touch her on the shoulder (which she rebuffed). She also complained that he repeatedly asked her to go out on double dates with coworkers. On one occasion an AEELA messenger, Jose Francisco Figueroa-Cana, witnessed Arce place his hands on one of Ms. Monteagudo’s hips. He said that Arce was always trying to touch Monteagudo. Monteagudo testified that the behavior continued up to the time when Arce pulled her toward him and tried to kiss her during a group outing at a local bar. She pushed him away, but testified that she was treated harshly at work following the incident. She received an excessive amount of work and was told by the Director of AEELO0 S Human Resources and Labor Relations Department, that she would be fired if she complained. She quit and filed a sexual harassment claim against AEELO. Monteagudo did not report the conduct while working for AEELO even though AEELO’s sexual harassment policy required her to do so. Due to this omission, AEELO raised the affirmative defense set out in Burlington (1998) and Faragher (1998). She testified that her reasons for not reporting the behavior was because all the parties to whom she was supposed to report to were friends with each other and Arce. The
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court also noted that witnesses to the harassment did not report it either and that she was 22 at the time of the alleged harassment and Arce was 45. The court acknowledged that even though she was not a minor as was the victim in Reed (2003), the age difference had some relevance with respect to her failure to report. The court concluded that while her case was not strong, ‘‘a reasonable jury could conclude that her failure was based on ‘more than ordinary fear or embarrassment’ and was therefore reasonable’’ (p. 172). Two final cases illustrate the extreme difficulties facing women who are the victims of possible sexual harassment at work in light of the affirmative defense requirements (Burlington, 1998 & Faragher, 1998). First, in Conatzer v. Medical Professional Building Services, Inc. (2003) the plaintiff failed to report a possible incident that occurred on September 28. She did, however, file a report a few days after a subsequent incident that took place on October 11 or 12. Nonetheless, the District Court ruled in favor of the defendant company, determining that the plaintiff’s 17-day delay in reporting the initial incident was unreasonable. Also surprising was a court’s ruling in favor of the defendant in Philips v. Taco Bell Corp. (2000). In Phillips the plaintiff, Rita Phillips, testified in a deposition that she was sexually harassed by her supervisor, Duane Sonntag, on five separate occasions, which the court detailed as follows: On March 13, 1995, Sonntag squeezed plaintiff’s breasts. On June 12, Sonntag grabbed the front of plaintiff’s pants. On June 13, 1995, Sonntag grabbed plaintiff’s hand and placed it on the front of his pants. On June 17, 1995, Sonntag rubbed his hands across plaintiff’s buttocks. On June 18, 1995, Sonntag rubbed his hands across and down plaintiff’s back. (p. 1033)
Ms. Phillips did not report the March 13 incident, though she was aware of the company’s sexual harassment policy. She did file a report on June 20, 1995, two days after the series of incidents that occurred in June. The court determined that the March 13 incident was sexually harassing and ruled that her failure to report until three months later was unreasonable. The Phillips case highlights a major problem facing women who are harassed at work. For example, the behavior in Jones v. Clinton (1998), which included alleged indecent exposure (discussed subsequently in more detail) was determined to be insufficient to create a hostile environment. It is likely in Phillips that the March 12, 1995, incident, even though it involved a sexual touching of Ms. Phillips, standing alone, did not create a hostile environment either. This would place Ms. Phillips and similarly situated victims of harassment in a situation in which they would in all likelihood lose a sexual harassment claim if
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they report too soon and also lose if they refrain from filing a report immediately upon receiving unwelcomed sexual attention at work (White, 2006). The impact on women of the affirmative defense created by the Supreme Court in Burlington (1998) and Faragher (1998) has the potential to be significant in light of the psychological realities faced by female victims. It is difficult to argue that the Supreme Court’s decisions are totally unreasonable. The goal of decreasing incidents of harassment in the workplace is probably best served when such incidents are reported sooner rather than later. But several difficulties arise in attempting to reach that goal. First, some behaviors may be inappropriate, yet not rise to the level of sexual harassment. Newer employees may have special concerns about the impact making a complaint may have on their careers (Hebert, 2007). Yet to not report them is to invite the affirmative defense and risk losing a sex harassment claim (Hebert). Additionally, the decision to report behavior is, as discussed above, as much a psychological one as a legal one for many victims. The law requires them to do precisely what they are unlikely to . . . report the harassment. There may be no perfect way to protect victims of harassment and at the same time treat companies that truly are working to eliminate harassment fairly, yet the affirmative defense, and court interpretations of it, certainly works against women choosing to file a claim. LEVELS OF BEHAVIOR In Jones v. Clinton (1998), Paula Jones alleged that then Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton engaged in inappropriate behavior toward her in a hotel room in Little Rock. Jones, a state employee, claimed in her lawsuit against him that he first made comments about her physical appearance and put his hand on her leg and started moving it toward her pelvic area. After she moved away, he approached her, exposed his penis, and told her to kiss it. The District Court ruled against her, writing that the ‘‘plaintiff certainly has not shown under the totality of circumstances that the alleged incident in the hotel . . . with the Governor were so severe or pervasive that it created an abusive working environment’’ (p. 675). The court acknowledged that there are situations that might be considered so severe that a single incident could create a hostile environment, but concluded, ‘‘while the alleged incident, if true, was certainly boorish and offensive . . . this is not one of those exceptional cases in which a single incident of sexual harassment, such as an assault, was deemed sufficient to state a claim of hostile work environment sexual harassment’’ (p. 675). Though this result may seem surprising, Courts are often required to distinguish between inappropriate behavior and behavior that is
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legally considered to be sexually harassing and would subject the employer to liability under Title VII (1964) or other similar state statutes. Solberg (a&b, 1995) analyzed post Harris (1993) cases in an effort to determine if a bright line exists that would enable employers and employees to predict what types of conduct would cross the line from inappropriate to illegal. Though no clear line exists, it appears that some general notions can be drawn with respect to degrees of misconduct and the likelihood that particular actions will be considered sexually harassing. This section of the chapter will review several of those cases to determine where the behavior exhibited might fall along the continuum set out. In light of the factors set out in Harris (1993): frequency, severity, whether the conduct was physically threatening or humiliating (or merely just an offensive utterance), and whether the behavior unreasonably interfered with the plaintiff’s work performance, Solberg (a&b, 1995) felt that behavior could be put into three categories on a continuum that would be indicative, if not conclusive, of whether the conduct in question was in violation of Title VII. The most severe behaviors, clearly sexually harassing, were exhibited in the cases of Dey v. Colt Construction and Development Company (1994) and Carr v. Allison Gas Turbine (1994). The behavior in Dey, which occurred over a two and one-half year period allegedly included Dey’s supervisor referring to her in explicitly derogatory terms, offering to perform a sexual act upon her, unzipping his slacks while they were on an elevator together and suggesting that the reason she did not have a tan after returning from a vacation was because she had spent the week in bed on her back. Dey also testified that she was subjected to comments, gestures, and sexual innuendoes on a daily basis. The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals had little trouble in determining that these types of behaviors over that length of time were harassing under the law. Carr (1994) involved coworker harassment. Mary Carr alleged that while working as a tinsmith apprentice she was subjected to outrageous behavior by her all male coworkers. Among the behaviors she claimed to be subject to were referring to her by explicitly derogatory terms, painting such a term on her toolbox, hanging nude pin-ups around the shop where she worked, stripping to their underwear in front of her when changing clothes at work and cutting the seat of her work overalls. She also claimed that one worker indecently exposed himself to her. The Court of Appeals agreed that the ‘‘words and deeds of Mary Carr’s coworkers crossed the line that separates the merely vulgar and mildly offensive from the deeply offensive and sexually harassing’’ (p. 1010). The court also felt it relevant that she was specifically targeted by her coworkers and that defacing her property and mutilating her clothing were ‘‘more ominous, more aggressive affronts than mere words’’ (p. 1010).
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The above behaviors were clearly sexually harassing. Less severe, though inappropriate behaviors were exhibited in Doe v. R. R. Donnelly and Sons Company (1994). The behavior alleged to have occurred in this case, while frequent, was less severe than that discussed above. The victim, Jane Doe, worked at R. R. Donnelley in a bindery facility. She claims that her supervisor, Charles Stewart, commented on her clothing, asked her what clothing she wore at home or at the gym, told her that she looked attractive because she lost weight, patted her on the buttocks on two occasions, and told her during her yearly evaluation that she should never have an affair at work. In her subsequent sexual harassment case against the company, the trial court ruled against her because the behavior was not egregious enough to violate Title VII. The appellate court, though concerned that the behavior had taken place over a lengthy period of time, ruled against her because her complaint was untimely. Noteworthy from this case is the appellate court’s stating that even though the behavior standing alone was probably not severe enough to be sexually harassing in the legal sense, the fact that it continued for a long time, might have put it in the sexual harassment category. Milder behavior in the view of the Seventh Circuit was displayed in Saxton v. American Telephone and Telegraph Company (1993) and Baskerville v. Culligan International Company (1995). Saxton involved behavior that, though unprofessional and inappropriate, was not pervasive enough to convince the court that it created a hostile work environment under the Harris (1993) rubric. The conduct alleged to have taken place between Marcia Saxton and her group leader, Jerome Richardson, occurred one night when the two met for drinks to discuss workplace issues. During the course of the evening, Richardson placed his hand on her leg above her knee on more than one occasion, rubbed her upper thigh with his hand, pulled her into a doorway and kissed her for a few seconds and put his hand on her leg as he drove her home. He later apologized and said he would not act like that again. Ms. Saxton eventually filed a claim which reached the Court of Appeals, which held ‘‘(a)lthough Richardson’s conduct was undoubtedly inappropriate, it was not so severe as to create an objectively hostile work environment (p. 534). Noteworthy in this case, as in Doe (1994), is that the court considered the length of time over which the behavior continued. Baskerville (1995) is illustrative of how juries and courts differ at times in their view of what behaviors are sexually harassing under the law. Valerie Baskerville began working for Culligan in 1991 as a secretary. A short time later she was assigned to work for Michael Hall. During the next seven months she alleged that he acted improperly by engaging in a variety of unwelcome behaviors, none overly severe. They included calling her ‘‘pretty girl’’ (p. 430), making a grunting sound as she left his office when she was wearing a leather skirt,
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telling her that he left a Christmas party early because he did not want to lose control because of all the pretty girls there, and once in her presence looking at his hand in a way that suggested masturbation. She also claimed that he called her a ‘‘tilly’’ (p. 430) and that his wife had told him to clean up his act. At trial, the jury awarded Ms. Baskerville $25,000 in damages. The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, in an opinion written by Justice Posner, reversed, writing ‘‘We do not think that these incidents, spread over seven months, could reasonably be thought to add up to sexual harassment’’ (p. 430). In commenting upon the purpose of sexual harassment law, the Justice wrote ‘‘The concept of sexual harassment is designed to protect working women from the kind of male attention that can make the workplace hellish for women’’ (p. 430) and that ‘‘It is not designed to purge the workplace of vulgarity’’ (p. 430). In a statement indicative of what the court might consider harassing, as opposed to merely inappropriate, Justice Posner wrote in reference to Michael Hall’s conduct: (h)e never touched the plaintiff. He did not invite her explicitly or by implication to have sex with him, or to go out on a date with him. He made no threats. He did not expose himself, or show her dirty pictures. He never said anything to her that could not be repeated on primetime television. (p. 431)
An analysis of the behaviors exhibited in the above and other cases indicates that it is possible in many instances to determine what type of conduct is likely to be considered sexually harassing under the law. That more likely to be considered a Title VII violation includes extreme physical conduct, intimidating behavior, vulgar derogatory terms, graphic sexual talk, graphic photos, and pervasive behavior (Solberg, a&b, 1995). Conduct less likely to be harassing under the law includes sexual banter, occasional vulgar expressions, moderate physical contact, and non-repetitive behavior, unless it involves a high level of severity (Jones v. Clinton, 1998; Solberg, 1995). It must be kept in mind that courts need to determine that a hostile environment was created, not merely an inappropriate moment. To conclude this section, it is instructive to consider the facts of the Harris (1993) case, which first set out the objective guidelines for courts to consider in analyzing sexual harassment cases. Based on the cases just discussed and the decisions reached in each, it would appear that Harris presents a close case. Though she was the victim of several types of inappropriate behavior, there was no physical contact, graphic sexual talk, invitations to have sex, or overly vulgar derogatory terms. On the other hand, the behavior was directed at Ms. Harris and most importantly, went on for a long period of time, even after she had requested that it stop. Therefore, despite the probable closeness of the
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case, a good argument may be made that Ms. Harris would prevail in a federal appellate court (Solberg, 1995).
CONCLUSION This chapter has attempted to address the potential impact on women in the workplace as a result of judicial interpretations of Title VII’s (1964) prohibition against sex discrimination in the workplace. It has addressed three areas. First, it reviewed the literature and case law related to whether alleged sexual harassment in the workplace should be judged from the perspective of a reasonable person or from that of a reasonable victim/woman. There are strong arguments for both, with perhaps the better arguments tending to favor the gender-specific standard. This is due in part because even though more than twentyyears has passed since the Supreme Court’s Meritor (1986) decision and women have made great strides in the workplace, women are still overwhelmingly the victims of sexual harassment as compared to men (EEOC, 2009). Because of this fact, it makes sense to adopt a standard designed in theory to help the majority of victims. The next topic discussed is the requirement that victims of sexual harassment committed by a supervisor report the harassment. Although this has the goal of reducing harassment through early reporting, it places perhaps an undue burden on victims as the literature discussed indicates that victims, particularly female victims, most often do not report harassment early on. This puts women in a situation in which they risk losing a claim due to their failure to report, while essentially having to guess if the behavior was serious enough to support a claim should they choose to report. It has been suggested by one researcher that the courts adopt the reasonable women standard to determine whether the failure to report was unreasonable in light of the psychological reality related to making the decision whether to report (Hebert, 2007). Finally, the chapter detailed a series of cases in an effort to determine how egregious behavior needed to be before it could comfortably be termed sexual harassment under the law. Though there is no bright line, certain types of conduct were observed to be more harassing under the law than others. The difficulty with respect to the impact on women is that many inappropriate behaviors do not quite create the abusive or hostile environment that the law requires. This is compounded by the requirement discussed above that harassment be reported. Since this problem will be faced by many more women than men (EEOC, 2009), once again the major impact is on them and not male victims.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENT I would like to thank Tamara Henkels, a former student, for her help in researching some of the cases referenced in the chapter. REFERENCES Abrams, K. (1989). Gender discrimination and the transformation of workplace norms. Vanderbilt Law Review, 42, 1183–1248. Almony, P. J. (1992). Ellison v. Brady: A legal compromise with reality in cases of sexual harassment. Villanova Law Review, 37, 195–211. Andrews v. City of Philadelphia, 895 F.2d 1469 (3rd Cir. 1990). Ashraf, S. (1993). The reasonableness of the ‘‘reasonable woman’’ standard: An evaluation of its use in hostile environment sexual harassment claims under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Hofstra Law Review, 21, 483–504. Barrett v. Applied Radiant Technology, 240 F.3d 262 (4th Cir. 2001). Baskerville v. Culligan International Company, 50 F.3d 428 (7th Cir. 1995). Bennet-Alexander, D. D., & Hartman, L. P. (2009). Employment law for business, New York: McGraw-Hill Irwin. Bundy v. Jackson, 641 F. 2d 934 (D.C. Cir. 1981). Burlington Industries v. Ellerth, 524 U.S. 775 (1998). Carr v. Allison Gas Turbine, 32 F.3d 1007 (7th Cir. 1994). Cahn, N. R. (1992). The looseness of legal language: The reasonable woman standard in theory and practice. Cornell Law Review, 77, 1398–1446. Civil Rights Act. 42 U.S.C. 2000e et seq. (1964). Code of Federal Regulations. Volume 29, Section 1604.11 (2000). Conatzer v. Medical Professional Building Services, Inc., 255 F. Supp. 1259 (N.D. Okla. 2003). Currie v. Kowalewski, 824 F. Supp. 57 (N.D.N.Y. 1994). De Souza, E. R., & Solberg, J. J. (2004). Law v. psychology: the need for the victim of sex harassment to report it and the likelihood that it will be reported. Midwest Law Review, 19, 75–85. Dey v. Colt Construction & Development Company, 28 F.3d 1446 (7th Cir. 1994). Doe v. R. R. Donnelly and Sons Company, 42 F. 3d 439 (7th Cir. 1994). Duplessis v. Training Development Corp., 835 F. Supp. 671 (1993). Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act, Section 37, 2101 et seq. Ellison v. Brady, 924 F.2d 872 (9th Cir. 1991). Epstein, E. (2004). Employment Law Chapter: federal Sexual Harassment and the ‘‘reasonable woman’’ standard. The Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law, 5, 377–386. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (2009, March 11). Sexual Harassment Charges EEOC & FEPAs Combined: FY 1997–FY 2008. Washington, DC. Retrieved March 17, 2009, from http://www.eeoc.gov/stats/harass/html Faragher v. City of Boca Raton, 524 U.S. 725 (1998). Fitzgerald, L. F., Swan, S., & Fischer, K. (1995). Why didn’t she just report him? The psychological and legal implications of women’s responses to sexual harassment. Journal of Social Issues, 51, 117–138. Gawley v. Indiana University, 276 F3d 3001 (7th Cir. 2001).
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Gettle, J. A. (1993). Comment: Sexual harassment and the reasonable woman standard: Is it a viable solution? Duquesne Law Review, 31, 841–858. Glidden, E. A. (1992). The emergence of the reasonable woman in combating hostile environment sexual harassment. Iowa Law Review, 77, 1825–1853. Gruber, J. E. (1989). How women handle sexual harassment: A literature review. Sociology and Social Research, 74, 3–9. Gruber, J. E., & Smith M. D. (1995). Women’s responses to sexual harassment: A multivariate analysis. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 17, 543–562. Gutek, B. A. (1985). Sex and the workplace. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Harris v. Forklift Systems. 510 U.S. 17 (1993). Harris v. International Paper. 765 F. Supp. 1509 (1991). Harvard Law Review. (1984). Note: Sexual harassment claims of abusive work environment under Title VII. 97, 1449–1467. Hebert, L. C. (2007). Why don’t ‘‘reasonable women’’ complain about sexual harassment? Indiana Law Journal, 82, 711–743. Henkels, T., & Solberg, J. J. (February 2005). Victim requirements in sexual harassment cases post Burlington. Paper presented at the Pacific Southwest Academy of Legal Studies in Business Conference, Palm Springs, CA. Henson v. City of Dundee, 682 F. 2d 897 (D.C. Cir. 1982). Hill, L. K. (2005). The feminist misspeak of sexual harassment. Florida Law Review, 57, 133–186. Jackson v. Arkansas. 272 F.3d 1020 (8th Cir. 2001). Johnson, P. B. (1993). The reasonable woman in sexual harassment law: progress or illusion? Wake Forest Law Review, 28, 619–669. Jones v. Clinton, 990 F. Supp. 657 (East. Dist. Ark. 1998). Katz v. Dole, 709 F.2d 251 (4th Cir. 1983). Leopold v. Baccarat, 239 F.3d 243 (2nd Cir. 2001). Lindemann, B.T., & Kadue, D. D. (1992). Primer on sexual harassment. Washington, DC: BNA Books. Madray v. Publix. 208 F. 3d 1290 (11th Cir. 2000). Mativa v. Bald Head Island. 259 F.3d 261 (4th Cir. 2001). McKinney v. Dole. 765 F. 2d 1129 (D.C. Cir. 1985). McWilliams v. Fairfax County Board of Supervisors. 72 F. 3d 1191 (4th Cir. 1996). Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson. 477 U.S. 57 (1986). Monteagudo v. Asociacion de Empleados. 554 F.3d 164 (1st Cir. 2009). Newman, N. (2003). Book review: the reasonable woman: has she made a difference? Boston College Third World Law Journal, 27, 529–556. Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Services, Inc. 523 U.S. 75 (1998). Phillips v. Taco Bell Corp. 83 F. Supp. 2d 1029 (E. D. Mo. 2000). Prosser, W. L., & Keeton, W. P. (1984). Torts (5th ed.). Berkeley, CA: West Group. Rabidue v. Osceola Refining Co. 805 F.2d 611 (6th Cir. 1986). Radtke v. Everett 501 N.W. 2d 155 (1993). Reed v. MBNA Marketing Systems, Inc. 333 F.3d 27 (1st Cir. 2003). Saxton v. American Telephone and Telegraph Company. 10 F.3d 526 (7th Cir. 1993). Shaw v. Autozone, Inc. 185 F.3d 806 (7th Cir. 1999). Solberg, J.J. (1995a). Has Harris v. Forklift brightened the behavioral line in sexual harassment cases in the seventh circuit? Proceedings of the Tri-State Academy of Legal Studies in Business, 19, 83–95.
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Solberg, J. J. (1995b). The potential impact of Harris v. Forklift Systems on the reasonable woman standard in sex harassment cases. Midwest Law Review, 13, 33–42. Stingley v. State of Arizona. 796 F. Supp. 424 (1992). Title VII, (1964). 42 U.S.C. Section 2000e. et seq. Watts v. Kroger, 170 F.3d 505 (5th Cir. 1999). White, E. D. H.. (2006). Note: A hostile environment: How the ‘‘severe or pervasive’’ requirement and the employer’s affirmative defense trap sexual harassment plaintiffs in a Catch–22. Boston College Law Review, 47, 853–890. Williams v. Saxbe. 413 F. Supp. 654 (D.C. Cir. 1976). Yates v. AVCO Corp. 819 F.2d 630 (6th Cir. 1987).
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Chapter 10
Preventing Abuse of Young Girls and Women Ayelet Giladi
This chapter offers a sociological/feminist perspective regarding programs for preventing sexual harassment (SH) among young children. SH is one of many forms of abuse among young girls and women. It also presents an alternative approach for teaching young children human rights and includes program content and methodology. The program aims to empower young girls, providing them with practical tools for understanding their bodies, protecting themselves, setting boundaries, and raising self-esteem. It outlines what they needs to know and tells where to turn for help in making their environment safe and secure. This program is expected to contribute to the field of early childhood (EC) education by giving guidance to the staff on how to teach young children to avoid violence and foster gender equality, challenging the accepted gender power relations in our society. The chapter is divided into two parts: 1. A theoretical review of the relationship between gender and EC education. The development of gender concepts in EC is followed and their educational influence on gender stereotypes and power relationships among young children evaluated. The feminist viewpoint is described, emphasizing the importance of educating women along these lines. The roots of injustice and abuse of girls are traced back to early gender relations. 2. The Israeli Ministry of Education training programs for teaching young children equality between the sexes are outlined: ‘‘Getting Along
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Feminism as Human Rights Together,’’ ‘‘Getting Along Together 10,’’ and ‘‘Getting Along Together in Big Time.’’ A fourth program for seventh to ninth grades is now being developed.
Violence against women may be physical, psychological, sexual, spiritual, emotional, and/or structural. It may leave visible marks and injuries, but also covers situations in which there are no physical wounds. While violence may be a one-time incident, there may be lifelong overt or concealed damage. Abusive behavior may also be carried out over long periods by individuals and/or institutions seeking to control, limit, and humiliate women. All forms of violence against women, which occur in all cultures and societies, are major violations of human rights. Words, pictures, stories, and images presenting unrealistic and degrading portrayals of women and their everyday lives are universal. Rigid conventions and myths about the nature, appearance, and appropriate behavior of women are used for sales purposes, and to control or limit the freedom of women. They lock us—men and women—into stereotypes that are constricting, damaging, and, ultimately, death-dealing. Sexual domination and violence is increasingly portrayed—in films, videos, magazines, and books—as acceptable mass entertainment. Violent humiliation and abuse of women provides erotic sources of excitement and pleasure. According to research conducted by the World Bank in 35 countries, between 25 and 50 percent of all women suffer significant physical, sexual, and/or psychological abuse from their partners. Abuse is not confined to the home, but occurs on the streets, at work, in the neighborhood, in hospitals, in wars and armed conflicts, and in religious institutions (Cec, 1999). SH is among the most common forms of gender violence experienced by young girls and women. Young girls are often abused by their peers, the adults around them, and strangers. They do not always understand what is going on or realize that it is wrong. Child SH victims are expected to accept violation and not to speak up. Research carried out over the last two decades has shown that SH of women by men is widespread in business (Fitzgerald, Drasgow, Hulin, Gelfand, & Magley, 1997), academia (Fitzgerald et al., 1988), and in government and military settings (Bastian, Lancaster, & Reyst, 1996). Since males are considered the power brokers in organizations (Farely, 1978), SH in workplaces and institutions of higher education often involve a formal power differential (McKinney, 1994; Rospenda, Richman, & Nawyn, 1998). While SH also occurs among young children (Stein, 1999; Strauss, 1994), it is not much discussed because it is difficult to describe the problem in sociological and/or psychological terms and conduct solid,
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reliable research in this area (Barak, 1995; Welsh, 1999). This is particularly so among young children. In addition, most adults tend to interpret SH as an act of play (Strauss, 1994). Giladi’s pioneering research in Israel revealed that young children are aware of their own and the opposite sex, which helps them maintain gender borders. SH at young ages apparently does not stem from sexual urges but rather from desires related to social and cultural gender concepts, primarily the desire to demonstrate power and gain social capital within their age group. Considering the links between gender and sexuality is a dynamic approach to thinking about SH among young children (Giladi, 2004). Influenced by post-modernism and -structuralism, including feminist post-structuralism (i.e., post-structuralist critiques of modernist discourses, inducing pedagogical discourses in academia), there is an increasing demand for reform in theory and practice in EC education based on a developmentally appropriate approach (Silin, 1995; Yelland, 1998). Feminist post-structuralist voices are particularly emphatic in this context. Inspired by the work of Valerie Walkerdine (1989, 1990) and Bronwyn Davies (1989), these studies highlight the gendered nature of EC traditions and ‘‘truths’’ and how these affect children and their developmental possibilities. They claim that childhood innocence and ‘‘naturalness’’ is a myth, whereas EC practices in fact ‘‘naturalize’’ gendered violence and aggression between boys and girls. Davies maintains that feminist post-structuralism provides a powerful theoretical basis for understanding how children are gendered, re-evaluating gender in EC education, and for building improved feminist pedagogies. Nevertheless, gender equity approaches applied to other areas of education have barely affected, let alone reformed, EC education. EC education theory considers whether small children should be exposed to sexuality (Sears & Williams, 1999). As Bickmore (Sears and Williams, 1999) notes, sexuality features in elementary school children’s lives. Assumptions about children’s ‘‘innocence’’ regarding sexuality are outdated. The (mis)information about gender relations and sexuality that flows freely today in the public-space media, from public figures, in television shows, comic strips, and billboard advertising presents powerful implicit models of what it means to be a valued member of society (Epstein & Johnson, 1998). Gender identities, including the discomfort that arises from breaching implicit gender boundaries, are learned early in life. Garvey (1984) observes that the practice of mislabeling gender to upset another child is common by the age of three to four years. As Epstein (1998) observed, considering the continuities in the modern history of ethnic and SH: ‘‘Children are both threatened and dangerous. They know and probably do too much, too soon, too young. Sexually, they are not childish enough’’ (p. 36). Epstein uses the terms
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‘‘schooling’’ and ‘‘sexuality,’’ while realizing that this may be disturbing because schooling is thought of as a public activity, whereas sexuality is defined as a private one. Nevertheless, schooling is associated with sexuality in rich and complex ways. In schools as well as kindergartens (from age four), sexual and other identities are practiced and developed (e.g., via doctor and nurse and chasing games, kiss/chase play, teasing, and bullying). This occurs in the context of the cultural repertoires and institutional conditions to which children are exposed in their schooling. As feminist and other sex educators have long claimed, the notion of childhood innocence is little more than a harmful excuse for keeping young children ignorant (Epstein, 2001; Silin, 1995). Children are vulnerable because of their small size and lack of power, and relative lack of knowledge. As Jackson (1982) points out, if children are kept ignorant, the notion of childhood serves to deny them access to power and justifies their powerlessness. As they grow up, children acquire the capacity to protect themselves by learning to obtain and evaluate knowledge. In other words, kindergarten children are capable of understanding SH only if they are given the tools required to so. To explain to young children the difference between men and women, start with identifying sex by nature and then, according to gender, that is, how a woman or girl or man or boy define herself or himself and experience her/his worlds. Differentiation according to gender, based on appearance, behaviors, chosen professions, and choice of clothing colors, is transmitted to young children starting at age four. The use of the term ‘‘gender’’ aims to reduce or blur the implications of ‘‘biological sex’’ on ‘‘social sex.’’ Gender plays a major role in the way people define themselves. The same gender group determines how to react to a baby girl or boy, and determines what will be expected from them as they grow up. Young children learn cultural stereotypes referring to boys’ and girls’ behaviors, as reflected in activities, social style, and preferences, in EC (Giladi, 2004). Children in kindergarten direct their activities in terms of gender, which they use a basis for organizing information, from the age of four. Martin (1998) claims that kindergartens do not create the gender differences, but reinforce and create further gender-based differences. In addition, in her view, children come to kindergarten bearing gender concepts created by the family and the environment, and much is learnt from the media, and commercials on television, newspapers, magazines, and through the Internet. It is also impossible to ignore all the classical stories and movies for children, such as Little Red Riding Hood, and Sleeping Beauty. As Martin notes, all these sources ‘‘gender the body.’’ Therefore, the kindergarten teachers fill a crucial role in setting expectations by the way they react to the children’s clothes and behaviors.
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From my experience as a college professor and SH prevention program trainer, the blindness of educational teachers and their assistants toward gender and gender stereotypes is clear. The goal is to give them ‘‘gender filters’’ to make them see their own and their children’s realities from a different perspective. Most of them think that are practicing equality, but analyzing their actions, they clearly feel that more than 50 percent of women’s tasks correspond with the ‘‘Ministry of Interior’’ (cooking, cleaning, education, etc.), while their husbands are the ‘‘Foreign Ministry’’ (manage the finances and activities outside the home). They claim they are doing these tasks with love, devoting themselves to their children. In effect, they are transferring society’s expectations to their sons or daughters. At this point, the power struggle comes into play. Our program shows that these stereotypes allow boys and men to behave unjustly and abusively toward young girls and women. New concepts to counter these stereotypes should be introduced in EC education in order to reduce sex- and gender-based abuse and injustice. Researchers probing the meaning of this gender blindness in educational staff claim that women should be aware of ‘‘gender indoctrination’’ in children’s daily life and routine. Maher, Ryan, Griesshaber, MacNaughton, and others are critical of child-centered developmental theories, based on the child getting all the attention needed. However, the patriarchal structure of society should also be discussed. They claim that this blindness involves educating women not to be aware of the gender situation and intervene in extreme cases or power struggles. In effect, the educational staff ‘‘designing’’ the next generation should be provided with the tools for critical thinking and gender pedagogy. This is easier said than done. Our gender training course leads to critical thinking among educators, children, and their parents, focusing particularly on SH prevention among the children at early ages. Young children from age six are trained in this way at school. Several educational programs in Israel are concerned with how to deal with sexual injury. Psychological teams take care of injustices and abuse among children and adults who have gone through such experiences. In social behavior terms, raising awareness to prevent violence among children with a focus on violent sexual behavior, was found to be important. Our program gives guidance to both educational staff and children. From a sociological point of view, many SH incidents are associated with inappropriate behavior norms, whether they involve harassment or encouraging it, either knowingly or unknowingly. In Israel, which is not the only country where SH is the norm, those not engaging in it are considered geeks or outsiders. Our society is ‘‘sick,’’ because no distinction is made between right and wrong, and inequality reigns. A combination of power behavior and gender roles or stereotypes creates the conditions for injustice and abuse. Our research indicates (Giladi, 2004) that children behave in this way not to gain sexual profit but to
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get power over their friends and improve their position in their peer group. Teachers should understand the connection between power behavior and gender. They need to learn to recognize, understand, and put on special ‘‘gender filters.’’ At the start of my career, Dr. Susan Strauss, who was among the first to report on SH in young children, offered me moral support and I followed in her footsteps. My PhD thesis, ‘‘Perceptions and Observations of Young Children’s Experiences in Kindergarten and Early Schooling in Israel,’’ (2004), dealt with SH theory and empirical data. There was clearly also a need to develop SH prevention tools to combat injustice and abusive behavior suffered by girls, who would become the women of the future. Four prevention programs have been or are being developed for young children: 1. Getting Along Together–Preventing Sexual Harassment in Young Children (for children aged between four and seven, from kindergarten up to second grade). 2. Getting Along Together 10–Preventing Sexual Harassment in Young Children (for children aged between 8 and 10). 3. Getting Along Together in Big Time–Preventing Sexual Harassment in Young Children (for children aged between 11 and 13). 4. A program for seventh to ninth grades is now being developed.
These SH prevention programs, based on sociological perspectives, deal with important values, such as respect, dignity, and equality. The teachers appreciated the attempt to bring back ‘‘old’’ values, first mentioned in the Bible (Leviticus, chapter 9), and were pleased to use them in daily interactions with the children and their parents. For example, teachers were asked to introduce these tools when presenting the Hanukkah and Passover stories, and when discussing verbal violence, physical or bullying incidents, and so on. Equality between boys and girls was the most important value presented and injustice and abuse were defined. Everyone has the right to feel protected in their homes and schools, on school buses, and in the parks. The children were taught that no one, including their fathers, mothers, relatives, best friends, and strangers, should act toward their bodies without respect and dignity. The teachers felt that the children understood and believed in the program. The concepts in the SH prevention program may be connected with feminist pedagogy, which emphasizes relationships and influences on construction of knowledge, and subjectivism over objectivism, and working together. The children are made aware of the role of subjective connection to the individual voice, and the effect of meaning construction. Feminist pedagogy is based on a variety of perspectives and many voices: Which stories should children be told
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in SH prevention programs, and how should they be told? How can an atmosphere be created to empower mixed audience of boys and girls to learn, think, and be critical of their environment: To distinguish between right or wrong on social issues, define SH in particular, create a feeling of openness among the girls enabling them to speak freely without been afraid of what the boys think or the teacher would think? How can they feel protected/shielded? How can the patriarchal paradigm in society be changed by the children or by their teachers? This particular story occurred with a group of kindergarten children taking part in the Getting Along Together—Preventing Sexual Harassment in Young Children. One of the mothers came to speak in private to a kindergarten teacher named Ilana. She asked whether her daughter was being exposed to SH in any way. Ilana answered that the children were learning how to protect their bodies in the Getting Along Together—Preventing Sexual Harassment in Young Children program. The mother then told her that she had to leave the house to take one of her joint children with her second husband to hospital. When she returned, her six-year-old daughter told her that her nine-year-old stepbrother had suggested showing her his penis and then wanted them to touch each another. Her daughter told him that she did not want to do this and went into her room, which she only came out of when her mother came back very late at night. When asked where she learned to say ‘‘No,’’ she said that Ilana told her that no one can force this kind of behavior on her and that she should report it. The mother was very proud of her daughter and thought that it was very important that her child had learned about these issues because she herself had been abused by adults when she was young and still carried the trauma with her but had never told anyone about it until now. In tears, she thanked Ilana for saving her daughter from having similar experiences. In this case, the program changed the patriarchal paradigm for that particular little girl and seems to have saved her from being abused, as well as protecting her rights as a child. How can teachers be given the tools to use after the end of the program? To answer these questions, it is clear that this kind of pedagogy has to change the basic patriarchal view. The SH prevention programs were built to include children’s real-life stories, which were used as the basis for discussions on sexual liberation and injustice. These stories highlight how lack of respect and equality leads to violence between groups of boys and girls who might think they are only playing but, in fact, are engaging in SH, for example, pulling down pants or underwear, lifting up skirts, kissing and touching without consent, or touching each others’ sexual organs. Throughout the program, teachers refer to such behavior as SH, and discuss and share their feelings about it, as an alternative to traditional pedagogies, which focus on the transmission of knowledge. Teachers now learn how to work with the
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students and be empowered by the learning process (Curtis & Rasool, 1997). In this way, feminist pedagogy has managed to change the basic construction of the patriarchal paradigm, which is unjust and leads to abusive behaviors, most of the victims of which are girls. Another aspect of feminist pedagogy (Maher, 1999, 2001) is the ‘‘progressive’’ education and ‘‘child in the center’’ approach, in which children develop in a supportive, secure environment. These pedagogies ignore power relationships among children and with their teachers. Maher claims that the teacher’s role is passive in progressive education. While teachers are expected to encourage the students to express themselves, their authority is problematic since they want to avoid traditional education systems. According to Maher, post-modernism makes an important contribution to feminism by challenging subjective identity and the authority of teachers and educators, and the dynamic and changing power relationships. Getting Along Together 10–Preventing Sexual Harassment in Young Children for Third to Fifth Grades and Getting Along Together in Big Time–Preventing Sexual Harassment in Young Children for Fifth and Sixth Grades deal with this issue by discussing negative and positive power: Violent behavior is a form of negative power, while the leader of the class or other children may use positive power to prevent violence, bullying, or boycotting. The teacher’s authority can be explained as using positive power to lead the class to a better place—to be good citizens who respect others and treat them as equals. The teacher uses authority as a dynamic force she hopes the students will take with them. In this framework, the teachers present themselves as knowledgeable and willing to learn at the same time. In this way, teachers gain respect, and the students learn how to be responsible. The result should be construction of knowledge that does not come in a hierarchical mode, but in a developmental context. To demonstrate this point, the program teaches how to avoid sexual violence and not only the children but also the teachers gain from this process. In the SH prevention program, children and their teachers are offered an approach to both human rights and gender and alternative feminism dialogues. Discussions are held to distinguish among various gender and power relationships both inside and outside the classroom. According to MacNaughton (2000), the ‘‘the post-structuralism assumption’’ claims that there are only a few forms of dialogues in society, while our programs initiate new forms of gender relationships during play and in the children’s relationships. After discussing various forms of disrespect, indignity, and inequality, the connection is made between SH and gender. Teachers are also taught how to talk to children about subjects that were previously taboo. Children learn how to refer to their sexual organs in a respectful way in Hebrew and are told that they will eventually get used to these words and respect themselves more. After 10 weeks of work with the children in the sixth
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grade, one teacher thanked our team for the ‘‘. . . special way of teaching the children such a sensitive subject in such a perceptive way, without getting complaints from the parents.’’ Since the children are addressed as adults and with respect, this generates a very straightforward, honest, down-to-earth dialogue. While presenting the teachers and the children with a feminist pedagogy (Maher, 1999, 2001), dynamic and changing power relationships are discussed. Teachers and children are taught that power is in their hands and they should use it in a positive way to protect their rights over their bodies, and, when necessary, to say ‘‘No,’’ to children and adults around them. Such alternative dialogue needs to be adopted throughout the year and in the entire curriculum. In Bible lessons, the values in the texts should be used to understand what happened and re-evaluate children’s behavior in violent fights. These values should serve as a good basis for preventing violence, particularly SH and sexual abuse, as forms of gender-power injustice. As MacNaughton (2000) suggested, the way teachers regard their students should be changed by using a curriculum suited to their developmental stage, and they should be responsible for satisfying individual children’s needs while, at the same time, acting according to gender perspectives—with the help of new ‘‘gender filters.’’ Therefore, educators and teachers equipped with the tools for feminist and human-rights discussions should understand children’s actions in terms of gender-sex behavior, while teachers without these tools do not identify gender-power relationships in children’s play and relationships, such as the field-work example presented below. The Chinese Jump Rope Game During a recess when most of the children were playing in their gender groups, three boys were conspicuously wandering around bored, whispering to one another, and making a noise. After a few minutes, they approached a girl who was holding a Chinese jump rope between her legs (over which a group of girls were jumping). The girl noticed the threatening presence of the boys and warned them that if they did not go away, she would call the teacher in charge. One of the boys approached her from behind, drew close to her, and forced a kiss on her cheek. The girl blushed and stood there in pain and embarrassment. Her friends, who witnessed the event, stopped their game and went up to her. The girl, meanwhile, sat down on the ground and clutched her cheek in her hands. Her friends suggested that she go to the teacher in charge and complain about the boy, but she did not respond. Two other girls called out to the teacher, ‘‘Amir gave Inbar a kiss.’’ The teacher in charge, who was busy talking to another child, did not hear them. I looked for Amir and did not find him in the playground; probably he had gone into the school.
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After three minutes, the girls decided to move, and took Inbar’s hand and went to the new place. I approached this new place to observe Inbar’s behavior, and suddenly heard someone shout, ‘‘Enough, enough already!’’ and a crying voice reverberated through the playground. It seemed that Amir had attacked Inbar again. Inbar stopped playing, mustered up courage, went to the teacher in charge, and told her what had happened. The teacher responded, ‘‘He definitely wants to be your boyfriend, so maybe give him your telephone number?’’ Inbar, apparently realizing that the teacher did not understand how she felt, returned to her friends with a sour expression. The friends were perplexed. They checked her cheek, and one of them said, ‘‘You don’t have any mark on your cheek.’’ They stopped playing the Chinese jump rope game. For the rest of the playtime I did not see Amir and his two friends in the playground. They must have fled into the school.
In this example, the teacher was not able to identify gender-power relationships in the children’s play and relationships, which is why she answered the girl in that way. She looked at the incident from the perspective of an adult confronting the harasser and never thought about it from the girl’s point of view. As a professor in college, one of my major aims is to allow my EC education students to find alternative dialogues and meanings. They learn sociological, developmental, historical, cultural, public health, and legal perspectives, as well as post-structural feminist theories that challenge standard EC concepts. Children and their teachers are asked to observe gender, power, and status relationships, as a way of preventing violence, particularly SH and abuse. Groups of children hear, read, and act out plays and stories taken from their routine daily life. They learn to answer questions about their gender world, as a way of understanding how they operate, make their choices, and use their power relationships. They are directed to analyze them through respect, dignity, and equality between the sexes, and share their feelings while confident, secure, and safe in their peer groups. For example, children in recess were playing and surfing the on the slide when one of the girls came to the kindergarten teacher complaining that one of the boys did not respect her because he said that he would take the slide when her turn came. When the teacher called the boy over, he said that he was not proud of his action and would not do it next time. She used values to solve a potentially violent incident. If children were given clear and consistent boundaries, they would react differently in many situations, both in and out of school. When schools do not lay down clear policies and boundaries, and teachers do not hold a gender dialogue with them, the children are not able to understand their subjectivism, and prevent violent behavior. Girls suffering from injustice and abuse will grow up to be adults
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who are subject to similar behavior in their homes, the army, and workplaces. Teachers’ awareness of sexual violence is vital for creating an atmosphere of equality between boys and girls. Teachers should learn how to achieve this in order to promote a new just and non-abusive atmosphere among young children. Equality fostered by this program provides teachers with a new look at gender and power relationships in children’s games. One way is to nurture children who challenge gender behavior, typically using values of respect, dignity, and equality. Because these SH prevention programs try to achieve changes from an early age, these methods give the children and their teachers the ability to be critical, think in a sincere way, and have autonomy, without operating from a gender status in their own peer group. If children understand gender and its implications, this should lead to less abuse of women by boys and men and reduce the number of such incidents among girls and women. They would realize that SH is not something girls or women should get used to, but should try and prevent such behavior, and if it happens, there is no need to be silent about it. This chapter tried to show how links between gender, power relationships, and EC puts the child in the center within the post-structural feminist dialogue, which sees the social context of the gender power relations between the children. The teacher directs the children to build alternative power relationships among themselves and with adults who threaten their safety by violating their respect, dignity, and right to equality. An atmosphere of justice with active involvement and action would be expected to improve young girls’ faith in society and reduce SH and sexual abuse particularly at an early age. This chapter tried to show how schools should prepare students for real life from an early age, the great importance of providing tools for understanding, interpreting, and challenging social situations inside and outside kindergarten and schools. It discusses feminist methodology aimed at empowering young girls and women educators to promote this kind of social change. These changes in EC education are expected to contribute toward reducing injustice and abuse suffered by young girls and women.
REFERENCES Barak, A., Pitterman, Y., & Yitzhaki, R. (1995). An empirical test of the role of power differential in originating sexual harassment. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 17, 497–517. Bastian, L., Lancaster, A., & Reyst, H. (1996). Sexual harassment survey. Arlington, VA: Defense Manpower Data Center, Department of Defense. Curtis, C., & Rasool, J. A. (1997). Motivating future educators through empowerment: A special case. The Education Forum, 61, 307–313.
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Davies, B. (1989). Frogs and snails and feminist tales: Preschool children and gender. North Sydney, Australia: Allen and Unwin. Epstein, D., & Johnson, R. (1998). Schooling sexualities. Philadelphia: Open University Press. Fitzgerald, L., Drasgow, F., Hulin, C., Gelfand, M., & Magley, V. (1997). Antecedents and consequences of sexual harassment in organizations. Journal of Applied Psychology, 82, 578–589. Fitzgerald, L., Shullman, S., Bailey, N., Richards, M., Swecker, J., Gold, Y., et al. (1988). The incidence and dimensions of sexual harassment in academia and workplace. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 32, 152–175. Garvey, C. (1984). Children’s talk. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Giladi, A. (2004). Sexual harassment? Perceptions and observations of young children’s experiences in kindergarten and early schooling in Israel. APU University, 23–27, 30–36, 75–100, 162–175, 291. Jackson, S. (1982). Childhood and sexuality. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. MacNaughton, G. (2000). Rethinking gender in early childhood education. London: Paul Chapman Publishing. Maher, F. A. (1999). Progressive education and feminist pedagogies: issues in gender, power and authority, Teachers College Record 101, 1, 35–59. Maher, F. A. (2001). John Dewey, Progressive education and feminist pedagogies: issues in gender and authority. In K. Weiler (Ed.), Feminist engagement (pp. 13–32). New York: Routledge. Martin, K. A. (1998). Becoming a gender body: Practices of preschools. American Sociological Review, 63, 494–511. McKinney, K. (1994). Sexual harassment and college faculty members. Deviant Behavior: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 15, 171–191. Rospenda, K. M., Richman, J. A., & Nawyn, S. J. (1998). Doing power: A confluence of gender, race and class in contra-power sexual harassment. Gender and Society, 12, 40–60. Ryan, S., & Griesshaber, S. (2005). Shifting from developmental to postmodern practices in early childhood teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education, 56, 34–35. Sears, J., & Williams, J. (1999). Queering elementary education. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group and National Book Network. Silin, J. (1995). Sex, death and the education of children: Our passion for ignorance in the age of Aids. New York: Teachers College Press. Stein, N. (1999). Classrooms and courtrooms. New York: Teachers College Press. Strauss, S. (1994). Sexual harassment at an early age. Principal, 74, 27–30. Walkerdine, V. (1989). Counting girls out. London: Virago. Walkerdine, V. (1990). School-girl fictions. London: Verso. Welsh, S. (1999). Gender and sexual harassment. Annual Review of Sociology, 25, 169–190. Yelland, N. (Ed.). (1998). Gender in early childhood. New York: Routledge.
Chapter 11
In Women’s Voices Lindsay Baker
Feminism to me means equality on all levels. I see the future of feminism focusing more on gender equality. Today there are more women in the workplace. This began to change during the economic depression of our society. Middle-class families were unable to sustain a certain style of living on the single salary of a husband. Therefore, women in households were almost forced, as it may be described, to go outside of the home, where they had spent their days taking care of the children and making sure dinner was ready by five o’clock, to supplement the increased costs from the decline of the economy. Many good things have come from women in today’s workforce. Women have been given the opportunity to increase self-satisfaction and self-esteem. In addition to personal leaps and bounds, women in today’s workforce have had the opportunity to work in a changing economy, a changing world. They contribute to their family, as well as to their community in the workplace. When a woman works in the home, she is very focused on the needs of others: cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, and other necessary home tasks. In the workplace, women have the opportunity to spend their days meeting their own needs. For most women, the workforce may be considered less stressful and less demanding than being home with their spouse and children. However, I feel that feminism is much more than just equality in the workplace. Beginning with the first wave of feminist movements, women have worked hard to develop equal rights. In the second wave, women’s cultural and political inequalities were expressed. Women spoke up and helped others understand how these inequalities could affect their personal lives. The third wave brought about gender indifferences, it
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helped to explore sexuality, as well as analyze what many would call gender-specific roles. All of the explorations in the three waves of feminism are what have brought women to this place in today’s society. Domestic violence centers have been started. Activism against inequalities takes place all over the world. College courses on the feminist movement have been taught. Books on gender equality have been written. All of this has been possible because of the feminist movement. What do I see for the future of feminism? This question is hard to answer. In today’s society the current economy has put people in ‘‘tough times.’’ I predict that the label of ‘‘feminists’’ will begin to phase out. I see future youth, of both genders, taking a stand. I see pro-feminist ideas continuing to be implemented through education in school, crisis center openings, and even more options for counseling and issue discussion to take place. The future is going to bring more opportunity for equality. The future is going to bring more opportunity for societal growth. I see feminism becoming more and more popular; however, I don’t see the title of ‘‘feminist beliefs’’ continuing. I see earlier generations integrating equality of gender in their everyday life. In the future, I would hope that schools would help to educate our students on why gender equality is so important. Also, I would hope to see employers allowing employees the opportunity to be trained on these issues. I would hope that sufficient sexual harassment training will be offered, as well as the opportunity for all companies to pay their employees equally for equal skill and quality work. In addition to the youth of today’s society, I hope to see a collaboration of all ages and genders in the future. By collaborating, men and women can work together to express their views. They can work together to make changes, as well as make a stand for inequality all over the world. ‘‘Feminist politics aims to end domination to free us to be who we are—to live lives where we love justice, where we can live in peace. Feminism is for everybody’’ (hooks, 2000, p. 118). REFERENCE hooks, b. (2000). Feminism is for everybody: Passionate politics. Cambridge, MA: South End Press.
About the Editor and Contributors
EDITOR Michele A. Paludi, PhD, is the Series Editor for Women’s Psychology for Praeger Publishers. She is the author/editor of 33 college textbooks, and more than 160 scholarly articles and conference presentations on sexual harassment, campus violence, psychology of women, gender, and sexual harassment and victimization. Her book, Ivory Power: Sexual Harassment on Campus (1990) received the 1992 Myers Center Award for Outstanding Book on Human Rights in the United States. Dr. Paludi served as Chair of the U.S. Department of Education’s Subpanel on the Prevention of Violence, Sexual Harassment, and Alcohol and Other Drug Problems in Higher Education. She was one of six scholars in the United States to be selected for this Subpanel. She also was a consultant to and a member of former New York State Governor Mario Cuomo’s Task Force on Sexual Harassment. Dr. Paludi serves as an expert witness for court proceedings and administrative hearings on sexual harassment. She has had extensive experience in conducting training programs and investigations of sexual harassment and other EEO issues for businesses and educational institutions. In addition, Dr. Paludi has held faculty positions at Franklin & Marshall College, Kent State University, Hunter College, Union College, and Union Graduate College, where she directs the human resource management certificate program. She teaches in the School of Management.
CONTRIBUTORS Lindsay Baker graduated from Southern Vermont College in December 2008 with a BS in Business Administration and Management. She is enrolled in the General MBA Program, as well as the Certificate of Human Resources Program at Union Graduate College. She plans to graduate in
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June 2010. Lindsay is currently interning at Horizon Bradco of Schenectady, New York, in Human Resources and Accounting. Sarah Metzgar Boggess has more than 20 years’ career experience, spanning the functions of communications, marketing, journalism, governmental relations, and resource development. She currently works in the field of higher education. She has a bachelor’s degree in economics and government from Dartmouth College and a master’s degree in business administration and certificate in Human Resources Management from Union Graduate College. Donna Castaneda, PhD, is professor of psychology at San Diego State University–Imperial Valley Campus. She received her PhD in social psychology from the University of California, Davis. Her research focuses on gender and ethnicity and their relationship to mental and physical health. She has investigated the impact of close relationship factors in HIV/AIDS risk behavior, particularly among Latinos; the HIV/AIDS prevention needs of women factory workers in Mexico; the close relationship context and how it affects intimate partner violence; and the relationship between marital satisfaction and mental health among wives and husbands. Another area of interest is in the role of structural factors, or aspects of service delivery systems, in the provision of health and mental health services to Latinos. Joan C. Chrisler, PhD, is Class of 1943 Professor of Psychology at Connecticut College, where she teaches courses on the psychology of women and health psychology. She has published extensively on the psychology of women and gender and is especially known for her work on women’s health, menstruation, weight, and body image. She edited Sex Roles: A Journal of Research from 2002 to 2006, and is editor or co-editor of eight books, including Women over 50: Psychological Perspectives (2007), From Menarche to Menopause: The Female Body in Feminist Therapy (2004), Lectures on the Psychology of Women (4th ed., 2008), and the Handbook of Gender Research in Psychology (forthcoming). Cynthia Garrett, MA, MSW, is Lecturer in Psychology at Connecticut College, where she teaches laboratory sections of the Psychology as a Natural Science course. She previously practiced clinical social work at the Wheeler Clinic and the University of Connecticut Health Center. Her areas of expertise are trauma, women and addiction, and the clinical use of dialectical behavior therapy. Ayelet Giladi, PhD, is a pioneer and recognized expert on the harassment of young children in Israel. Dr. Giladi earned her undergraduate
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and master’s degree at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Dr. Giladi, a professor at Kibbutz College, teaches her students how to recognize sexual harassment of children, conduct qualitative research, and report on the phenomenon. In addition, Dr. Giladi conducts research on the issue, consults with a variety of organizations, and conducts training about sexual harassment at an early age. She has authored prevention programs for use with children ages 4 to 7 and 11 to 13. She is the chairwoman of the Voice of the Child Association: Prevention of Sexual Harassment Among Young Children. She has been featured on Israeli television, radio programs, and newscasts and in Israeli newspaper articles. Dr. Giladi trains family judges, physicians, nurses, psychologists, educators, and school administrators about sexual harassment. She earned a doctorate in sociology education from England ARU University. Shelly Grabe, PhD, a psychologist and research scientist at the University of California–Santa Cruz, received her training from Michigan State University and the Universities of Missouri and Washington. Her research interests are in the area of the psychology of women and focus on an examination of how the treatment of women’s bodies as objects contributes to the process of marginalization of women via threats to their psychological well-being. Dr. Grabe is trained as a statistician and methodologist and has extensive experience conducting empirical research examining the connection between women’s bodies and psychological well-being. She was a recipient of the Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award for her research on women’s body objectification and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Women’s Research Center before beginning an Associate Professor position in Social Psychology at the University of California–Santa Cruz in the fall of 2008. Her current interests are in using interdisciplinary, feminist research to address social justice in the context of globalization. Katie L. Kelly graduated from Union College in 2008 with a BS in Psychology and a Minor in Classics. She completed her HR Certificate at Union Graduate College in August 2009. Thereafter, she hopes to pursue an MA in Industrial Organizational Psychology, using her skills in psychology and business in the HR Field. Kristina Hicks earned her MBA from Union Graduate College, where she specialized in Human Resource Management. She also earned a Certificate in Human Resource Management from Union Graduate College. Her interests include women and management and human resource management, including training and development, recruitment and selection, motivation, communications, and international human resource management.
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About the Editor and Contributors
Jennifer L. Martin is the department head of English at a public alternative high school for at-risk students in Michigan and a lecturer at Oakland University, where she teaches graduate research methods in the department of Educational Leadership, Feminist Methods, and Introduction to WGS in the department of Women and Gender Studies. She is not only a feminist teacher, but a feminist activist. She has volunteered as an assault responder and engaged in political action for feminist causes. Currently, she is the Title IX Education Task Force Chair for the Michigan National Organization for Women in order to advocate for Title IX compliance in Michigan’s schools. She has conducted research and written articles on the topics of peer sexual harassment, teaching for social justice, service learning, and the at-risk student. Michelle McKenzie received her MA in psychology from Pepperdine University. Her academic interests include violence against women and sexual assault prevention. She is currently working on her memoir about date rape. She is also a speaker for the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network and a rape crisis counselor. Noorfarah Merali, PhD, is an Associate Professor and the Coordinator/ Director of the Counselling Psychology Graduate Program at the University of Alberta. She is a specialist in cultural diversity and cross-cultural adjustment. Dr. Merali’s research program examines family adaptation across cultures and through the cultural transition process instigated by immigration. Her research addresses two family subsystems: the parentchild subsystem and the husband–wife dyad. With respect to marital relations, Dr. Merali has recently been working collaboratively with cultural community organizations in Canada to study arranged marriage practices and their application across international borders. Her research in this area has identified theoretical frameworks for studying marriage migration, changes to federal government policies to reduce the vulnerability of women in international arranged marriages to intimate partner violence, and training implications for community workers responding to marital conflict/violence and mental health problems like depression among individuals in arranged marriage situations. Dr. Merali acts as a consultant to settlement agencies and cultural community organizations, taking a leadership role in ethnic community needs assessments, program design and evaluation, and staff training. She is a Registered Psychologist with the College of Alberta Psychologists and is a member of the Canadian Psychological Association, American Psychological Association, and the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (International). Carmen A. Paludi, Jr. holds advanced degrees in Electrical Engineering from Clarkson University and Syracuse University, and has conducted
About the Editor and Contributors
257
graduate studies in Applied Physics and Electronics Engineering at the University of Massachusetts, and Engineering Management at Kennedy Western University. His 32-year career spans work for the Department of Defense in Federal Civil Service as well as the private sector. He has held positions as Senior Principle Engineer, Member of the Technical Staff, and Senior Scientific Advisor for the United States Air Force, Sanders Associates, The MITRE Corporation, Titan Corporation, and L-3 Communications, Inc. He has more than 20 technical publications in refereed journals, and presentations at international symposia and conferences. Mr. Paludi was an adjunct faculty at New Hampshire Technical College, a guest lecturer at the Advanced Electronics Technology Center at the University of Massachusetts, and is a frequently lecturer at the Union Graduate College. He is a Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) trained and certified Appraisal Team Member by the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He has developed and presented in-house training programs in Requirements Management, Requirements Development, and Risk Management. He has more than 30 years of program management experience. Patricia D. Rozee, PhD, is a professor of Psychology and Women’s Studies at California State University, Long Beach, where she teaches classes in the Psychology of Women, and Violence Against Women. Dr. Rozee is co-editor of the award winning textbook, Lectures on the Psychology of Women, now in its fourth edition. She has published extensively in the areas of sexual assault and violence against women. Anne Sisson Runyan, PhD, Professor in (and former Head of) the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Cincinnati with a courtesy appointment in political science, is a pioneer of and specialist in the field of feminist world politics. Her most recent books include Global Gender Issues in the New Millennium (2009) and the forthcoming Beyond Gender and Global Restructuring: Sightings, Sites, and Resistances, and her current projects include books on transnational feminist politics and North American feminisms. Joseph Solberg graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 1979 with a degree in Accounting. In 1979, he began law school at the Loyola University of Chicago School of Law. He received his law degree in 1982. He worked as an assistant state’s attorney in Bloomington, IL, for several years and joined the faculty at Illinois State University in 1988. He currently teaches courses in the Legal and Ethical Environment of Business, Business Ethics and Corporate Responsibility, Real Estate Law, and Labor and Employment Law. His research interests include employment discrimination, with an emphasis on sexual harassment, ethics, and teaching pedagogy.
258
About the Editor and Contributors
Lindsey Speach graduated from Siena College in May 2007 with a BS in Marketing Management and a minor in Sociology. She is enrolled in the Certificate of Human Resources program at Union Graduate College and plans to join the MBA program. Lindsey is currently the Recruiting Coordinator for the Northeast region of KeyBank N.A. Monica Ulibarri, PhD, is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California–San Diego and a lecturer at San Diego State University. She completed her PhD in Clinical Psychology from Arizona State University. Her research focuses on HIV prevention in Latino/a communities, with an emphasis on how individual- and relationship-level factors such as mental health, substance use, history of childhood abuse, intimate partner violence, and sexual relationship power intersect with HIV risk behaviors.
Index
Abduction homicide, 53–54 Abortion, 130–31; first-trimester, 135; Global Gag Rule, 131 Acculturation, 111 Act of Equality between Men and Women, 157 Advancement inequity, 165 Affirmative defense requirement, to report sexual harassment, 220–30; reluctance and delay of victims in reporting, 223–30 Afghan, marital rape in, 133 African Union, 132 Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA), 151 Agency and empowerment, 24 Agrarian Reform Laws, Nicaragua, 35 Albania, 186 Alcohol consumption, and rape, 182 AMBER Alert program, 66–67 American Association of University Women, 164 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) (1990), 152 Amnesty International, 5 Andrews v. City of Philadelphia, 212, 214 Animal husbandry, women in, 29 Argentina, 186 Armed conflict and rape, 191–93; ethnic cleansing, 192–93
Arranged marriage: consent and coercion, 104–6, child marriage, 105, choice, level of, 105, widow marriage, 105–6; definition, 102; economic rights, 101; individual-level variables affecting, 110–12, acculturation, 111, education, employment, gender, 110–11, non-family living arrangements, 111, opportunities for peers interaction, 110, Western culture exposure, 110; interpersonal outcomes: marital satisfaction, 112–15, spousal abuse, 116–18; law, policy and human rights advocacy, implications, 121–25; laws related to: age of marriage, 107, 108, choice of mate selection, 106, dowry system, 108–9, gender equality, 108, women’s freedom of living arrangements, 108; nature of, 103; personal outcomes: criminality, 121, mental health problems and self-harm, 119–21, social rights, well-being, 118–19; 101; subtypes: cooperative or joint-venture pattern, 104, modified traditional or delegation pattern, 104, traditional or planned pattern, 103–4; Arroyo, President, 135
260
Index
Assisted reproduction, 136 Australia, 191; reproductive rights in, 134 Austria, 155 Baker, Lindsay, 251–52 Bangladesh, 179, 192; family planning in, 137 Barrett v. Applied Radiant Technology, 226 Baskerville v. Culligan International Company, 232 Be a Man Campaign, 185 Beijing Platform for Action (BPA), 1, 5, 18–19 Belgium, 186 Benedict XVI (Pope), 135 Blind marriage, 103 Blitz attack, 52 Boggess, S. M., 147 Bosnia, 6, 190, 192 Brazil, 179, 181 Bride price, 109 Brothels, near military bases, 190–91 Bulgaria, 186 Bundy v. Jackson, 210 Burlington Industries v. Ellerth, 209, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224, 226, 228, 229, 230 Burundi, 194 Bush, Laura, 9, 10 Bush administration, 131 Cambodia, 188, 191 Cammart, Patrick, 193 Canada, 158, 180 Capabilities approach, 21; empowerment and, 25; and social and political institutions structure, 21–22 Carr v. Allison Gas Turbine, 231 Casual sex, 184 Catholic hospitals, 135 CEDAW. See Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) Center for Women’s Global Leadership, 3
Characteristics of Marriage Inventory (CHARISMA), 114, 115 Childless psychotics, 51 Child marriage, 105 Children of God/The Family movement, 200 Children’s Passport Issuance Alert Program, 68 Chile, 181 China, 157, 186; arranged marriages in, 106; choice of mate selection, 107, 111; marital satisfaction, 113–14; one child per family policy, 134 Choice and agency, 24 Christian clergy and rape views, 199 Civil Rights Act (1964), 150–51, 209 Clearinghouse, 68–69 Clinton, H., 152 Clinton administration, 131 Coercive rape, 190 Cognitive attribution theory, of achievement motivation, 162 Cold War, 130 Colonial domination, 20 Columbia, 194 Comfort women, 191 Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, 186 Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, 191 Community Forestry Groups (CFGs), 30–31; obstacles for women in, 31 Conatzer v. Medical Professional Building Services, Inc., 229 Confidence assault, 52 Confluence Model of sexual aggression, 183–84 Contraception, 130, 138 Control and empowerment, 25, 26 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), 6, 7, 132 Corporate rules, on sexual harassment, 221 Cote d’Ivoire, 186 Coworker harassment, 222, 231
Index Criminal justice system, 196–97; sexual assault and, 197 Criminality, as outcome of arranged marriages, 121 Cuba, 186 Cultural relativism: justice and society, 20 Culture, impact on reproductive rights, 133–34 Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women. UN, 177 DeLauro, Rosa, 152 Democratic Republic of Congo, 6, 190 Demographic time bomb, 131 Department of Health, 135 Devadasi, 199 Dey v. Colt Construction & Development Company, 219, 231 Disabled persons, reproductive rights, 134–35 Doe v. R. R. Donnelly and Sons Company, 232 Domestic Violence Act, 133 Duplessis v. Training Development Corp., 217 Early childhood (EC) education, 239, 241 East Africa, 35 East Asia, 157 East Timor, 191 Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), 2 Ecuador, 158 Educational staff, gender blindness, 242–43 Egypt, parental care in, 138 Ellison v. Brady, 212, 214, 217 Employment Guidelines of the European Union (2002), 156 Empowerment: agency and, 24; capabilities and, 25; conceptualizing, 23–26; control and, 25, 26; and human rights in development, 19–23; and land ownership, 32–39, main findings, 37–39, Nicaragua, 35–36, study, 36–37; meaning of, 23–24; psychological, 24–25
261
Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), 151, 210, 212 Equal Pay Act (1963), 147, 150 Equal Pay Day, 152 Ethiopia, 179 Ethnic cleansing, rape as means for, 192–93 European Commission, 159 European Union (EU), 5, 155; abortion in, 135 Executive Committee Conclusion on Women and Girls at Risk No. 105 (LVII) (2006), 194 Fair Labor Standards Act (1938), 150 Family planning, 135, 136–37 Faragher v. City of Boca Raton, 209, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224, 228, 229, 230 Federal Economic Act (1932), 149 Female genital cutting (FGC), 90–91, 133, 139 Feminism, future of, 251, 252 Feminist Catholic groups, 136 Feminist Majority, U.S., 9–10 Feminist movements, waves of, 251–52 Feminist pedagogy, 244–47 Femocrats, 5 Finland, 157 Forced marriage, 104 Forestry, and women rights, 30–31 Fourth World Conference on Women, 1 France, 157 Gawley v. Indiana University, 225 Gender, 242–43, 246–47 Gender blindness, in educational staff, 242–43 Gender-conscious standard, for sexual harassment, 215–16 Gendered power: natural resources and development and, 26, forestry, 30–31, land, 31–33, water, 28–30 Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM) and women empowerment, 22–23 Gender equality, 251; and reproductive rights, 137
262
Index
Gender Equality Architecture Reform (GEAR), 3 Gender identities, in early life, 241–42 Gender mainstreaming, 4–5 Gender-power relationship, 247–48 Gender quota system, 3–4; contagion of, 4 Gender Related Development Index, 22 Gender-sexuality link, 241 Gender stereotyping, 159–61 General Assembly, UN, 3 Germany, 157, 186 Getting Along Together, 10–Preventing Sexual Harassment in Young Children program, 244, 246 Getting Along Together in Big Time–Preventing Sexual Harassment in Young Children program, 244, 246 Getting Along Together–Preventing Sexual Harassment in Young Children program, 244, 245 Ghana, 199; marital rape in, 133 Ginsburg, Justice, 218, 219 Global feminism, 1; critiques of, 7–10; and gender policymaking, 2–7; and neoliberal governmentality, 10–13, politics involved, 14–15 Global Gag Rule, 131–32 Global governance, 1 Globalization: impact on women’s rights, 18–19 Global Survival Network, 186 Governmentality, 10–13; meaning of, 11–12 Grabe, S., 17 Greece, 186 Gross Domestic Product (GDP), 13 Guinea, 186, 191 Guttmacher Institute, 141 Habitual residence, 70 Hague Appeal for Peace, 5 Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction, 67–68 Harman, J., 190
Harris v. Forklift Systems, 209, 211, 218, 219, 231, 232, 233 Harris v. International Paper, 217 Harvard Business Review, 165 Harvard Law Review, 212, 213, 214 Hegemonies, 7, 8 Henson v. City of Dundee, 210 Herzegovina, 192 Hicks, K., 147 Hinduism, and rape views, 199 Honduras, reproductive rights in, 138 Honeymoon Psychosis, 119 Hong Kong SAR, 157 Hostile environment sexual harassment, 210, 211, 221 Hostile masculinity path, 184 Hughes, Karen, 9 Human rights, of women, 6, 8; causal attributions for success and failure, 162–63; critiques of, 9; discourse on, 14–15; and empowerment, in development, 19–23; gender stereotyping, 159–61; globalization and impact on, 18–19; job segregation, 163; land ownership rights and, 32–39; and participation in post-war reconstruction efforts, 195–96; performance evaluation, 161–62; property ownership and, 34–35; violation of, 27–28, 34; wage disparity and, 158–63; water rights and, 28–29 Human Rights Watch, 141 Human trafficking, UN definition of, 185–86 ICPD. See International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) Immigration abuse, 116 Imperial feminism, 9 Impersonal sex, 184 India, 30, 34, 186 Indonesian Society for Pesantren and Community Development (P3M), 136 Integral Protection Measures against Gender Violence, 201
Index Intergovernmental organization (IGO), 1, 2 International Alert, 5 International Center for Missing and Exploited Children, 67, 71 International Center for Research on Women (ICRW), 34 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), 129 International Criminal Court, Rome Statute, 6 International financial institutions (IFIs), 1 International Institute for Research and Training of Women (UN-INSTRAW), 3 International Labor Organization Equal Remuneration Convention, 154 International Rescue Committee, 194 In vitro fertilization (IVF), 131 Iowa Law Review, 213 Ireland, abortion in, 135 Islam, reproductive rights in, 136 Israel, 186, 199; reproductive health care, 131; sexual harassment in, 243–44 Italy, 186, 187; abortion in, 136 IUD (intra-uterine device), 130, 134 Jackson v. Arkansas, 224 Japan, 157, 179, 186, 191 Jewish congregations, 136 Job segregation, 163 Joint Titling Act, Nicaragua, 36 Jones v. Clinton, 229, 230, 233 Judaism, reproductive rights in, 136 Juju rites, 187 ‘‘Just world hypothesis’’, 49 Justice and society, 20 Karzai, President, 133 Katz v. Dole, 221 Keith, D. J., 214 Kenya, 195 Kindergarten children, and gender differentiation, 242 Kirkpatrick Model, 65
263
K. L. v. Peru, 132, 142 Koran and rape views, 198 Korea, 157, 191 Kuwati muftis, 136 Land rights and women, 31–33; ownership and empowerment, psychological investigation, 33–39 Latin America, 4, 35, 185 Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, 153 Legalization, of women’s rights, 20–21 Leopold v. Baccarat, 226 Lewis, Stephen, 192 Liberia, 190, 191 Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act (2009), 152–53 Lithuania, 186 Little Red Riding Hood, 242 Madray v. Publix, 224 Mainline Protestantism, 136 Malaysia, 157, 181, 191 Marginalization, of women, 29 Marginalized groups, reproductive rights, 134 Marianismo, 132, 142 Marital rape, 133 Marriage Law of the People’s Republic of China, 106–7 Martin, J. L., 147 Maternal mortality, 138–39 Mativa v. Bald Head Island, 225, 226, 227 McKenzie, M., 177 McKinney v. Dole, 210 McWilliams v. Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, 211, 221 Media and rape views, 200–201 Medicaid, 137 Medical personnel, and need to help violence survivors, 201 Mentoring, and gender disparity, 165–66 Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson, 209, 211, 221, 222, 234 Mexico, 181 Microcredit: borrowing, 22; lending, 27 Mikulski, Barbara, 153
264
Index
Military Domestic and Sexual Violence Response Act, UN, 191 Military rape, 188–91; of civilian women in warring countries, 190; pornography and brothels enhancing, 190–91; of women in military, 188–90 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), 4, 12–13, 129, 141 Missing children and child abductions, 47; abduction homicide, 53–54; AMBER Alert program, 66–67; Children’s Passport Issuance Alert Program, 68; clearinghouse, 68–69; cognitive maturity of children and adolescents, 63–64; educational programs, 60–61; feminist critique of abduction research and Hague Treaty, 69–71; Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction, 67–68; impact on children and families: developmental regression and phobias, 60, emotional/ psychological effects, 58, health-related aspects, 58–59, physical/health-related effects, 58, social and interpersonal relationships, 58; needs assessment, 61; noncustodial parental abduction, 56–58; posttraining evaluations, 64–66; postvictimized generalized distress response, 48; rates of recovery, 48; runaways and throwaways, 54–56; stranger abductors characteristics, 51–52; trainers educational qualifications, 61–62; training program, 62–63; types: childless psychotics, 51, pedophiles, 50, profiteers, 51, serial killers, 50–51, stranger abduction, 49–50 Monteagudo v. Asociacion de Empleados del Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico (AEELA), 226, 228 Multi-Country Study on Women’s Health and Domestic Violence Against Women, 36
Namibia, 179, 181 National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, 47, 48, 57, 67 National Committee on Pay Equity, 151–52, 168 National Recovery Act (1935), 149 Natural resources and development, 26; and gendered power: forestry, 30–31, land, 31–33, water, 28–30 Neoconservativism, 2, 10–11 Neoliberal governmentality, 10–13; global feminist politics versus, 14–15; MDGS and, 12–13; neoconservativism, 10–11; state in, 12 Nepal, 30, 110 Netherlands, 186 New Guinea, 181 New View of Female Sexual Problems, 92 New Zealand, 158 Ngwa-Igbo community, 133 Nicaragua, 185; land ownership and reforms, 32–39, main findings, 37–39, study, 36–37; therapeutic abortions in, 132–33 Nicaraguan Women’s Institute, 35 Nigeria, 133, 186, 197 Noncustodial parental abduction, 56–58 Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), 196 Non-normative rape, 179, 180 Normative rape, 179, 180 Norway, 157 Obama administration, 131 O’Conner, Justice, 218, 219 Office of the Special Adviser on Gender Issues (OSAGI), 3 Older women, reproductive rights, 134 Old Testament, and rape views, 198 Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Services, Inc, 219 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), 5, 155 Ortega, Daniel, 132
Index P3M. See Indonesian Society for Pesantren and Community Development (P3M) Palestinian refugees, reproductive health service, 131 Paludi, C., Jr., 147 Paludi, M. A., 147 Pan American Health Organization, 82 Partner violence, 197 Paulina Ramirez v. Mexico, 132, 142 Paycheck Fairness Act (2007), 152 Pay equity, 147; Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA), 151; Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) (1990), 152; Civil Rights Act (1964), 150–51; comparable worth, 153–54; and engaged workforce, 167–68; Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), 151; Equal Pay Act (1963), 150; Federal Economic Act (1932), 149; human resource recommendations, 169–70; international comparisons, 154–58; legislation in workplace, enforcing, 166–67; Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act (2009), 152–53; National Committee on Pay Equity, 151–52; National Recovery Act (1935), 149; Paycheck Fairness Act (2007), 152; pay inequity and poverty eradication, 167; social and institutional barriers, 165–66; socialization of women, to avoid high-status occupations, 163–65; wage discrimination explanation, social science research view, 158, causal attributions for success and failure, 162–63, gender stereotyping, 159–61, job segregation, 163, performance evaluation, 161–62; work and life integration, 168–69 Pedophilia, 50 Pendleton, C., 159 Peru, 179, 180, 181; family planning in, 137 Peterson, Esther, 150
265
Philippines, 157, 158, 191; reproductive rights in, 135 Philips v. Taco Bell Corp., 229 Pink collar occupations, 163 Pin money, 160 Planned Parenthood International, 141 Population Council, 141 Pornography and military actions, 190 Portugal, abortion in, 136 Posner, Justice, 233 Postcolonial feminists, 9, 10 Post-modernism, 246 Post-structuralism, and early childhood education, 241 Power: and gender, 27, 28–29; imbalances, 28–29, 31; and water resources, 28, 29 Privatization and structural adjustment, 27 Profiteers, 51 Protect Act of, 2003, 66–67 Protestant churches, 136 Protocol to the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa, 132 Psychological empowerment, 24–25 Public Services International, 157 Punitive rape, 179–80 Quid pro quo sexual harassment, 210, 221 Rabidue v. Osceola Refining Co., 214 Radtke v. Everett, 215, 216 Rape, 139; actions for men and, 184–85; alcohol consumption and, 182; cultural supports of: criminal justice system, 196–97, media, 200–201, religion, 198–200; during armed conflict, 191–93; fear of, 195; as form of exchange, 180, 185; male perpetrators, characteristics of, 183–84; military, 188–91; myths, 183, 198, 199, 200; non-normative, 179, 180; normative, 179, 180; organizational supports for, 185,
266
Index
sex trafficking, 185–88; poverty and, 181; prevalence, 178; punitive, 179–80; of refugees and internally displaced women, 193–96; shame of, 193; systematic, 6; women’s vulnerability to, 180–83 Reagan administration, 131 Realpolitik, 9 Reasonable victim standard, 211–19; feminist theories on, 218; gender-conscious standard, 215–17; legal views on, 217 Reed v. MBNA Marketing Systems, Inc., 226, 227, 229 Refugees and internally displaced women, rape of, 193–96 Religion: influence on reproductive rights, 135; and sexual assault, 198–200 Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, 136 Report on Compliance with the Hague Convention, 47, 59 Reproductive decision-making, 138; shared, 138 Reproductive justice, 130; for children’s health and development, 140; importance, 138–40; politics and culture influence, 130–38; for women’s equal rights, 140; for women’s mental health, 139–40; for women’s physical health, 138–39 Reproductive rights, 129; definition, 130; women’s perspectives on, 141–42 Republic of Congo, 186 Revictimization and sexual assault, 181–82; in refugee camps, 195 Rice, Condoleezza, 9 Riley, D., 216, 217 Roman Catholic Church, 135, 136; Ethical and Religious Directives, 135 Romania, 186 Rozee, P., 177 Runaways, 54–56 Runyan, A. S., 1 Russia, 186 Rwanda, 3, 5, 6, 191, 192
Samoa, 179 Saxton v. American Telephone and Telegraph Company, 232 Scalia, Justice, 218, 219 Schooling, and sexuality, 242 Security Council, UN, 5, 191; resolutions, 6 Self-efficacy, 25 Self-harm, 120 Self-initiated marriages vs. arranged marriages: expectations of marriage and relationships, 114; marital characteristics, 115; marital satisfaction in, 112–13; personal well-being, 118–19; spousal abuse, 116–18 Self-insemination methods, 134 Serbia and Montenegro, 179 Serial killers, 50–51 Sexual assault, 201. See also rape; as accepted practice, 200; coercive, 190; and criminal justice systems, 197; military rape and, 189–90; in refugee camps, 195; religion and, 198–200; survival, 190; survivors of, 181–82 Sexual harassment (SH), 209; affirmative defense requirement: to report issue, 220–30, reluctance and delay of victims in reporting, 223–30; behavior levels, 230–34; Civil Rights Act and Title VII, 210–11; corporate rules on, 220–21; definition of, 210; prevention: among young children, 239, distribution, 240–41, programs, 244–49; reasonable victim standard, 211–19; supervisor harassment and coworker harassment, difference between, 222 Sexual health, 83–84 Sexuality: and gender, 241; and schooling, 242 Sexual rights, 7, 84–86 Sexual violence, 6; definition of, 178; escalation of, 192; by nonpartners, 179; by partners, 179; refugee camps and, 194 Sharia Law, 133 Shaw v. AutoZone, Inc., 226
Index Sierra Leone, 190, 191 Singapore, 157, 191 Sleeping Beauty, 242 Smaller families, 140 Sochua, Mu, 187, 188 Solberg, J., 209 Souter, Justice, 222 South Africa, 180, 186; gender equality and reproductive rights in, 137 South Asia, reproductive rights in, 136 Spain, 184, 201; abortion in, 135 Speech, L., 147 Spousal abuse: financial hardships, 118; immigration policies, 116–17; social isolation, 117 Spousal immigration policies, 116–17 Stereotypical abduction, 49 Stingley v. State of Arizona, 217 Stranger abductors, 49–50; characteristics: apparent normalcy, 51–52, modus operandi, 52; lures used by, 52–53 Structural adjustment: and land reform, 31; privatization of natural resources, 27 Sub-Saharan Africa, reproductive rights in, 136 Sudan, 6, 192, 195 Summers, L., 159 Supervisor harassment, 222, 224 Survival rape, 190 Sweden, 157 Switzerland, 155 Systematic rape, 6 Tanzania, 179, 181, 194, 195, 196 The Terror Dream, 10 Thailand, 157, 179, 181, 186 Third World women, 7, 9 Throwaways, 54–56 Total life planning, 168 Transnational feminism, 2; and critiques of global feminism, 7–10; globalization and, 18; practices, 15 Treaty of Amsterdam (1997), 155 Trokosi tradition, 199–200 Turkey, 29, 186 Tysiac v. Poland, 132, 142
267
Ubang community, 133 Uganda, 185, 193 Ukraine, 186 UN Decade for Women, 1, 6 UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), 2, 3, 5; Progress of the World’s Women Report, 4 UN Division for the Advancement of Women (UNDAW), 3 UNHCR, Executive Committee Conclusion on Refugee Protection and Sexual Violence No. 73 (XLIV), 194 United Kingdom, reproductive rights in, 134 United Nations (UN), 129, 139, 141 United States, 181, 186; assisted reproductive techniques, 137; reproductive rights in, 135; unintentional pregnancy in, 136–37 Universalism, 19–20; and legalization of women’s rights, 20–21 UN Office on Drugs and Crime Database (UNODC), 186 UN Resolution 1325, 195 UN Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA), 129, 133 Uzbekistan, contraceptive patterns in, 130 Vietnam, 157; laws related to marriage: abolition of arranged marriage, 108, age of marriage, 107, 108, Marriage and Family Law (1960), 108, polygamy, 108 Violence: physical, sexual and psychological, 177–78; sexual. See sexual violence; against women, 197; workplace, 210, 212, 213 Violence against women, 240 Violence against Women Bill, 197 Violent behavior, 246 Wage gap, and gender, 147–48, 166–67 War Labor Board, 149 Water rights and women, 28–30 Watts v. Kroger, 224 West Los Angeles Veterans Association Health Center, 189
268
Index
West Timor, 194 Widow marriage, 105–6 Williams v. Saxbe, 210 Women and sexuality, 81; definitions, 82–84; sexual behavior, 86–89, notion of social power, 89, rate of sexual activity, 87, and sexual identity, 88–89, sexual partners, 87; sexual desire, 89–92; sexual problems, 92–94, classification system, 93, definition, 93, medical model, 92; sexual rights as human rights, 84–86 Women’s Caucus for Gender Justice, 5 Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children, 5, 195 Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO), 3 Women’s Equality Day, 147
Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), 5 Women’s reproductive rights. See reproductive rights Women’s Rights are Human Rights campaign, 8 Women with cognitive impairments, sexual assault risk, 135 Workplace: equality in, 251; violence, 210, 212, 213 World Association of Sexology, 82 World Bank, 5, 137 World Health Organization, 36, 37, 82, 130 World War II, and sexual aggression, 191 Yates v. AVCO Corp., 214 Yugoslavia, 6, 191 Zapatero, Prime Minister, 135 Zimbabwe, 180, 186
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