Global Sexual and Reproductive Health

Comprehensive Guide of Gender-Based Violence by Parveen Ali (Editor); Michaela M. Rogers (Editor) This book provides comprehensive information about various types of gender-based violence (GBV) and abuse. GBV is a major public health and social problem that affects people, mostly women and girls, in every community, culture, and country. GBV refers to the violence or a pattern of abusive behaviours including physical aggression, sexual coercion, psychological abuse and controlling behaviours resulting in physical, sexual or psychological harm. It is associated with severe physical and psychological consequences, and can result in death.   . GBV can take many forms including female foeticide, infanticide, female genital mutilation, child marriage, grooming, trafficking, forced marriage, dowry-     related abuse, honour-based violence, rape, sexual assault, stalking, harassment, street violence, abuse against older people, domestic violence, and intimate partner violence. It can take place in public, private and virtual settings, and within the context of intimate, familial, community and institutional relationships. While all these forms affect girls and women more, boys and men can also be exposed of various forms of violence including child abuse, sexual abuse, wartime violence, corporal punishment to name a few. This book takes a unique approach and presents an overview of ​gender-based violence and related practices throughout the world. The book is written in a     user friendly manner in order to be accessible as an introductory text to a wide range of readers including students, practitioners and researchers. Edited by a public health academic and a social worker, with contributions representing a wide range of disciplines, the book will appeal to many professions including nurses, midwives, social care and social work practitioners, police, teachers, psychologists, and sociologists.    

Violence Against Women During Coronavirus by Naomi Pfitzner; Kate Fitz-Gibbon; Sandra Walklate; Silke Meyer; Marie Segrave This open access book brings together leading international violence researchers to examine the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on experiences of, and responses to, domestic and family violence. In April 2020 the United Nations predicted that for every three months the COVID-19 lockdowns continued an additional 15 million cases of domestic violence would occur worldwide, termed the "shadow pandemic". Drawing on empirical work situated within an international context, this book presents evidence alongside country specific case studies to provide a global exploration of how women's insecurity increased during this global health crisis at the same as their access to support services reduced. It provides a timely analysis of the degree to which the pandemic and associated government restrictions impacted on women's experiences of violence with particular attention to changes in its prevalence and severity, and in system and service responses to women's help-seeking. In addition, the differential impacts of the pandemic in relation to the experiences of priority cohorts, including violence experienced by children and temporary migrant women is also explored. The key focus is on the nature, extent, and responses to the COVID-19 pandemic on service delivery, accessibility of support, and access to justice for women experiencing domestic and family violence. 

Gender Violence, the Law, and Society by M. Susanne Schotanus (Editor) The ebook edition of this title is Open Access, thanks to Knowledge Unlatched funding, and freely available to read online. Gender Violence, the Law, and Societyanalyses and explores the historical and cultural roots of issues of gender-based and sexual violence in Japan, India and South Africa. Using a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary methods, this edited collection highlights the intersection of marginalized gender and sexual identities - such as raped women, gay men and women who are victims of commodified violence - and marginalized geographic areas. Taking a structured and holistic approach, the chapters authors break down issues across three levels: violence, state, and society. By exploring case studies from the three selected geographical areas, both the roots and effects and related organization and belief systems are explored in their relations to the issues of sexual and gendered violence. The chapters expose and consider the complexities and nuances in each country in terms of their varying cultural practices, their religious and caste systems, and racial disparities, whilst exploring and expanding the understanding of the concept of violence itself. Gender Violence, the Law, and Societytakes an important step towards synthesizing area-specific issues and knowledge into a more comprehensive and global body of knowledge on the apparently universal appearances of forms of sexual and gendered violence.

Gender Violence and the Transnational Politics of the Honor Crime by Dana M. Olwan In Gender Violence and the Transnational Politics of the Honor Crime, Dana M. Olwan examines how certain forms of violence become known, recognized, and contested across multiple geopolitical contexts--looking specifically at a particular form of gender-based violence known as the "honor crime" and tracing how a range of legal, political, and literary texts inform normative and critical understandings of this term. Although a number of studies now acknowledge the complicated mobilizations of honor crime discourses, the ways in which these discourses move across and in between different geographies and contexts remain relatively unexplored. This book fills that void by providing a transnational feminist examination of the disparate--yet interconnected--sites of the US, Canada, Jordan, and Palestine, showing how the concept travels across nations and is deployed to promote hegemonic agendas--becoming intertwined in notions of modernity, citizenship, and belonging. More specifically, Olwan traces the term's appearance in public and popular works that allow for its continued mass acceptance and circulation--from media depictions in Canada and beyond, to how it is taken up in national registers about migration and belonging in the US, to activism in Palestine that reveal the fault lines between activist and academic critiques of the honor crime, and finally to feminist efforts in Jordan and the wider Middle East to confront legal codes used to sanction gender-related violence. Through these cases, Olwan demonstrates how the honor crime functions as a signifier that governs and manages populations and how its meanings travel and circulate across and between separate and interconnected circuits of power and knowledge.  

Gender and the Violence(s) of War and Armed Conflict by Stacy Banwell The ebook edition of this title is Open Access, thanks to Knowledge Unlatched funding, and freely available to read online.Drawing on historical and contemporary case studies, Gender and the Violence(s) of War and Armed Conflictdelves into visual as well as text-based materials to unpack gender-based violence(s) perpetrated and experienced by both genders within and beyond the conflict zone.  Considering examples of old and new wars ranging from the Holocaust, the 1971 Liberation War in Bangladesh; and the armed conflicts in the DRC, Iraq, Syria and Darfur, this book uncovers sexualised, genocidal and reproductive violence against both genders. Crucially, the author showcases examples of male victimisation, and thus redresses gaps within the literature. In particular, as part of an original gendered analysis of the war on terror, Banwell unpacks women's involvement in sexual violence against male prisoners at Abu Ghraib.  By going beyond instances of interpersonal violence, and looking additionally at structural forms of gender-based violence, state violence, institutional violence and climate variability, this book broadens our understanding of both the causes and consequences of modern conflicts. Through her critique of gender essentialism, the author challenges gendered notions of who 'is dangerous' and who is 'in danger' during war/armed conflict. Eclectic in its approach, and multi-disciplinary in scope, Banwell's text is illuminating reading for academics, students and professionals working with war-affected populations.