Empowered victims? Women’s contradictory positions in the discourse of violence prevention

Abstract

Violence against women is a salient outcome of systemic gender inequality across the globe. In the US, the societal discourse of violence prevention simultaneously frames women in positions of victimhood and of empowerment. This study investigates the ways women draw upon these contradictory constructions in their meaning-making and practices related to violence prevention. Twenty women aged 18–62 discussed their experiences of risk and safety around an urban university campus in an in-depth interview. Women’s selective appropriation of victim and empowerment scripts produced multiple and tension-filled constructions of risk, in ways inflected by gender, ‘race,’ class, sexuality, and age. Themes included the endorsement of a “safety checklist” that functioned to construct women’s risk as unmanageable and victimhood as inevitable; complex generational differences in women’s willingness to identify fears of gendered bodily harm as legitimate and in the ways they did so; and the creation and maintenance of imagined communities of safety and danger, implicitly inflected by ‘race’ and class.

Keywords

discourse empowerment gender risk tension violence

Violence against women is one of the most salient outcomes of systemic gender inequality across the globe. For the past three decades, violence against women in the US has been addressed by feminist and social justice-oriented campaigns intended to raise awareness about the prevalence of violence, and to provide women with the physical and psychological skills to avoid and combat their potential encounters with violence (Dahlberg & Mercy, 2009; Russell, 2003). Accompanying the material reality of violence reflected in violence statistics (although, of course, even this indicator is skewed due to the rates at which victimization goes unreported; see, e.g., Langton, Berzofsky, Krebs, & Smiley-McDonald, 2012; Stanko, 1992) are the ideologies through which societies interpret this “reality” and which inform individual meaning-making. It is our contention that the ideological assumptions that underlie the societal discourse around violence prevention must be interrogated critically, as this discourse relies upon problematic constructions of gender, ‘race,’¹ class, age, and sexuality. For example, while popular discourse assumes that victims of violence are women, in part, due to the rates at which women are subjected to violence, this assumption also reflects longstanding problematic ideologies that equate femininity with passivity, vulnerability, and inefficacy (Cahill, 2000; McCaughey, 1997). In the present study, we critically address such problematic assumptions, as well as the tensions and contradictions inherent in the discourse of violence prevention.

As many have noted, a prominent feature of the discourse of violence prevention for women is the ways in which violence is assumed to occur only in the public sphere (Buzawa, Buzawa, & Stark, 2012). This construction is problematic for many reasons (e.g. it ignores experiences of domestic and intimate partner violence) and will be revisited in the final discussion. Although we focus our present study on violence in the public sphere, contemporary societal discourse around “stranger” violence (i.e. in the “public sphere”) and intimate partner violence (i.e. in the “private sphere”) are intrinsically related: both instantiate the constructions of women’s bodies as penetrable and vulnerable and reify the dichotomy of female victims and male perpetrators (for further discussion, see Muehlenhard & Kimes, 1999). Another pervasive feature of the prevention discourse is the assumption that violence against women overwhelmingly takes the form of sexualized violence (e.g. sexual harassment, sexual assault, or rape). While this, in part, reflects the rates at which women are subjected to sexual violence, women do experience many other types of violence. Therefore, this study explores women’s constructions of risk of violence broadly, as it occurs in the public sphere, including the ways that sexual violence may or may not dominate discussions, and the ways other forms of violence may or may not be ignored.

By focusing on women’s capacities for preventing and avoiding violence, the tone of the prevention discourse is one of self-empowerment. However, by focusing on women’s roles as potential victims, the discourse implicitly relies upon problematic assumptions equating women with weakness and vulnerability. In other words, the positions of empowerment offered to women through the prevention discourse are contingent upon constructions of women as potential and perpetual victims. In this way, the discourse of prevention creates contradictory subject-positions for women, simultaneously framing them as empowered and victimized.

While the discourse of violence prevention has received a great deal of critique for its problematic treatment of women as perpetual victims responsible for their own safety (e.g. Cahill, 2001; Hall, 2004; Marcus, 2002; Stanko, 1995), less work has focused on the specific tension between women’s subject-positions of victimhood and of empowerment that are produced throughout this discourse. Even less work has addressed the ways in which women actively draw from these tension-filled constructions in their everyday experiences. The current study aims to address this gap in the literature by investigating the ways in which women draw upon these contradictory constructions in their everyday meaning-making and practices related to violence prevention in the public sphere.

The construction of women as victims

A large body of literature has pointed to the ways that the institutions and practices related to violence prevention rely upon and operate through constructions of women as vulnerable, frail, and in need of protection (e.g. De Welde, 2003a; Hollander, 2001; McCaughey, 1997; Murphy, 2009; Pain, 2000; Stanko, 1995, 1997). For example, women are often advised to restrict their access to public space at night and to walk in groups in order to minimize the risk assumed to accompany their presence. At the same time, even as the discourse of prevention positions women as inherently vulnerable and at risk for victimization, intersecting discourses of ‘race,’ class, sexuality, and age construct some women as more vulnerable than others. This construction is concretely reflected in recruitment efforts made by self-defense courses. Practices such as charging expensive fees for sessions, and recruitment that targets women in higher education, work both to systematically exclude women of color and working-class women from self-defense training and to overlook and marginalize the personal safety concerns specific to these groups of women (De Welde, 2003b). Further, racist discourses construct black and Latino men as hypermasculine, hypersexualized, and as a danger to (white) women (Hall, 2004; Roberts, 1998)—assumptions which are often reproduced in self-defense courses that portray perpetrators as racialized strangers, despite the fact that most assaults on women are perpetrated by acquaintances (Hollander, 2001; Jackson, 1993; Pain, 2000). Also, importantly, violence is overwhelmingly identified as an event that takes place between a male perpetrator and a female victim (Stanko, 1995). This construction is particularly explicit for sexual violence, reflecting the pervasive ideology of compulsory heterosexuality (Gavey, 2005; Rich, 1980).

In light of the construction of violence as predominantly sexual, elderly women come to occupy a peculiar place in the discourse of prevention. In US society, as in many other societies, women’s bodies are sexualized differently across the lifespan: young women’s bodies are hypersexualized and older women’s bodies are increasingly desexualized across the lifespan (Pain, 2000). Therefore, with regard to sexual violence, viable subject-positions for elderly women do not exist. Yet, as women age, their bodies (already assumed to be delicate and weak) are viewed as increasingly frail and vulnerable. Women’s position within the discourse of prevention is therefore inflected by age: women’s vulnerability is constructed differently across the lifespan, as are the types of violence for which they are considered at-risk. Faced with this constant expectation of risk and victimhood across the lifespan, albeit expectation inflected by age, women are compelled to prevent or avoid the victimization that is assumed to befall them and turn to the safety practices mandated by the prevention discourse.

Compulsory prevention practices and the production of the empowered victim

Largely supported by neoliberal ideology born out of US political, economic, and social activity in the 1970s and 1980s (Harvey, 2005), the problem of gender-based violence, among many other effects of systemic power and oppression, has become individualized and attributed to personal choice and responsibility. However, individual “choice” in the context of misogyny, sexism, and racism proves to be an illusion as neoliberal logic denies the systemic nature of oppression and privilege (Gavey, 2012). As Nancy Berns (2001) explains in her analysis of media representations of gendered violence, neoliberalism has the dual effect of degendering violence (i.e. obscuring the role gender and power play in the production of violence), while gendering the blame (i.e. placing the responsibility for avoiding violence on women’s shoulders). Within this context, not only are women held responsible for avoiding violence, but women who do fall victim to violence are viewed as personally responsible for their victimization. Women are then compelled to prevent or avoid the position of victim (and instead occupy the position of the self-determined, empowered citizen) via the enactment of a number of personal safety practices.

Some feminists hold that these safety practices and the discourse of prevention challenge conventional constructions of femininity as vulnerable and weak, and instead create new spaces for women’s subjectivity, characterized by increased agency and empowerment (e.g. McCaughey, 1997). Further, having obtained the knowledge necessary to defend themselves, some argue that women may reclaim their bodies from fear and potential danger (e.g. Jackson, 1993). A large body of literature has explored the role of self-defense courses, in particular, in increasing women’s likelihood of resistance along with other positive psychological outcomes (e.g. Brecklin & Ullman, 2005; Ullman, 2007) and in challenging traditional scripts of femininity and women’s status as potential or perpetual victims (Cahill, 2009; De Welde, 2003a; McCaughey, 1997).

Alternatively, others have critiqued the prevention discourse, arguing that it perpetuates a dualistic, gendered understanding of violence, inscribing women as victims and men as perpetrators (e.g. Campbell, 2005). This persistent focus on women as potential and perpetual victims, others suggest, frames violence against women as inevitable and frames all forms of resistance or intervention as reactive to a violence that is assumed will or has already occurred (Hall, 2004). Finally, some critics highlight the ways the discourse relies upon and reproduces a construction of women and women’s bodies as vulnerable such that the empowerment rhetoric of self-defense is contingent upon problematic constructions of women’s bodies as frail and in need of reform (Cahill, 2000; Hollander, 2001; Mardorossian, 2003; Martin, 2002; Stanko, 1997). In this way, women’s bodies are maintained as perpetual danger sites and “rape spaces” that need to be managed or trained in order to avoid victimization (Cahill, 2000; Hollander, 2001). Women-centered prevention approaches, from this perspective, signal that women are responsible for their own safety, and thus may be held to blame for “poor risk management” should they fall victim to violence (Lamb, 1996).

From tension-filled discourse to subjectivity: The current study

The current study is guided by a systemic perspective in which individual meaning-making is understood to be in a dialectical relation with local and macro-social processes. Gender is seen as a social formation that includes material, discursive, institutional, symbolic, and psychological elements, indissolubly linked and systemically related, and that intersects with social formations of ‘race,’ class, sexuality, and age in structuring the social world at all levels. The politics and structuring functions inherent in macro-social processes of gender, ‘race,’ class, sexuality, and age both constitute the individual as a social actor and configure the local discursive processes through which meaning is co-constructed in local interaction. Embedded in this system, individuals construct their identity and meaning-making by appropriating, rejecting, transforming, or interpreting available societal discourses in ways that are both agentive and constrained (Falmagne, 2004, pp. 822–828, 838–840). Women’s lifelong process of identity construction (consisting of ongoing negotiations of discourses of gender, ‘race,’ class, and sexuality), as well as their earlier experiences with violence, adds further complexity to the ways women mediate societal discourses of violence in their perceptions and practices across the lifespan (Pain, 2000).

Guided by this theoretical framework, the present study extends a focus on the ways in which women occupy the tension-filled position of the empowered victim: enabled as individuals to take charge of their own safety, while destined to victimhood by virtue of their gender. Tensions in discourses, subject-positions, and meanings of social phenomena can be met with ambivalence, and the tensions may be reproduced, ignored, or negotiated in a variety of complex ways throughout individuals’ meaning-making (e.g. Abbey & Falmagne, 2008; Abbey & Valsiner, 2005; Billig, Condor, Edwards, Middleton, & Radley, 1988). The current study investigates how women draw from the empowered victim construction to inform their safety practices and in making meaning of their everyday experiences around violence and risk. Of particular interest will be whether women reproduce the tension between empowerment and victimhood in their meaning-making of everyday experiences, and the extent to which they selectively draw upon constructions of victimhood and empowerment in discussing their own experiences relating to safety, risk, and violence.

Methods

Participants

Twenty women aged 18–62 years participated in an in-depth, flexible-style interview (described further below). All participants were members of a small, private university located in an ethnically mixed, poor urban neighborhood in the Northern US. Participants included undergraduate students (N = 14), as well as staff and faculty (N = 6), who were recruited through email list-serves, in-person solicitation of university classes, and convenience sampling. Participants were told that the researchers were interested in women’s experiences walking on and around the university campus and that their participation was entirely voluntary and confidential. Each participant scheduled an interview with the researcher that lasted approximately 45 minutes.

Most participants identified as Caucasian and middle to upper class (one woman identified as Asian-American and middle class, and one woman identified as African-American and working class) and all indicated in the course of their interview that they were heterosexual. While the demographic of the sample is fairly homogeneous and reflective of the university at which the data were collected, it also represents the demographic of women who are the primary focus of the discourse of violence and violence prevention—and therefore most clearly subjected to its tension-filled positions and contradictory terms. Paired with the fact that most of the city residents immediately surrounding the university campus are from non-Caucasian ethnic/racial groups of lower socio-economic status, mainly of Latino or African descent, conducting interviews with these predominantly white, middle- to upper-class women provided an ideal lens to examine the intersectional ideologies of ‘race,’ class, and gender that infuse constructions of violence and perpetrators.²

Interview procedure

In order to situate each participant’s responses in her social context, the interviews included detailed explorations of each participant’s social and cultural background. For example, participants were asked to discuss the organization of their family life, the neighborhood in which they grew up, and the social contexts in which they live their life. Following the biographical portion of the interview, all participants were prompted with “Can you tell me about your thoughts and experiences walking around the [university] campus and the surrounding neighborhood?” Pilot interviews conducted with the intention of establishing an effective interview vocabulary and protocol suggested that this prompt was broad enough to elicit a diverse array of responses applicable to the research question, without limiting the type of responses participants may find relevant to discuss.

In both the biographical and the safety-content portions, the interview followed a flexible format in that participants’ responses directed the content of the interview, including subsequent follow-up questions. This flexibility allowed the discussion to follow the strands and topics that each woman found meaningful. However, the interview was not open-ended, in that special attention was put on participants’ experiences and thoughts regarding safety in their daily lives. Tape-recorded interviews were transcribed verbatim and read for accuracy. All names reported below are pseudonyms that participants selected or that were assigned by the authors.

Data-analytic approach

Data analysis was informed by a discourse-analytic perspective in which language is not understood to be a transparent vehicle of meaning, but rather a cultural tool through which social phenomena are constituted and (re)presented (e.g. Wetherell, 1998). The ideologies participants draw upon are systems of meaning that produce understandings of the social world and are always inflected by power systems (particularly in relation to gender, ‘race,’ class, sexuality, and age). As discussed above, individuals are understood to construct meaning around their experiences by appropriating, rejecting, transforming, or interpreting available societal discourses in ways that are both agentive and constrained (Falmagne, 2004). Therefore, participants were analytically approached as social agents actively and selectively engaging with societal discourses in their construction and (re)presentation of their experiences of safety and risk.

The interviews were analyzed interpretively to identify women’s engagement with the societal discourses of violence, risk, and victimhood, following coding procedures based on thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006). Constructs were developed from a quasi-inductive orientation, with the language and perspective of feminist theory and the conceptualization of the discourse of violence providing sensitizing lenses without confining the process (Falmagne, Iselin, Todorova, & Arner Welsh, 2013). Participants’ positionality with regard to ‘race’ and class were used interpretively in analysis, but without imposing these categories as causal determinants of any aspect of the woman’s meaning-making and without implying any group-level generalization (Falmagne, 2006). With regard to age, analysis highlighted the ways a woman’s age informs her position within the discourse of violence, as well as the role of women’s life experiences in their meaning-making of violence and risk.

The development of themes followed an iterative process. Transcripts were first read for understanding, and initial codes were developed to mark instances in which women’s discussions were read to be reflecting the logic of the discourse of prevention or to be reflecting sites of tension between understandings of women as empowered or as victims. Patterns among these codes were generated based on their context and the ways we understood women to resolve, reproduce, or otherwise modulate any tension-filled constructions. These patterns were reread and refined into potential themes, which were then reviewed to check for conceptual consistency and theoretical meaningfulness before the final themes were established, defined, and named.

Findings

Women’s selective appropriation of the victim and prevention scripts reflected and (re)produced many of the tensions and contradictions of the prevention discourse. This occurred not only across participants, but often within individual interviews. In terms of the broad concerns of this study, the themes presented here were selected as important sites of tension in women’s construction of their experiences as gendered bodies and beings in social space. These included: (a) the endorsement of a “safety checklist” that functioned to construct women’s risk as unmanageable and victimhood as inevitable; (b) generational differences in women’s willingness to identify fears of gendered bodily harm as legitimate and in the specific forms this identification took; and (c) the creation and maintenance of imagined communities of safety and danger implicitly inflected by ‘race’ and class. Each of these themes is addressed in detail in this section and their theoretical relevance is elaborated in the final discussion.

Risk management and the “safety checklist”

Across age, women voiced a view of safety as a checklist of things “to do” and “not do” in order to manage the risk of becoming a victim. As reflected in women’s discussions, the endorsement of this “safety checklist” also produced a compulsory obligation for women to adhere to it in order to avoid blame for victimization. At the same time, participants’ statements reflected a view of violence as unpredictable and inherently unmanageable, suggesting that the “safety checklist,” while being a compulsory obligation for women to follow, is denied any genuine effectiveness. This situates women in an impossible position: women are held responsible for violence prevention despite its construction as unpredictable and predetermined. This juxtaposition occurred often throughout interviews and even within the same utterance, as illustrated by Amy’s (age 20) comment:

“If you don’t take precautions, like walking by yourself, it won’t—. It may not happen that night, but something could eventually happen so there’s no point of putting yourself at risk. You never know what’s going to happen.”

Amy’s comments imply the assumption that women are inherently at risk for violence. While acknowledging the precautions women can take to manage the risk of victimization (and lending them a certain degree of efficacy), she simultaneously suggests a constant fear of attack, firmly inscribing women’s victimization as unpredictable, yet inescapable. In other words, Amy’s logic reflects the empowered victim tension: the “safety checklist” empowers women to help manage their risk of victimization; however, women's risk is assumed to exist, framing violence and victimization as inevitable. Becky’s (age 52) comments throughout her interview reflect this same juxtaposition:

“[Girls] are very exploited, they’re preyed upon and they have to understand that. There’s nothing you’re going to do to change it … that’s how it is. Just be savvy. Try to outwit them, you know?”

Like Amy, Becky also assumes that women are inherently at risk for victimization. As she frames female vulnerability and victimhood as inevitable, she also draws upon the empowerment rhetoric of the risk management discourse, suggesting that women are capable of outsmarting the attackers they will inevitably face, yet that they will succeed only if they devote enough effort to it. Becky again reproduces the empowered victim tension, assuming women will fall victim to violence and “there’s nothing you’re going to do to change it,” while still indicating that women are expected to take steps to try to do just that. Similar trends are seen in Annie’s (age 62) account of a past experience with sexual assault:

“I was assaulted when … I was a senior in college … I was a secretary and uh was just warm and welcoming to people. And I was newly married so I wasn’t out on the hunt or anything, or dressing provocatively. … It was terrible.”

In recounting this experience Annie highlights her role in the assault, detailing her behavior (i.e. “warm and welcoming” but not “on the hunt or … dressing provocatively”) to illustrate that she had fallen victim to assault despite the fact that she had taken the appropriate precautions. While Annie does not explicitly position herself as responsible for the potential attack, she simultaneously implies that her behavior should have prevented the assault from occurring. Mirroring the victim-centered discourse of prevention, Annie’s narrative foregrounds her own actions as leading up to the assault, rather than those of the attacker. Thus, all three women’s statements illustrate a belief that many women endorsed, that is, a belief that there are things women can and should do to manage their risk of victimization, despite a simultaneous construction of violence as inherently unmanageable, and something that “could eventually happen,” because “that’s how it is.”

As suggested by Annie’s narrative, often hand-in-hand with an endorsement of the “safety checklist” and women-centered violence prevention is an unspoken mandate that women who fail to fulfill the “safety checklist” are at fault for whatever victimization or risk they may encounter. This mandate can manifest itself in victim-blaming rhetoric and even in self-blame. Examples of this pattern are reflected in Ashley’s (age 20) interview:

“Like, so if I’m drunk walking around like going from party to party, [safety is] something I never think about [laughs], which is stupid because that’s probably when you’re most vulnerable … so I didn’t take [the safety] escort but I was kind of like, ‘oh you know, maybe this will teach me one day when something does happen, I’ll take escort from then on’ [laughs].”

Ashley’s construction reflects an understanding of women as inherently at risk for violence, and following the logic of the “safety checklist,” assumes that the responsibility for preventing victimization is solely hers. She implies that not engaging in prescribed safety behaviors is “stupid” and any victimization that follows would be her own doing—a punishment for not appropriately managing risk.

(De)Legitimizing gendered fears

Concerns about safety can include threats to one’s body as well as threats to one’s possessions. We characterize the former type—bodily threat—as gendered because it involves an invasion of or interaction with the body—an entity that is inherently gendered. The latter type can then be understood as non-gendered, as threats to one’s possessions do not involve a targeting of the body or gender in a meaningful way. Although, of course, there is risk for bodily harm during a mugging, for example, participants spoke about bodily threats and threats to one’s possessions as mutually exclusive. With this delineation in mind, a salient pattern across women’s interviews has to do with the ways in which fears of gendered threats were or were not acknowledged and how, when acknowledged, they were subsequently constructed as legitimate or illegitimate. While older women freely spoke about their concerns of gendered threats and emphasized their immediacy for women, younger women only indirectly referenced bodily violence and downplayed the relevancy and legitimacy of fears of gendered threats.

Directly acknowledged fears were those that women would explicitly articulate when asked about their safety concerns. For younger women, fears of gendered threats were not identified explicitly, but instead were actively delegitimized in favor of possession-related threats. This active delegitimization is clear in Amy’s (age 20) interview:

“I guess the only thoughts that cross my mind when I’m walking there is like—. Hearing someone walk up behind me makes me nervous … those kind of things, I guess. I’m afraid that someone’s going to want to take my stuff. I never feel like I’m going to be attacked or hurt or anything.”

Rather than articulating any fear of bodily harm, Amy actively delegitimizes its validity: she explicitly denies a concern over getting “attacked or hurt,” focusing her narrative exclusively on a concern over losing her possessions. Young women’s delegitimization of concerns about bodily violence are also illustrated in Grace’s (age 20) response to a question about what she fears:

“I don’t know. I just don’t want to get robbed [laughs].”

Megan’s (age 19) similar response to the same question also illustrates this:

“I think I’d probably be more at risk for like being mugged or like robbed or you know, that kind of thing, than like anything else. Yeah. … Actually I haven’t really thought about it. [laughs]”

While neither young woman explicitly denies fears of bodily threats, their offhanded dismissal of all fears outside of being robbed highlight their rejection of concerns over bodily violence, and about violence more generally, as legitimate concerns. That both women’s dismissal of these fears is compounded by laughter gives further insight into how they are positioning themselves as immune to threats of bodily harm. Often used as a conversational device to avoid uncomfortable topics, laughter here may signal, beyond a mere dismissal of fear, an active discomfort with its discussion. This discomfort may tentatively be interpreted as reflecting at the same time the young women’s desire to distance themselves from discussions of bodily harm and their implicit fear of this type of violence. This tension is discussed next in terms of the ways women indirectly acknowledged threats of bodily violence even while undermining them explicitly.

Overwhelmingly, the only way that young women evoked threats of bodily violence was through what can be characterized as indirect identification. Threats of bodily violence were not explicitly articulated as such, nor were they identified in response to direct questions about fear or risk. Rather, they were identified indirectly through the spontaneous mention in the interview context of particular, putatively benign incidents of a gendered nature. Catcalling (whistling or comments of a sexual nature made, usually by men, to a passing woman) was frequently brought up in this way. However, each time it was brought up, young women then actively worked to delegitimize it as form of danger, as gendered violence, or as an occurrence warranting any feelings of fear or discomfort. For example, Andrea (age 20) downplays the discomfort of being catcalled by stressing its banality:

“I feel like no matter what you look like, or like, what—I don’t know, time of day it is, there are always people catcalling from their cars … so, it’s not a big deal and it’s almost like humorous, but, it’s just—. It’s so silly. I feel like it’s almost guaranteed that someone’s going to whistle outside of their car or just say something.”

That Andrea implicitly identifies catcalling as fear-inducing is signaled by the fact that she spontaneously brings it up in an interview where she has been asked to share her thoughts about danger and risk. However, by continuing on to insist on its triviality, she simultaneously constructs catcalling as comical. By specifying that catcalling occurs “no matter what you look like,” Andrea denies its relevancy to gender or sex—although women do get catcalled more than men, the fact that it happens regardless of your physical appearance indicates for Andrea that it is not considered gendered or sexual harassment.

Sara (age 21), after also spontaneously mentioning catcalling in her interview, immediately delegitimizes it as a fear-inducing event by appealing to what she views as the non-threatening intentionality behind it:

“Yes, it’s insulting, but you just can’t really take it seriously, because it’s not serious. You can’t ask yourself, ‘Are they expecting to get my number by yelling, “You’re sexy” at me?’ you know? That’s not the point. It’s just to get your attention. And I think some people don’t understand that and take it too seriously.”

Although Sara directly marks catcalling as insulting, she undermines this reaction through her explicit construction of catcalling as an act not intended as harassment or assault, but instead aimed at attention grabbing. In contrast to Andrea, Sara does acknowledge the relevance of gender and sexuality to catcalling, suggesting that some view it as kind of sexual advance. Yet, even though she draws this connection, she goes on to discount it, again returning to her construction of catcalling as solely aimed at attention grabbing.

While young women’s dismissal of catcalling could be read as an empowering act—removing agency from the catcallers by labeling them “silly” and the like—it became clear throughout women’s discussions that what was actively being dismissed was not the catcallers, per se, but women’s own emotional and experienced discomfort with the situation. Indeed, even as both Andrea and Sara implicitly identify catcalling as a phenomenon that makes them uncomfortable, they actively work to delegitimize it as a valid concern for women’s safety. This move effectively delegitimizes women’s own feelings of discomfort and implicit appraisal of the situation as threatening or offensive—a discursive strategy that maintains catcallers’ behavior as mundane and that devalues women’s experiences of this behavior.

Thus, across a number of interviews, younger women spoke of the irrelevancy of gendered fears and avoided any direct endorsement of them. Even when their discussions turned to fears contingent on gender and sexuality, young women consistently avoided, and at times actively undermined, the acknowledgement of these fears as valid. In this way, young women strategically worked to distance themselves from the logic that identifies gender as a relevant factor in producing inequality or subordination in their everyday lives. This trend is reflective of a broader shift in the popular imagination in which gender inequality is assumed to no longer be a social issue. “Postfemininsm,” the term often used to describe this ideology, will be discussed in greater depth below as a lens through which young women may be constructing their experiences of (non-)risk and violence.

In contrast, the older women in the sample consistently and directly acknowledged gendered violence-based fears as legitimate. Becky (age 52) identifies rape and sexual assault as something she fears specifically with regard to her college daughter’s safety:

“The sexual thing of course, you know rape or whatever … naturally. I think I worry about it more with … date rape, you know someone slipping something into her drink.”

Becky’s focus on her daughter reflects dominant gender ideologies that hypersexualize young women’s bodies and desexualize older women’s bodies, and that direct women’s perceptions of who are at risk for sexual violence, as will be further discussed below. By identifying and discussing rape as the fear she is “naturally” most concerned with, Becky’s articulations perpetuate the naturalization of sexualized violence against women. However, in identifying date rape as one of her top concerns for her daughter, Becky challenges the “stranger danger” myth and instead acknowledges the reality of date- and acquaintance-initiated violence.

Patricia (age 41) identifies violence as something that should be of central concern for women of all ages:

“I think [awareness is] important, especially anti-violence, partner violence or anything. … I think it’s great to have students learn those skills—staff too. I just wish they didn’t have to.”

Like Becky, Patricia challenges the “stranger danger” myth by stressing the importance of raising awareness around partner violence. Patricia also acknowledges violence, broadly, as a legitimate fear for women, by recommending that women should be equipped with the “skills” to avoid victimization. At the same time, throughout her discussion, Patricia constructs violence as an inevitable occurrence, wistfully adding to her recommendation for violence awareness education that she “just wish(es)” it was not necessary.

The contrast between younger and older women’s treatment of violence-based fears poses an interesting paradox. Young women distance themselves from fears of bodily and sexual violence despite discursive constructions that paint young women as hypersexualized (and therefore most vulnerable for sexual violence) and statistics suggesting that women under 35 are the most at risk for these forms of violence (Berzofsky, Krebs, Langton, Planty, & Smiley-McDonald, 2013). On the other hand, perhaps informed by a larger fund of life experience, older women are more likely to discuss violence as a relevant and pertinent concern for women. This sentiment also reflects the ideology in circulation when many of the older women were raised—an ideology that recognized gender inequality as a prominent social and political concern. However, by only identifying young women as potential victims and sexual violence as the only legitimate fear for women, older women ignore their own risks and potential experiences of violence (sexual or otherwise). The complex ways in which violence and risk are discussed across the lifespan will be elaborated further in the final discussion.

Imagined communities

The delineation of borders between insiders (i.e. members of the university community) and outsiders (i.e. residents of the city surrounding the campus) was frequently mentioned in women’s discussions of ways to augment safety. ‘Race’ and class were implicitly central to these discussions: as mentioned, most members of the university community are white and middle to upper class, while most of the city residents surrounding the campus are from non-Caucasian ethnic/racial groups of lower socio-economic status, mainly of Latino or African descent.

Megan (age 21) illustrates this construction in her suggestion that crimes against members of the university are always instigated by members of the surrounding community:

“I’ve always been personally curious about what the community thinks of [the university] and how, if it’s negative, how do we improve that relationship? Because then maybe they’ll stop mugging us.”

Like most of the younger cohort, Megan identifies danger as manifested in crimes threatening one’s possessions (not one’s body). She also assumes that all perpetrators of such crimes are “outsiders,” members of the surrounding neighborhood communities (i.e. “others”). Discursively, by using the terms “community,” “they,” and “us,” Megan makes it clear that whether a person is a perpetrator or a (potential) victim of crimes is contingent upon their membership in the university community (“us”) or the surrounding neighborhoods (“them”). Chloe (age 21) explicitly refers to her construction of outsiders as perpetrators and insiders as victims in her recommendations for campus safety:

“I think it’s less likely for another student to walk into your room and steal something, than someone from the outside. So in theory, closing off more of [the university] would be better.”

Thus, while Megan’s thoughts of improving the relationship between the university and surrounding community is seen by her as one route to building safety in the context of an insider–outsider dichotomy, Chloe recommends strict maintenance of the boundary between the groups.

The racialization of the insider–outsider dichotomy is highlighted by Ashley’s (age 20) recollection of a past experience while meeting a friend in his predominantly black neighborhood that contributes to her current understanding and behavior in the university context:

“So he [her friend] was from [a suburb], which is predominantly black … like some parts are considered the ghetto, like not that safe … I was this white preppy girl walking by herself in this neighborhood where I didn’t belong. Um, so I guess coming to [college] I kind of um just sort of kept that in mind, that I needed to just mostly be conscious of my surroundings, um but I’ve been prepped for it a little bit.”

The connection that Ashley draws between her experiences in a predominantly black neighborhood and her experiences at her current university indicates that the boundary constructed between the university and surrounding neighborhoods is not neutral. Rather, this division is predicated on an assumption that outsiders are racialized and, therefore, dangerous, an assumption illustrated by Megan's and Chloe’s comments as well. Ideologically, this construction is supported in large part by the stranger danger myth—according to which perpetrators are most often strangers who are overwhelmingly male, non-white and of low socioeconomic standing—a notion that circulates throughout the societal discourse of violence.

The older cohort also relied on an insider–outsider delineation in their discussions of safety. Becky (age 52) recounts an instance in which an undergraduate was approached by a member of the surrounding community. In her telling, the identification of the outside community member as inherently dangerous is clear:

“One day [an undergrad] was approached by somebody, just out here! … and she knew enough to just run away, you know? She knew he wasn’t like a campus person.”

Becky’s story aligns closely with Chloe’s recommendation for insider–outsider boundary maintenance. Becky’s telling inscribes members of the outside, surrounding community as people who are inherently dangerous and should be feared. Her endorsement of the student’s choice to run away rather than engaging the community member reflects her felt necessity of maintaining the boundary between the two groups. This “us” versus “them” or “othering” mentality operates both to perpetuate dominant assumptions equating dangerous people and potential perpetrators of violence with men of color and to conceal the reality of violence, which overwhelmingly occurs not between strangers, but between acquaintances. The ways this “othering” supports each of these outcomes will be discussed further in the next section, as will the broader effects of “othering” on social understandings of violence and of ‘race.’

Discussion

Societal discourses inform our understandings of social phenomena, and contradictions within these discourses can produce tensions in meaning-making. In the case of violence, the tensions within the prevention discourse complicate women’s relationship to violence. Women’s discussions of violence across age reflect the pervasive tension inherent in the discourse of prevention: women are compelled to occupy the empowered non-victim position, while simultaneously facing the construction of violence as an inevitability for women. Within the terms of this discourse, it is impossible for an individual woman to construct a cohesive narrative that does not at times position her as immune to violence, while at other times condems her for ignoring the risks she faces. Many tensions evident in women’s discussions instantiate this paradox. One tension, reflected in several participants’ responses, was the construction of violence as being simultaneously manageable and unmanageable by women. For example, Amy stressed the importance of “taking precautions” to avoid violence, while simultaneously acknowledging that when it comes to violence, “you never know what’s going to happen.” Participants’ reproduction of this construction of violence suggests that the alleged empowerment that accompanies the fulfillment of precautionary measures is perpetually eclipsed by the ideological maintenance of violence and women’s victimization as inevitable.

The ease with which this tension translates into victim blaming is cause for attention. Women across the lifespan were aware of the prevention measures they were expected to take and often framed their failure to enact these measures as inviting or deserving of violence, as when Ashley mused that “maybe this [failing to enact prevention measures] will teach me one day when something does happen.” Traditional violence prevention programs are largely informed by this victim-centered discourse, and this popular conception of violence is instantiated throughout other social institutions as well. In particular, legal rulings in rape cases often perpetuate victim-blaming ideology in the US and abroad, such as the widely publicized case in which Italy’s supreme court overturned a rape case on the grounds that the young woman involved was wearing form-fitting clothing, a fact that was taken to implicate her responsibility (Calavita, 2001), or the New York Police Department’s recent efforts to prevent rape by advising women to stop wearing skirts and dresses in public (Noel, 2011).

Another tension, present specifically in the young women’s interviews, was the contrast between their indirect acknowledgment of gender-based violence and their direct and active delegitimization of these fears. Many young women recognized catcalling as a gendered phenomenon, as indicated by their unprompted discussion of it alongside remarks about fears of bodily violence, yet simultaneously dismissed it as a cause for concern. Young women struggled to reconcile the realities of their experiences with the assumptions of the prevention discourse. Specifically, young women who are compelled to position themselves as empowered through the terms of the discourse are denied the space to voice or legitimize their concerns and their feelings of discomfort and fear.

In contrast to young women’s dismissal, older women were more likely to explicitly identify gender-based fears as valid. Several interpretations may help account for this generational difference. Older women in the sample came of age in a very different historical moment when conversations about gender and feminism were centered around gender inequality. Younger women, on the other hand, have come of age in a time when a single, dominant feminist movement does not exist and many believe that gender inequality is no longer a social issue. The “postfeminist” agenda highlights young women’s agency and empowerment through economic consumption, and ignores gender as a structural and discursive formation (Aronson, 2003; McRobbie, 2004). In highlighting individual empowerment and agency, claims of discrimination based on gender are delegitimized and instead viewed as “offensive and inappropriate for the current era” (Showden, 2009, p. 168). Young women therefore would be less likely to identify gender as a factor that should inform their ideas about risk and violence (Gardner, 1995; Kelly & Radford, 1996). This generational difference could also be based in life experience. Older women have had more opportunities to personally experience occurrences such as pay discrimination in the workplace, or unequal treatment after having children, and hence may be more likely to identify gender as a legitimate justification for heightened fear of bodily violence.

Importantly, older woman’s discussions of safety and risk focused solely on younger women as potential victims, as in Patricia's and Becky’s discussions of undergraduates, Becky’s discussion of her daughter, and Annie’s reflections on herself, but as a younger woman. Additionally, when discussing young women’s victimization, older women referred to violence almost exclusively as sexual violence (e.g. sexual assault, sexual harassment, and date rape). This exclusive focus on young women as victims and on sexual violence works to deny older women a place in the prevention discourse and ignores the violence for which older women are at risk. This is problematic as older women are, of course, subjected to violence in sexual and non-sexual forms. Constructions that reference only sexual violence as a concern for (young) women ignore these other forms of violence for which older women may be more at risk.

Finally, there was a tension between women’s fears and those occurrences for which women may actually be at risk. Women positioned their university community as one that is inherently safe, in contrast to the adjacent community neighborhoods, and even went on to recommend safety measures that would heighten this boundary, as in Chloe’s recommendation to close off the university. Women equated outsiders with danger and constructed them as irrational, unpredictable, and unmanageable. It follows, then, that the violence they commit is equally seen as unmanageable, rather than a phenomenon to critically interrogate and interrupt. This, of course, parallels the prevention discourse in which, as argued above, violence is constructed as inevitable.

In the university context where this study was conducted, who is an insider and who is not is heavily reliant on dimensions of ‘race’ and class, as many residents of neighborhoods surrounding the university campus are mainly of Latino or African descent and of lower socio-economic status. This construction is fully fueled by the stranger danger myth, where the “stranger” in question relies on a racialized and class-based construction of danger (De Welde, 2003a; Madriz, 1997). While the us–them dichotomy discussed here refers to the context of the particular university campus where data was collected, the dichotomy and the “othering” processes that underlie it have a broader significance. The discourses of ‘race’ and class reflected in women’s discussions about risk and violence are constitutive of “othering” processes emergent in the contexts of imperialism and racialization, as well as through historical and contemporary political rhetoric in the US and other countries regarding domestic social and economic inequalities (Said, 1978).

The delineation of insiders as being inherently safe and outsiders as being inherently dangerous is also problematic for a number of other reasons. First, research demonstrates that intimate partner violence is the leading cause of injury to women. It affects 1–3 million women a year in the US, making it more common than muggings, stranger rapes, and car accidents combined (Tjaden & Thoennes, 1998). By acknowledging all university members as safe and all non-university members as risky, women’s fears do not align with the reality of their risks (Nurius, 2000). As we and others have noted, violence is prominently constructed as occurring only in the public sphere and maintains the home as a safe space for women (Cahill, 2000; Pain, 2000), despite statistics suggesting that many forms of violence against women occur at higher rates among acquaintances and other occupants of the “private sphere” (e.g. Berzofsky et al., 2013; Tjaden & Thoennes, 1998). Critical inquiries of women’s meaning-making around intimate partner violence and acquaintance-initiated violence would be fruitful in exposing additional contradictions within the discourse of prevention, and, by extension, for furthering efforts to legitimize the experiences of women (and men) who experience these types of violence.

In conclusion, problematic assumptions regarding gender, ‘race,’ class, sexuality, and age, which underlie the discourse of prevention, infuse the everyday meaning-making and experiences of the social agents who draw upon them. Specifically, in the present study, women across the lifespan drew upon the empowered victim construction, reproducing the expectation that women are inherently at risk for victimization and simultaneously capable—and responsible—for avoiding this victimization. In this way, the discourse of prevention functions not to offer a position of empowerment for women, but actually to reinscribe women as ineffectual victims (a construction this discourse directly aims to challenge).

The aim here is not to demonize self-defense courses or similar components of the prevention discourse: violence against women, after all, is not a purely discursive phenomenon. The very serious material effects of violence can be effectively attenuated by self-defense courses. Rather, we argue that women’s appropriation of the prevention discourse is not sufficient for fully addressing the problem of violence against women. In fact, as our interviews demonstrate, women’s selective appropriation of the discourse can actually reproduce and perpetuate problematic constructions of gender, ‘race,’ class, sexuality, and age. Primarily, by focusing exclusively on women, violence prevention is constructed as a women’s problem, and as individual women’s responsibility. Further, the prominent constructions of risk function to “other” perpetrators, thus discounting violence occurring between acquaintances and violence occurring in the private sphere. From this standpoint, confronting and intervening in all forms of violence against women requires a continued critical interrogation of these constructions at all levels of society—in prevention practices and social ideologies and in the interpersonal and individual patterns through which these ideologies are enacted and lived.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the women who volunteered to share their perspectives and stories and for the purposes of this research. The authors also wish to acknowledge the Francis L. Hiatt School of Psychology for providing funding for this research. Many thanks to Nicola Gavey for her feedback on an earlier version of this manuscript, and to Rose Capdevila and to anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions and comments that helped to strengthen this manuscript.

Notes

Author Biographies

Kathryn E Frazier is a doctoral student in psychology at Clark University in Worcester, MA, USA. Her research interests involve societal and feminist approaches to cultural discourses of gender, particularly as they relate to individual experiences of and meaning-making around interpersonal violence.

Rachel Joffe Falmagne is Professor of Psychology at Clark University, USA, and former President of the International Society for Theoretical Psychology. Her interests include feminist theory, critical psychology, and methodological and epistemological issues for the social sciences. She has published on the gendered foundations of thought, culture, and development, on the systemic, intersectional social constitution of “self” and “mind,” on the dialectic of the particular and the general in qualitative research, on subverting theoretical dualisms, and on the affective roots of thought. Books include Mind and social practice: Selected writings by Sylvia Scribner (with Ethel Tobach and Mary Parlee) and Representing reason: Feminist theory and formal logic (with Marjorie Hass).

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