Violence Against Women

This article presents a feminist analysis of honor killings in rural Turkey. One of the main goals is to dissociate honor killings from a particular religious belief system and locate it on a continuum of patriarchal patterns of violence against women. The authors first provide a summary of the defining characteristics of honor killings and discuss the circumstances under which they are likely to occur. Second, they discuss modernization versus traditionalism in Turkey, emphasizing the contradictory forces in a culture of change. Third, they discuss conflict orientations in understanding violence against women, starting from some of the assertions and assumptions of the Marx/Engels hypothesis and socialist feminism, and comparing and contrasting the radical feminist orientation with the materialist orientation. Fourth, the authors give examples of honor killings in Turkey that have been recorded in recent years, specifically highlighting the common threads among these heinous crimes. The patterns observed are more supportive of the radical and socialist feminist orientations than the Marx/Engels hypothesis. The article ends with modest suggestions about breaking the cycle of violence against women, emphasizing the personal, social, structural, and global links in engendering positive change.

This article addresses why rape in ethnic conflict and war is common. Emphasis is placed on the context of abuse, which some argue remains undeveloped in general explanations of violence against women. The author focuses on the role that ethnic nationalism plays in repatriarchalizing society and gender relations. With the rise of nationalism and militarization, there are institutionalized attempts to revive patriarchal social forms and relations that place women at an increased risk of violence. The article focuses on the former Yugoslavia to show that with nationalism and militarization, the nexus of gender and ethnicity becomes significant and deadly.

This exploratory study conducted from 1997 to 1998 is the first study to empirically investigate Greek battered women's help-seeking behavior from informal sources of help. In-depth interviews were conducted with 17 abused women in the only refuge for battered women in Athens. Results of this study indicate that Greek women tend to suffer years of violence before they ask for help because of various personal and sociocultural factors. These factors center around feelings of shame and guilt, hope that things will get better, and the concepts of marriage and the family that are of central importance to women's lives in Greece. The article concludes by highlighting the importance of using systems of informal support and recommending the need for more research on the issue of violence in Greece.

In India, as in all countries around the globe, violence against women occurs daily. Patriarchy plays a role in this violence. For some Indian women, the possibility of violence occurs throughout their lives, especially with changes in marital status. This article discusses several fatal forms of violence that some of the women in India experience. Included in this discussion of violence are the role of women's status, dowry, and the influence of Western capitalism. It is concluded that to combat violence against women, it is imperative that people work toward a global village where women are viewed as equal and valuable partners in society.

This article focuses on the need to revive the tool of equality for more effective decision making in cases of violence against women in India, and suggests that feminists and judicial decision makers need to adopt attitudinal shifts. It begins with a living model of equality at the grassroots level and moves to the theoretical premise of substantive equality provided by the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). The third part looks at Project Equality—designed and delivered by Sakshi, a Delhi-based nongovernment organization (NGO) in the Asia-Pacific region—which illustrates how collaborative and inclusive education between NGOs and judges can better equip judges for effective decision making in women's rights cases. Finally, the article concludes with the impact that a shift from scientific to rights-based judicial decision making can have for women in situations of violence.