Book contents
one - Violence and discrimination against women
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 January 2022
Summary
The figures and their absence
This is not a book about violence against women; it is a book about responses by society to violence against women. However, having figures about violence in your hand is crucial. In fact, only by examining the extent and frequency of male violence can we appreciate the scale, determination and lack of scruples involved in covering up the violence. Only in this way does the importance of figures and statistics also become clear and, conversely, the significance and consequences of their absence. In fact, the lack of figures about violence represents a political choice and one of the means of hiding it. In her book Sisterhood is global (1984), an analysis of the state of the world from the point of view of women, Robin Morgan talks about the ‘policy of not having figures’:
When a preface reads ‘no data obtainable’ [NDO] or ‘no statistics obtainable’ [NSO] on a given subject, it means that despite intrepid effort we could not find or gain access to the information. Those NDOs and NSOs … form a politically revealing pattern in themselves. Again and again they arise in the categories of rape, battery, sexual harassment, incest and homosexuality; these are still the unspeakable issues in most parts of the globe. As long as they remain unspoken and under researched an enormous amount of human suffering will continue to go unacknowledged and unhealed. (Morgan, 1984, p xxiii)
Her whole book is therefore an appeal to increase research work and collect and analyse data, free from patriarchal bias, in order to uncover the truth.
Over 20 years later, we have a great deal of research, enabling us to draw a map of violence against women and children. This knowledge is the result of pressure by the women's movement and work by women in research institutions and international organisations. In many European countries, for example, research into violence carried out at a national level represents acceptance of the recommendations of the Fourth World Women's Conference in Beijing in 1995, in which the need to have statistical information was confirmed.
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- A Deafening SilenceHidden Violence against Women and Children, pp. 11 - 28Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2008