Online Discourses of Women's Violence, Gender Equality and Societal Change
The Emerald International Handbook of Feminist Perspectives on Women’s Acts of Violence
ISBN: 978-1-80382-256-3, eISBN: 978-1-80382-255-6
Publication date: 2 August 2023
Abstract
Women's violence is periodically raised as a cause for concern both in the media as well as in discussions among the general public in other platforms, such as online forums. These concerns are linked with anti-feminist efforts to discredit the benefits of feminisms and to counter feminist knowledge on gendered patterns in violence. In this chapter, I discuss the ways these concerns and the associated discrediting of feminism have been manifested in various contexts, including academic research on intimate partner violence. My specific focus is on online forums, where women's use of violence is frequently highlighted for the purpose of creating an image of reversed gender discrimination experienced by men. I illustrate how such meaning-making is employed in online discussions derived from various online discussion forums in Finland. The empirical example is focussed on identifying discursive methods frequently employed in the online contexts and specifically illustrates how those methods are employed for the rhetorical effect of othering feminists, highlighting the severity of women's violence as a social problem and portraying men instead of women as victims of inequality. I conclude with a discussion on connections between this meaning-making and broader patterns in anti-feminist mobilisations of the issue of women's violence.
Keywords
Citation
Venäläinen, S. (2023), "Online Discourses of Women's Violence, Gender Equality and Societal Change", Banwel, S., Black, L., Cecil, D.K., Djamba, Y.K., Kimuna, S.R., Milne, E., Seal, L. and Tenkorang, E.Y. (Ed.) The Emerald International Handbook of Feminist Perspectives on Women’s Acts of Violence, Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 329-341. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80382-255-620231022
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2023 Satu Venäläinen. Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited
Introduction
Women's violence is periodically raised as a cause for societal concern both in the media as well as in discussions among the general public in platforms such as online discussion forums and social media. Indeed, women's use of violence and men's victimisation especially in intimate partner relations holds a prominent place in the rhetoric of men's rights movements that aim to portray men as discriminated against by the advocates of feminist politics. Such rhetoric often includes claims about gender equality having gone too far, and about men nowadays being victimised in their intimate relations to a greater extent than women. In recent years, these discussions have particularly taken place in online contexts, where men are frequently portrayed as the victims of not only women in their heterosexual intimate relations but also more broadly in their treatment as members of contemporary western societies witnessing progress in gender equality. These portrayals often go hand in hand with attempts to refute the relevance of gendered dynamics in intimate partner violence (IPV), and relatedly, the validity of feminist understandings and research on these dynamics. Such attempts unite anti-feminist views expressed by men's rights advocates as well as the general public with the strand in IPV research that has adopted a gender-neutral approach, articulated in opposition to a feminist one and largely based on claims of gender symmetry in IPV.
This chapter taps into the profusion of understandings on women's violence that are built in opposition to feminist views on IPV, with a specific analytical focus on how such understandings and their antithetical relations to feminist ones play out and are mobilised in online discussions among the general public. By doing so, the chapter illustrates how the debates on gender symmetry in IPV research, and the associated split between feminist and gender-neutral understandings, trickle down to inform commonsensical efforts to make sense of women's violence among broad audiences. The key claim of the chapter is that an understanding of the discursive mechanisms through which feminist views on women's acts of violence and on IPV in general are refuted across various contexts is important for researchers examining women's acts of violence because such an understanding provides tools for unpacking and criticising anti-feminist views and exploring their impacts on both researchers themselves and the general public.
Moral Panics on Women's Violence as a Backlash Against Feminism
In recent years, IPV committed by women against men in heterosexual relationships has been repeatedly raised as a prominent concern in online forums across the globe, alongside other contexts such as traditional media. A recent example is the Amber Heard and Johnny Depp trial, closely followed by social media users across the globe who joined in demonising Heard and expressing sympathy for Depp. Both online and offline, the key advocates of such a concern have been anti-feminist men's rights activists, for whom IPV committed by women, and specifically the purportedly widespread ignorance regarding it, is a prime example of discrimination and disadvantage of men in contemporary western societies (Dragiewicz, 2011; Dragiewicz & Burgess, 2016; Kimmel, 2013; Mann, 2008). These views are centrally based on claims that men are victimised in intimate partner relations to at least an equal extent as women, because of which gendered understandings of IPV and feminists' focus on women's victimisation discriminate against men and their rights to equality. In online contexts, such views circulate particularly in what has become known as manosphere, a loosely knit online community dispersed across different sites and united by fierce anti-feminism (Ging, 2017; Gotell & Dutton, 2016; Marwick & Caplan, 2018). Whereas the manosphere is constituted by various groups of men's rights activists who deploy multiple online sites and affordances of digital spaces that unite them (see, for example, Ging, 2017), they commonly rely on shared ideas of men as true victims of gender relations, including gender-based violence.
Parallel claims about the disadvantage and ignorance of men's victimisation and women's perpetration of IPV have also been expressed by some academic IPV researchers. These views are commonly a part of the gender-neutral branch or research (e.g. Dutton, 2012; Straus, 2011; for more recent work with a largely similar stance, see e.g. Bates & Taylor, 2019), which tends to include a critical stance towards feminist research on IPV (e.g. Anderson, 2005; DeKeseredy & Dragiewicz, 2007; Johnson, 2011), perceived from the gender-neutral stance as largely responsible for the neglect of women's perpetration of IPV and men victims. The debate between the advocates of a feminist and a gender-neutral perspective in IPV research has been going on for several decades (for an overview, see, for example, Hamby, 2017) and continues to divide researchers into two separate camps. As will be illustrated below, these divisions are also present in online discussions, where research on IPV and its findings are constantly commented on and exploited for political purposes – specifically for the purpose of creating an image of discrimination against men in the case of discussions focussing on women's IPV perpetration.
Feminist scholars (e.g. Chesney-Lind, 1999, 2006) have viewed the increased attention directed at violence perpetrated by women and girls as a part of a backlash against feminism. Indeed, since the rise of the women's movement in the 1970s, women's violence has been periodically raised as cause for concern, often motivated by defensive responses to the women's movements' efforts to raise awareness of violence against women. These ‘moral panics’ over women's violence often appear hand in hand with claims that feminism has caused women to become more like men – including violent behaviour – and thus is at the root of the problem. In media representations, this is evident in ways in which women who have committed violence are frequently portrayed as masculine, and in general are frequently divorced from proper womanhood through various techniques of representation (Venäläinen, 2017). These portrayals serve the interests of certain groups to vilify feminism and feminists by demonstrating that increased gender equality has detrimental effects. Indeed, the figure of a feminist that has been circulating in Western imaginary for several decades entails associations with violence, selfishness, and even fascism and monstrosity (Edley & Wetherell, 2001; Hinds & Stacey, 2001). Hence there is a connection between commonly circulating portrayals of violent women and derogatory, othering accounts of feminists, which, as I further discuss below, continues to persist in new arenas such as online forums.
Meaning-Making Around Women's Intimate Partner Violence in Public and Online Contexts
The public's understandings of IPV committed by women have been examined in a branch of studies focussed on comparing perceptions of women's and men's violence, often from the perspective of gender stereotypes and how they are reproduced in portrayals of violence. More specific areas of focus in these studies have been perceptions of severity of IPV (e.g. Hamby & Jackson, 2010), assessments of injury and the criminality of IPV committed by women and men (Allen & Bradley, 2018), and perceptions related to the nature, motives and acceptability of IPV committed by men versus women (Scarduzio et al., 2017).
In my own research, I have explored meaning-making on women's violence in various contexts, including reporting on violent crime by the tabloid press and in the narratives of women imprisoned for violent crimes (Venäläinen, 2017), as well as in online discussions focussing specifically on IPV (e.g. Venäläinen, 2020; Venäläinen & Virkki, 2019). These enquiries have not only shown how power and gender inform meaning-making on the topic in various ways but also a significant overlap between tabloid reporting and online meaning-making. The portrayals circulated in those two contexts in turn tend to deviate from imprisoned women's own narratives, where a much more complex picture emerges of their perpetration and the contexts in which it occurs. In line with the moral panics described in the previous section, both the tabloid press and the general public in online discussions tend to reiterate views on women's perpetration of IPV as a concerning social issue that allegedly puts feminist views on gendered dynamics in IPV under suspicion. This meaning-making thus closely resonates with both the anti-feminist men's rights advocates' views and those by the advocates of a gender-neutral perspectives in research, as will be further illustrated below with an analysis focussed on online discussions.
The overlap between different interactional contexts regarding the meanings ascribed to women's violence can be usefully made sense of from a feminist poststructural perspective (e.g. Weedon, 1987). This perspective puts emphasis on discursive power and how it shapes meaning-making across various interactional, social and societal contexts and historical time periods (Towns & Adams, 2018). Discursive power constitutes socio-historically specific possibilities to think, act and speak in particular ways. Discourses that are available for sense-making at any particular socio-historical context therefore impose limits to what kinds of understandings gain predominance and become normalised, and which understandings instead remain marginal or disputed. Normalisation and the accompanying spreading of certain discourses occurs across various contexts for sense-making, and thus crosses boundaries between forums for communication among the general public, including everyday interactions both online and offline, as well as academic audiences and the kinds of perspectives adopted in research.
Social media, where the general public actively participates in meaning-making, thus engages in constant interplay both with traditional media and other contexts, including multidirectional commentaries on events and interpretations having originally taken place either offline or online. Online discussions play a key role in shaping public understandings on IPV, and they can work as platforms for the spreading of both feminist and anti-feminist views on it (Dragiewicz & Burgess, 2016). Sharp polarisation of views is a common characteristic of online meaning-making, where social processes of identity and group formation are central elements of communication. Due to the affordances of digital media and anonymity, online advocacy of men's rights is also particularly fierce and misogynist in nature, compared to the majority of offline manifestations of men's rights advocacy (Ging, 2017).
Critical discursive psychology is another, related and useful approach that I have drawn upon for analysing everyday meaning-making among general public on socially relevant issues such as IPV, gender and power. It entails a slightly more fine-grained approach to discursive interaction than the poststructural one (see, for example, Venäläinen, 2017). One of the key concepts in critical discursive psychology is interpretative repertoire, which refers to ‘relatively coherent ways of talking about objects and events in the world’ (Edley, 2001, p. 198). The concept thus illuminates the workings of systems of meaning similar to the concept of discourse, though being generally used for the purpose of identifying more context-specific building blocks for meaning-making. Through the mobilisation of interpretative repertoires that are available and recognisable for members of a particular culture, objects being made sense of, such as IPV, are constructed in specific ways, which can be constantly contested and negotiated by mobilising alternative constructs in everyday interactions. For instance, Nigel Edley and Margaret Wetherell (2001) have illuminated how feminists and feminism can be made sense of by utilising two opposite repertoires, the use of which may alternate depending on the interaction. In the example analysis below, I use this concept to highlight the cultural recognisability of the sense-making tools mobilised in online discussions on IPV committed by women. With this concept, I also wish to draw attention to the ways these sense-making tools are flexibly drawn upon for argumentative purposes.
Repertoires Mobilised in Finnish Online Discussions on IPV Committed by Women
The analytical example presented in this chapter is from Finland, a country known as a woman-friendly, progressive and gender-equal welfare state. However, similar to other Nordic countries, Finland's approach to IPV and its rates have been seen as paradoxical; despite its progressive image, rates of violence against women in Finland have consistently remained high, and the state and the services provided by it have been criticised on various occasions for failing to address the issue with adequate consideration of its gendered underpinnings and patterns (Hearn & McKie, 2010). These dynamics have been highlighted in studies such as a European Union–wide survey conducted in 2014 (European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, 2014), in which Finland ranked second for violence against women per capita. Significantly, such results have often been met with disbelief and suspicion among the general public. This is evident also in the materials used in the analytical example below where much of the discussion that highlights women's use of violence have been triggered by such results highlighting women's victimisation.
The materials used in the following analysis were collected in April 2017 for a project focussing on contemporary discourses on violence and societal inequalities in Finland. They come from some of Finland's most popular online discussion forums (six different forums in total; one general online discussion forum and the forums of a national newspaper, a regional newspaper from northern Finland, a youth magazine, a baby-focussed magazine and a science magazine) and nine comment areas of popular blog sites (accessed via a popular blog section of a web-based newspaper), with a span of 10 years (2007–2016). The forums were chosen on the basis of initial Google searches with search terms ‘violence + women’, ‘women's violence’ and ‘intimate partner violence experienced by men’. The forums with most active commenting on the topic were included, and within them the threads (located with site-specific text-search tools) that specifically focussed on the topic were chosen. This resulted in 98 discussion threads and 3,190 comments. In order to ensure the anonymity of the writers on these sites, the forums are not identified here and the names or pseudonyms of the writers have been omitted from the analysis. The extracts come with the number of each discussion forum and the month and year of publication.
The analysis presented next is based on identifying the core interpretative repertoires drawn upon in these online discussions. Identifying the repertoires involves several rounds of reading the materials with the purpose of distinguishing patterns in meaning-making that construct an object (here IPV committed by women) in a certain, culturally recognisable, way. I have labelled these as a repertoire of change, repertoire of equal perpetration and a repertoire of double standards. A discursive analysis attends not only to identifying such patterns in sense-making but also to what is discursive achieved in drawing upon them, i.e. their functions. This is illustrated in the following analysis section with the help of extracts chosen to represent each repertoire and how they function discursively. The analysis does not aim to provide an exhaustive picture of the meaning-making taking place in the discussions, rather its aim is to illuminate discursive patterns that seem to do central discursive work in discussions, i.e. that are powerful in terms of their functions.
Repertoire of Change
The first identified repertoire in the discussions is the repertoire of change, which constructs images of women's violence, particularly IPV, as a social problem that has become more pronounced in recent years. The claims of IPV committed by women having increased largely follow similar rhetorical paths as in the construction of moral panics over women's violence in, for instance, the United States (e.g. Chesney-Lind, 2006; see also Venäläinen, 2017). The key claim associated with this repertoire is that gender differences in IPV perpetration have become less significant. An image of change is evoked for instance with the use of terms such “modern woman”, in comments such as the following: “after having received a few punches, a modern woman will not crouch in the kitchen corner to be kicked but indeed grabs a kitchen knife.” (3/8/2009). The resonances with notions of women having become liberated are obvious here, enlivened with a portrayal of a woman who responds to being battered not with helplessness but by agentically using violence herself. Similar to the elements of moral panics identified in previous literature on portrayals of women's violence is the notion of women having become more like men, which works as another constituting element of this repertoire. Furthermore, occasionally, this purported development is explicitly accounted for by online commenters with the detrimental influence of feminism. The following extracts provide examples of this repertoire.
Feminism has turned women into men: selfish, blaming others for their own problems and solving them with violence […] All modern “progress” wasn’t after all so great and good as we are always led to believe (5/12/2011)
One of the trends in intimate partner violence is its becoming more equal. While the intimate partner violence experienced by women has diminished, that experienced by men has risen in equal proportion. Probably the demands of the working life, stress, being busy, increased use of alcohol as well as excessive immersement into feminist theology are driving women into an impasse, and the only way out is often aggressive eruption in the domestic sphere. (14/1/2008)
These extracts illustrate several ambivalences in the tone of commenting on women's violence and the effects of feminism. Whereas they entail a seeming care for women's wellbeing, they simultaneously forward a message that feminism and the changes it leads to, are the reasons for their distress and violence. The ideas expressed in these extracts are built around efforts to speak against a positive image of societal change attributed to feminism, and the claims of women's violence having increased serve a key role in supporting this argumentation. The extracts illustrate how raising the issue of women's violence frequently serves rhetorical functions that are not primarily motivated by a concern for violence and for instance its victims, but rather are harnessed for the purpose of diminishing the legitimacy of the women's movement. In sum, the constructions of change in online discussions tend to link feminism with women's purportedly increased use of violence, and thereby create images akin to moral panics raised in the media over the effects of feminism on women's behaviour and wellbeing (see, for example, Chesney-Lind, 2006; Venäläinen, 2017).
Repertoire of Equal Perpetration
Raising the issue of women's violence as a recently emerged cause for concern in online discussions is frequently supported by and co-appears with the repertoire of equal perpetration. The key element of this repertoire is the making of factual claims about equal rates and severity of IPV committed by women and men. The following extract shows how the claims about women's domestic violence being equal or even surpassing men's violence work to complete the picture of a serious problem at our hands.
During the last few years violence committed by women has started to appear more and more often in the media, its brutality and senselessness being well comparable to violence committed by men. And so it seems that gender explains violence less and less. There are several examples. There is a nurse who murders elderly people, there is a youngish woman who turned a shooting club into a slaughterhouse and there are those who are taken to indiscriminate violence in bars. Even within families women's violence is a big problem. Women are more often the perpetrators in filicides and in other violence towards children. Also the spouses get to feel their women's violence. In fact, men are more often than women the victims of severe domestic violence. (1/3/2010)
In the extract, references to the media, and in this case to a few notorious cases of women’s violence actively covered in the press in the preceding years in Finland, are mobilised for the purpose of providing evidence of increase and severity of women’s violence. This is coupled with statements of its frequency in the domestic sphere, presented as facts beyond dispute. Whereas such statements do not include references to statistics or research here, in other comments such references are highly common, relatively seldom however accompanied by any details of studies being referred to – in quite a similar fashion to patterns of representation identified in other context where (de)gendered images of IPV are constructed (e.g., Berns, 2001). Such references to well-known cases or statistics are frequently used factualisation techniques that allow constructing the accompanying claims as truthful and thereby also work to deflect any possible counter-arguments. (Edwards & Potter, 1992; for further identification of these techniques in the online discussions, see Venäläinen, 2020)
As the previous extract also illustrated, in addition to comparability to men, women's use of violence in the domestic sphere is frequently presented in the online discussions as not only an equal but in fact a more severe problem than men's violence. This claim is commonly reiterated in online discussions specifically concerning mental violence, the harmfulness of which is often emphasised over that of physical violence.
Women’s mental violence is much worse, and it hasn’t even been researched. It is continuous and it wreaks havoc in the long run. Hell’s angels. (14/9/2007)
Argumentation such as this reiterates the common idea of mental violence being the gender-specific manifestation of women's aggression (Ringrose, 2006) and uses this idea for establishing the claim that women's violence is worse in its effects than men's assumedly physical violence. Dragiewicz and Burgess (2016) have discussed similar comparisons between the harmfulness of women's mental violence and men's physical violence as examples of false equivalences that exploit feminist notions about the harmfulness of mental violence for the purpose of creating an image of equality in women's and men's experiences of violence, which is then used for the purpose of countering feminist claims about gendered patterns and consequences in IPV.
These claims and their rhetorical functions are very similar to those put forward for the purpose of establishing a gender-neutral paradigm in research on IPV. Indeed, the interplay between understandings put forth in research literature and among the general public is specifically salient in the construction of the repertoire of equal perpetration. The gender-neutral paradigm (e.g. Dutton, 2012; Straus, 2011) has been articulated on the basis of a critique against feminist research on IPV, with the function of delegitimising such research and its findings related to the IPV's structural underpinnings. Such dialectical construction of a contrast pair ‘facts and legitimacy/falsehood and illegitimacy’ is evident for instance in the following comment, which aims to forcefully convince the readers of the biased nature of feminist research on IPV.
A truly unadulterated research on violence needs urgently be conducted in Finland. Now that studies on violence are done by feminists, we get a completely distorted picture by manipulating the truth and the children and men are in great danger. I have read the violence reports from so many countries that align with my claims that Finland cannot markedly differ from them. Violence caused by women and men is about 50/50, but woman is more violent toward children! Now finally a stop must be put to all this distortion and lying for the benefit of a woman and against a man! (16/12/2015)
The construction of equal perpetration as a fact that shows the untruthfulness of feminist knowledge also works to establish dominance in the interaction unfolding in the discussion threads, by casting doubt on any counter-arguments aligned with feminist views. By highlighting the suffering of not only men but also children due to women's violence, a moral imperative is constructed to turn away from purportedly distorting feminist research, and towards research articulated as “unbiased” as its opposite. Therefore, whereas the repertoire of change cast feminism and the women's liberation it enables as the root cause of women's violence, here feminist research is similarly portrayed as causing harm to families due to hiding the purported truth of women's violence.
Repertoire of Double Standards
The themes of truth and biases that purportedly favour women and cause suffering to men also play a key role in the repertoire of double standards. It is based on claims of widespread biases in the treatment of women compared to men as perpetrators of violence. These claims are frequently accompanied with descriptions of sequences of events where a woman uses violence against a man, the man responds with efforts to restrain the woman, followed by an intervention by authorities, who assume the man and not the woman is the violent party, with the result of the man being sanctioned and the woman instead perceived as innocent. A frequent element of these narratives is the portrayal of women as purposefully framing the man and deceptively taking advantage of the authorities' biased assumptions – a positioning that reiterates common media representations of women's violence (Venäläinen, 2017):
If the man calls the police, the woman says that he is beating her. Then she says that the man has raped her and sexually abuses the children. A man is judged only on the basis of a woman's word. This has happened several times. The law is completely on the women's side. (16/5/2013)
Similar portrayals of women's violence not being sanctioned and women escaping being held responsible frequently appear in the discussions when the focus is on the sentencing of violent crime:
Women’s sentences for violent crimes are clearly lighter than men’s and they aren’t always even sentenced for crimes that would lead to a sentence if perpetrated by men. Men and women stand unequal before the law even though it should be the same for everyone. (3/12/2016)
These portrayals of women being treated more leniently than men by the criminal justice system mobilise sentiments and understandings related to issues of equality, which effectively allow for inviting the audiences to condemn the purported inequality experienced by men and providing advantage for women. The image of reality concerning gender and power largely aligns with anti-feminist ideas about equality having gone too far, with the result of women having become more privileged than men in contemporary Western societies (Messner, 2016). With regard to the functioning of the justice system and in general the sanctioning of women's violence, these portrayals echo academic discussions on the minimisation of women's violence due to the influence of stereotypical notions of women as nonviolent (e.g. Fitzroy, 2001). However, what appear largely absent from the online discussions are the opposing viewpoints also raised in research, according to which the same stereotypical notions may also result in specifically condemnatory treatment of women's violence due to its gendered transgressiveness (Hester, 2012).
Finally, similar to the other repertoires, the portrayals that constitute the repertoire of double standards also rely on positioning feminists as responsible for the highlighted problems:
There are same kind of psychopaths, sadists and torturers in women as there are in men. Women are just always given understanding to, pitied and held as victims whereas men are punished as they should be. And the reason for this are the theories made up by extreme feminists. (12/11/2014)
The image of feminists constructed here is based on the claim that their theories allow women to get away with violence due to fabricated assumptions of their innocence. Again, the resonances with assumptions circulated in research as well as public arenas about feminism distorting understandings of violence are clear, and at work here in creating an image of a reality where it is not women but men who are the victims of inequality.
Summary
The repertoires that are commonly drawn upon in online discussions entail several elements previously identified in media portrayals on women's violence that evoke moral panics around it and use it as evidence of detrimental effects of feminism. The interplay between efforts to highlight the severity of women's violence and to speak against the legitimacy of feminist efforts at social change, and in particular to raise awareness of gendered patterns in IPV, is also evident in the portrayals of feminist research as counterfactual and adulterated by biases. The links between understandings circulating among the general public and those generated as a part of the gender-neutral paradigm in IPV research are apparent in these tendencies to employ rhetorical tools aimed at discrediting feminist work. The commonalities in relation to men’s rights rhetoric as well as the portrayals that men who have used IPV have been frequently shown to rely on (see e.g. Anderson & Umberson, 2001) are also evident in the discussions. These understandings seem to continue to hold a position of predominance in terms of discursive power, even though, as mentioned in the previous section, the discussions in online environments frequently also manifest alignments with feminist understandings.
One of the key rhetorical functions accomplished with the help of the identified repertoires in the context of online discussions is their capacity to diminish possibilities to discuss and make sense of women's use of IPV from a perspective that considers structural-level gendered inequalities and their impact on experiences and perpetration of IPV – in a country considered as progressive, yet with high levels of violence against women. By doing so, they sustain the common image of opposition and discrepancy between feminist knowledge on IPV and women's use of it (Worcester, 2002). Therefore, disrupting the hegemony of this image of feminist work being antithetical to examination of women's use of violence is crucial also for countering the hegemony of anti-feminist views in efforts to make sense of the topic in contexts such as online discussions.
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- Prelims
- Introduction
- Historical Perspectives
- Chapter 1 No Explanation Needed: Gendered Narratives of Violent Crime
- Chapter 2 ‘A Hard-Working and Nice Person?’ Respectability, Femininity and Infanticide in England and Wales, 1800–2000
- Chapter 3 The Voices of Violent Women in Nineteenth-Century Ireland
- Chapter 4 The Many Defences of Maria Barberi: Challenges to a Victim-Based Agency
- Understanding Women's Acts of Violence
- Chapter 5 An Investigation of Forms and Drivers of Violence Perpetrated by Women in Lesotho: The Case of Female Correctional Institution in Lesotho
- Chapter 6 Bargaining With Patriarchy, Resisting Sisterarchy: Contextualising Women's Participation in Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting (FGM/C)
- Chapter 7 Women With Intellectual Disabilities: Unravelling Their Victim–Offender Status
- Chapter 8 Negotiating Vulnerability: Contextualising Nigerian Female Sex Workers' Violence Against Male Clients
- Women as Perpetrators of Interpersonal and Intimate Violence
- Chapter 9 Domestic Abuse: Analysing Women's Use of Violence
- Chapter 10 Typology of Female Offenders in Intimate Partnerships – A Feminist Approach
- Chapter 11 Men's Self-Reported Experiences of Women's Controlling Behaviours and Intimate Partner Violence in Kenya
- Chapter 12 ‘She Ended Up Controlling Every Aspect of My Life’: Male Victims' Narratives of Intimate Partner Abuse Perpetrated by Women
- Power and Women's Violence
- Chapter 13 Obstetric Violence: A Form of Gender-Based Violence
- Chapter 14 By Any Other Name: The Difficulties of Recognising Female Police Violence
- Chapter 15 Women's Violence in Armed Conflict: Towards Feminist Analysis and Response
- Women and Non-State Political Violence
- Chapter 16 Strategic Silences and Epistemic Resistance: Agency of Women Ex-Combatants in ‘Post-War’ Space
- Chapter 17 The Representation of Women's Involvement in (Non-State) Political Violence: Dominant Myths and Narratives Surrounding ‘Radicalised’ Women in the UK
- Chapter 18 News Media Framing of Female Ex-Combatants in a Post-Conflict Society
- Chapter 19 Feminists? Armed: Gender and the Question of Political Violence
- Chapter 20 With the Right to Kill, But Not to Lead: The Role of Women in the Spanish Terrorist Gang Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA)
- Cultural Interpretations of Violent Women
- Chapter 21 Online Discourses of Women's Violence, Gender Equality and Societal Change
- Chapter 22 Mental Illness/Distress in Representations of Maternal Filicide-Suicide: Silencing the Gendered Aetiologies of Violence
- Chapter 23 Sad, Bad or Mad: The Denial of Agency to Women Who Kill
- Chapter 24 ‘Evil Women’: Sexual Sadism and Murder in Britain, 1960s–1980s
- Fictional Representations of Violent Women
- Chapter 25 Imagining Women's Violence: The Femme Fatale
- Chapter 26 Killing Eve: Television Violence as Liberation?
- Chapter 27 Not Afraid to Kill: The First Female Literary Detective in Bengali Crime Fiction
- Chapter 28 ‘Returning to Destroy Your World’: A Transhistorical Approach to Cultural Constructions of the Female Revenger
- Chapter 29 Women's Violence in Tamil Mega Serials
- Chapter 30 Feminist Perspectives on Rape-Revenge and Necroempowerment in Narcotelenovelas and B Movies
- Violent Women and Girls in the Criminal Justice System
- Chapter 31 Trends in Girls' Delinquency in the United States
- Chapter 32 The Importance of Language, Intersubjectivity and Recognition in Creating Space for Women's Rehabilitation from Acts of Violence
- Chapter 33 Female Incarceration and Criminal Selectivity: Reflections on Crime Committed by Women in Brazil
- Chapter 34 Violence and Systemic Injustice: The Effects of Colonialism and Neoliberalism on the Overrepresentation of Indigenous Women and Girls in Canada's Criminal Justice System