Conceptual Development and Content Validation of a Multicultural Instrument to Assess the Normalization of Gender-Based Violence against Women

The normalization of gender-based violence (GBV) consists of all those cultural beliefs and values that sustain, justify, or minimize GBV perpetration. Acknowledging the lack of instruments addressing the normalization of GBV and its constitutive sociocultural dimensions, this article presents the conceptual development and initial validation of the Normalization of gender-based violence against women scale. This 18-item instrument could be used to assess the normalization of violence against women in GBV survivors of various cultural contexts. The scale has been developed through a sizeable mixed-methods study. This paper reports the qualitative portion of the study that allowed the development of the instrument and assessment of its content and face validity. In particular, the method section details the process by which the assessed scale’s domain has been identified through an expert panel workshop, the analysis of GBV survivor’s interviews, and the review of existing scales. The assessment of face and content validity, trough expert judges’ evaluation and Cognitive Interviewing, is presented. This instrument is the first normalization scale developed by a multicultural team for use with violence survivors. The techniques used to construct this scale aimed to capture cultural aspects of normalization that might be shared across women from diverse groups. Therefore, its use could enable social or health care providers worldwide to program or evaluate the effectiveness of interventions to contrast GBV by promoting a clearer understanding of cultural and social norms that sustain the acceptance and normalization of violence.

The Normalization of Violence in Commercial Kitchens Through Food Media

The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that there are 2.53 million cooks and chefs in the United States. Of those, one in four reports experiencing physical violence in the workplace—roughly 632,500 victims. While shocking, this figure fails to account for the psychological and sexual violence that also plagues commercial kitchens. Workplace harassment and bullying is not limited to the United States and has been documented in Scottish, English, Scandinavian, French, Malaysian, Korean, and Australian kitchens. Why is violence so prevalent in kitchens, and how has it become a behavioral norm? Using data from 50 in-depth interviews with kitchen workers and analysis of food media, this article shows that while kitchen workplace violence can be attributed to typical causes, such as occupational stress, there is an overlooked source: the normalization of violence through food media. By exploring television shows, like “Hell’s Kitchen,” and chef memoirs, like Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, readers will see how bullying and harassment are romanticized in these mediums, glorified as a product of kitchen subculture, and consequently normalized in the kitchen.

“I Don’t Hate All Women, Just Those Stuck-Up Bitches”: How Incels and Mainstream Pornography Speak the Same Extreme Language of Misogyny

This article seeks to establish the connection—via shared discourse—between Incels and mainstream pornography. With an interdisciplinary approach which involves a Corpus Linguistics analysis of Reddit forum data, research into digital behaviors, and a feminist critique, this article focuses on the commonalities between the language of pornography and that of Incels. In doing so, it demonstrates how both pornography and Incels are different manifestations of the same misogyny. The findings of this study highlight the normalization of violence against women (VAW), which continues to be endemic in society, enabled and exacerbated by contemporary technologies.

Disrupting Rape Culture

Issues of social and spatial gendered justice have never been more pertinent in contemporary post-industrialist societies. This book which marks an intervention in contemporary debates about women’s bodies, public space and rape culture, in order to think through ways in which the normalization of violence against women might be contested. It brings together a rich web of thought about politics, embodiment and public space to examine social and spatial justice in the context of the female body in public. Transforming rape culture is not easy; the problems outlined in this book are not things that can be fixed by policy changes or legal reform (alone). They necessitate an overhaul in the ethics of the way in which we think and act in public spaces, including attending to the exclusions that everyone, in part, is complicit in enacting. Through analyses of three provocative case studies (pregnancy in public space, the female body as protest, and BDSM in public spaces), this book opens up generative ideas about transgression and revolt and advances a transformative politics of the possibilities of living without rape culture.

The Politics of Mourning in the Neoliberal State

Recently American scholars have examined the politics of mourning in relation to anti-black racism in the United States. Drawing on the work of queer theorist Maggie Nelson, I will illustrate that a political sense of mourning is also relevant to queer theory and life as a way to bear witness to the violence of the sex-gender system even as we find ways of navigating through it. Lastly, I will defend the claim that a sense of mourning-without-end is political for any marginalized population that suffers from social death and from the disavowal of its suffering through the normalization of violence against them.

Chicas muertas from Selva Almada: On the Normalization of Gender Violence

In light of the reflections on violence and power of Hannah Arendt - "La violencia aparece donde el poder está en peligro pero, confiada a su propio impulso, acaba por hacer desaparecer al poder" (Alianza, 2005), I will approach the impeccable fictionalized chronicle of Selva Almada that delves into the complex mechanisms of the normalization of violence - both real and symbolic - exercised against women. The text focuses on the murder of three teenagers - Maria Luisa, Andrea and Sarita - in the Argentina of the 1980s, but also shows how internalized socially misogynist mental structures are - the patriarchal power in danger derives from violence- and outlines the close links that in the Argentine case have systemic violence against women both with poverty and the rural world and with the previous military dictatorship and state repression of bodies and minds whose imagination also extends to democracy. The author of Ladrilleros puts her finger on the wound and clears with intelligence how patriarchy works and to what extent we can all be accomplices of horror.

A Parent’s Perceptions of Physical and Emotional Sibling Violence

The inclusion of parental perspectives in research on physical and emotional sibling violence has been minimal, with parents of various ethnic backgrounds being particularly absent from the literature. Drawing on witnessed interactions with her own children and her personal experiences with a sibling in childhood, this article presents a view of physical and emotional sibling violence from the perspective of an African American parent identified by social services to be at risk for child abuse and neglect. Themes emerging from the interview center around the intersection of sibling violence and parental/family stress, parental normalization of violence between siblings, witnessing community violence, sibling versus peer fighting, and ways to address/prevent sibling violence. The need for more ethnically and socioeconomically inclusive research related to physical and emotional sibling violence is highlighted along with a discussion of practice implications as mechanisms for intervention.