Domestic and Workplace Violence

"When Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, asked two Swedish women out on dates in August, he may not have known that Swedish laws protecting women in their sexual encounters include wide-ranging definitions of sexual assault and rape.

Swedish criminal laws regarding sex offenses are not necessarily all that much stricter than the laws in many other European countries, Mr. Borgstrom said.

But Swedish women, backed by a strong consciousness of women’s rights and a history of a very public discussion of the scourge of sexual violence, may be more willing than most to look to the law for help.

The number of reported rapes in Sweden is by far the highest in the European Union, according to the European Sourcebook of Crime and Criminal Justice Statistics, which cites 53 offenses per 100,000 inhabitants. Britain has the next highest rate, at 24 per 100,000."

"This study investigates the cross-national correlates of intimate partner violence against women with a sample of 40 developed and less developed countries. Specifically, we analyze physical intimate partner violence against women during the 12 months prior to data collection, using data from nationally representative surveys. In the process, we examine the evidence for three explanations we discern from the literature: empowerment of women, cultural context (i.e. religion, institutions), and globalization. The results of our analyses provide strong support for the empowerment of women explanation, which draws from feminist concerns regarding socio-economic status of women, and reveal some effect of cultural context and globalization. Female labor force participation in non-agricultural sectors and women’s secondary school enrollment decrease the likelihood of intimate partner violence while increasing total fertility rate signals more partner violence. Religious fractionalization and dependence on high-income countries as export partners also increase the likelihood of intimate partner violence against women."

"Today is Transgender Day of Remembrance. As I wrote yesterday, at least 22 people were murdered in 2009 because of their sexual orientation. Four out of five of them were people of color and half were transgender women; the other half were overwhelmingly men who defied gender stereotypes, according to hate crime monitors. I argued in yesterday’s article that this violence is best understood as the most extreme example of a long list of dangers transgender women, particularly those of color, deal with everyday. The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the National Center for Transgender Equality point out a few of studies that provide more detail on that.

So the murders are grisly, but they are not isolated attacks. Our cultural fear of people who won’t follow rigid gender rules allows us to turn the other way while people are harassed, exploited and attacked routinely. Stop and think about that today, and then lets all start standing up against gender violence of all forms. And as I wrote yesterday, given the data, communities of color in particular need to come together to put this stuff to an end."

"October is National Domestic Violence Awareness Month, and on Wednesday President Obama hosted an event at the White House with Vice President Joe Biden to launch a set of new initiatives for domestic violence survivors. Obama said his administration was going to create a national advisory committee addressing violence against women that will be overseen by Attorney General Eric Holder. He also announced a suite of programs in different departments to meet the needs of domestic violence survivors, including giving people greater legal protections and protecting domestic violence survivors from being denied or kicked out of housing because they’d been abused.

Obama also said the Department of Justice was looking into making sure that restraining orders were successfully implemented and enforced, and that his administration was going to connect DV survivors with jobs and services and other tools so they could win “financial independence” to build new lives."