Gendered Violence: A Cultural Perspective challenges readers to confront gender violence as a social problem deeply embedded in inequalities of class, race, and nation as well as gender. It offers a highly readable and clear overview of what constitutes gender violence, its social context, and its history as a public issue.

Preface vi 1 Introduction 1 2 Gender Violence and Social Movements 25 3 Punishment, Safety, and Reform: Interventions in Domestic Violence 48 4 Gender Violence as a Human Rights Violation 77 5 Poverty, Racism, and Migration 102 6 Violent "Cultural" Practices in the Family 127 7 Women and Armed Confl ict 156 8 Conclusions 179 References 187 Index 207

This concise introduction defines gender violence in social and cultural terms. Through personal accounts and ethnographic case studies, Sally Engle Merry provides a vivid portrait of many forms of violence in gendered relationships. Domestic violence, rape, murder, wartime sexual assault, prison and police violence, murder, female genital cutting, female infanticide, “honor” killings, and trafficking are all analyzed extensively. Merry examines major social movements and other efforts to diminish gender violence such as criminalization, batterer retraining programs, and human rights interventions. Gender Violence: A Cultural Perspective challenges readers to confront gender violence as a social problem deeply embedded in inequalities of class, race, and nation as well as gender. It offers a highly readable and clear overview of what constitutes gender violence, its social context, and its history as a public issue. It is invaluable as a guide to this complex and important social problem.

This acute analysis raises a troubling paradox: neither the growing awareness of gender violence, nor the activism directed toward it have lessened its incidence. If anything can make a difference, however, this book will. -Jean Comaroff, University of Chicago Gender Violence skillfully charts a tempered course through some of the most charged and globally relevant issues today. Sally Merry draws on her extensive and long-term research both to provide a primer for neophytes in how to think about gender violence and a sophisticated analysis of the structural conditions that unevenly distribute those subject to it. With critical care, she adheres to the complex and ambiguous social, personal, and political predicaments that foster its occlusion while addressing how activism has shaped the changing terms in which it is made visible, confronted, and understood. -Ann Laura Stoler, The New School