Tackling the health and mental health effects of domestic and sexual violence and abuse

This document sets out a programme of work to equip services and professionals to identify and respond to the health and mental health needs of individuals affected by domestic violence, childhood sexual abuse, rape, oblique sexual assault and sexual exploitation including children, adolescents, and adults, both victims and abusers, male and female

Age and sexual divisions : a study of opportunity and identity in women

The aim of this thesis was to explore women's experience of age throughout the lifespan, to examine the connections between age divisions and gender divisions in the construction of opportunity and Identity in the lives of women, and to evaluate the influence of feminism on women's experience of the life cycle. The intention was - within a symbolic interactlonist framework and with reference to role theory, social scripts and soclalisation - to look at whether and, in what ways, identity and opportunity f or women are socially constructed within a system of structural inequality and women's subordination, and to study the changes that might have occurred as a result of a decade of feminism in the lives of women influenced by feminism. Within a general theoretical perspective of life course studies, an ethnographic methodology and grounded theory methods were used to generate concepts and to develop a formal theory of women's age and gender oppression from the theory which emerged, as a result of the research process Itself. Part One deals with the research process. This includes a review of feminism and the literature on age, the life cycle and socialisation. Methodology, research methods and characteristics of the sample are discussed in Chapter Two. Part Two on Internalised Oppression covers double standards in attitudes to age, distinctions between the male and the 'female chronology', the role of representations and childhood socialisation in the social construction of identity, the meaning of life-cycle related depression and the influence of feminism on identity. Part Three on Oppression, analyses the data in relation to age and the sexual division of labour, age and female sexuality and women's sexualised value. Part Four on Liberation looks at strategies devised by women at various life stages as a result of the influence of feminism to resist the oppression and to establish alternatives. Part Five on Formal Theory, presents a materialist analysis of gender oppression, age oppression, Ideology and identity, and the socialisation process. The evidence of this thesis suggests that women's lives are constructed from a combination of age and gender divisions throughout the lifespan, which operate as a form of social control both economically and sexually. It also suggests that, influenced by feminism, women have been able to increase their opportunities and redefine their identity within the female chronology. The research is original in conceptualising gender with generation (the 'female chronology')) oppression with internalised oppression, in demonstrating the function of power In the social construction of opportunity and identity and in identifying feminist influences on the female life cycle

Domestic and sexual violence and abuse : findings from a Delphi expert consultation on therapeutic and treatment interventions with victims, survivors and abusers, children adolescents, and adults

This report presents the results of one piece of research conducted as a part of the Victims of Violence and Abuse Prevention Programme (VVAPP) in the UK, namely a three round Delphi consultation. This Delphi consultation was undertaken to identify where there is and is not consensus among experts about what is known and what works in the treatment and care of people affected by child sexual abuse, domestic violence and abuse, and rape and sexual assault. It enables the identification of areas of agreement and disagreement about effective mental health service responses, and thereby contributes to the evidence base in this area. <br /

Gender, culture and organisational change: Putting theory into practice

An engaging contribution to the increasing body of knowledge about gender and organizations, Gender, Culture and Organizational Change examines gender-based inequality in organizations and considers how sexual and social relations between women and men based on sexuality, power and control determine the cultures, structures and practices of organization and the experiences of men and women working in them. Gender, Culture and Organizational Change represents a decade of experience of managing change and implementing theory in public sector organizations during a period of major social, political and economic transition and analyses the progress that has been made. It expands to make wider connections with women and trade unions in Europe and management development for women in the "developing" countries of Africa and Asia. It will be valuable reading for students in social policy, gender studies and sociology and for professionals with an interest in understanding the dynamics of the workplac

Pornography and the construction of misogyny

In this paper I return to my work in Pornography: Women, Violence and Civil Liberties, the edited volume published in 1992 by Oxford University Press, and subsequently my work on pornography, harm and human rights (Itzin, 1995,1996a), and to pornography and child sexual abuse (Itzin, 1996b. 1997a.b. 2000a,b,c). I draw from and build on that work and from the contents of the pornography special issue of the Journal of Sexual Aggression (Itzin and Cox, 2000). This paper covers key issues such as legislation and regulation, 'censorship'and 'freedom', the literature on pornography effects, the role of pornography in the aetiology of sex offending and in the construction of desire. In particular, the paper is concerned with theorising aetiology, causality and the 'epistemology of public policy' on pornography. It draws from and builds on the scholarship and activism of radical feminism in conceptualising and campaigning against pornography-related harm

Incest, paedophilia, pornography and prostitution: making familial males more visible as the abusers

In this paper I return to the survivor case study and sex offender data I used in my paper on conceptual models of the relationship between pornography and child sexual abuse in Child Abuse Review in 1997. Here I use them to show how paedophile typologies and sex offender classifications contribute to constructing the invisibility of the normal, ordinary, heterosexual family men who sexually abuse their own and other people’s children on a very substantial scale. I also use it as the basis for developing a typology which constructs the connections between incest, paedophilia, pornography and prostitution in the form of a ‘Continuum typology of child sexual abuse and the characteristics of child sexual abusers’, and captures the crossover of victims and perpetrators and the overlap of intrafamilial and extrafamilial child sexual abuse and exploitation. This, in turn, becomes the basis for constructing a ‘Nosology of child sexual abuse classification’ which genders the abusers and takes account of both the overlap and the dominant discourse currently of policing and policy, in which ‘paedophilia’ and ‘child sex offending’ have become synonymous, and incest abusers are invisible