By Carolina Villacampa, Marc Salat

This publication examines the legal landscapes surrounding forced marriages in Germany, Spain, Ireland, and Finland, offering insights into prevailing legal approaches and institutional initiatives. Through comparative research, it sheds light on the prevalence of forced marriage in these countries, the legal strategies deployed to combat it, and existing institutional efforts to support victims. By delving into international obligations and their integration into domestic legal systems, the publication aims to foster a more gender-sensitive and victim-centered approach to support services, ultimately working towards preventing forced marriages and mitigating their consequences. This resource is designed as a tool for policymakers and practitioners, providing insights to guide future interventions and promote informed discussions in the field of forced marriage prevention and victim support.\

Report Series no. 104. Helsinki: HEUNI, 2024. 87p.

By Atkins, Susan and Brenda Hale, Baroness

Women And The Law is a pioneering study of the way in which the law has treated women – at work, in the family, in matters of sexuality and fertility, and in public life. Originally published in 1984, this seminal text is one that truly deserves its 'groundbreaking' moniker. Predating many key moments in contemporary feminist history, it was written before Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble; before Naomi Klein’s The Beauty Myth, with the term ‘feminist jurisprudence’ having only been coined three years earlier. It went on to inspire a legion of women lawyers and feminist legal rulings, from the Family Law Act 1996 to the legal definition of ‘violence’ (Yemshaw v. LB Hounslow 2011). This 2018 edition comes with a new foreword by Susan Atkins and provides a timely analysis of women in law forty years on, how much has changed and the work still left to do

London: University of London Press, 2018. 284p.

Edited by  Sharon Lamb 

It is increasingly difficult to use the word "victim" these days without facing either ridicule for "crying victim" or criticism for supposed harshness toward those traumatized. Some deny the possibility of "recovering" repressed memories of abuse, or consider date rape an invention of whining college students. At the opposite extreme, others contend that women who experience abuse are "survivors" likely destined to be psychically wounded for life.
While the debates rage between victims' rights advocates and "backlash" authors, the contributors to New Versions of Victims collectively argue that we must move beyond these polarizations to examine the "victim" as a socially constructed term and to explore, in nuanced terms, why we see victims the way we do.
Must one have been subject to extreme or prolonged suffering to merit designation as a victim? How are we to explain rape victims who seemingly "get over" their experience with no lingering emotional scars? Resisting the reductive oversimplifications of the polemicists, the contributors to New Versions of Victims critique exaggerated claims by victim advocates about the harm of victimization while simultaneously taking on the reactionary boilerplate of writers such as Katie Roiphe and Camille Paglia and offering further strategies for countering the backlash.
Written in clear, accessible language, New Versions of Victims offers a critical analysis of popular debates about victimization that will be applicable to both practice and theory.

New York; London: NYU Press, 1999. 192p.

By Katherine Millar, James Shires, and Tatiana Tropina

Multilateral processes on cybersecurity have recently begun to include official statements drawing attention to its gendered dimensions. Several delegations participating in the United Nations Open Ended Working Group (OEWG) on developments in the field of information and telecommunications in the context of international security have stated the need for gender mainstreaming into cyber norm implementation and gender-sensitive capacity building, as well as a better understanding of the linkages between cybersecurity and gender equality frameworks. However, questions remain about the overall application of gender perspectives to cybersecurity, as well as what kinds of action are needed to effectively implement a gender approach to cybersecurity and turn those goals into reality. To tackle this knowledge gap, this report outlines the relevance of gender norms to cybersecurity. It draws on existing research, supplemented by stakeholder and expert interviews, to assess gender-based differences in the social roles and interaction of women, men and non-binary people of all ages reflected in the distribution of power (e.g. influence over policy decisions and corporate governance), access to resources (e.g. equitable access to education, wages or privacy protections), and construction of gender norms and roles (e.g. assumptions regarding victims and perpetrators of cyber-facilitated violence). Overall, gender norms inform cybersecurity in two ways. First, gender constructs individual identities, roles and expectations within cybersecurity and broader society, such as the frequent association of technical expertise with men and masculinity. Second, gender operates as a form of hierarchical social structure. This means that activities and concepts associated with masculinity, such as technical expertise, are often, but not always, valued over those associated with women and femininity, such as communications expertise or equality, diversity and inclusion initiatives. To understand how gender shapes specific cybersecurity activities, this report proposes a new cyber-centric framework based on the three pillars of design, defence and response, aligned with prevalent perspectives among cybersecurity practitioners and policymakers. In each of these three pillars, the research identifies distinct dimensions of cyber-related activities that need to be considered from a gender perspective.

Geneva, Switzerland: United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research , 2021. 80p.

By Nancy Lombard and katy Proctor

Scotland’s record of accomplishment in tackling issues such as stalking and coercive control has been identified as an exemplar. Most recently, the Domestic Abuse Scotland Act (2018) was implemented which for the first time recognised a coercively controlling course of conduct as the crime of Domestic Abuse, possibly indicating a more empathetic and understanding criminal justice system. However, it is important to recognise that despite victim-centred policies and legislation, institutional criminal justice processes can diminish their impact. As such, victims can feel disempowered and controlled simultaneously by the bureaucracy in which they find themselves and by the continued abuse of the perpetrator. Therefore, this research explored whether the Scottish Criminal Justice System facilitates the empowerment of the victims who access its support or exacerbate their disempowerment.

The aim of this study was to explore the lived experiences of victims of coercive control and/or stalking as they navigated the criminal justice system.

Glasgow: SCCJR - The Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research, 2023. 72p.

By Emma Russell, Hui Zhou, Gabriela Franich

This report documents how women experiencing domestic and family violence (DFV) are policed and criminalised. It presents findings from a research project conducted by Fitzroy Legal Service (FLS) in partnership with La Trobe University with the support of a Victorian Law Foundation Knowledge Grant (2020-21). The research aimed to identify how women who experience a range of social, economic, health and legal issues – including but not limited to DFV – become caught up in the criminal legal system.1 Investigating this point of overlap or interchange between social, financial, health or civil matters on the one hand, and criminal legal matters on the other, can help practitioners and policy strategists to explore the opportunities for systemic changes and collaborative support models that would prevent women’s criminalisation. Our use of the term women is inclusive of both cis and trans women. By using the term criminalisation, we hope to draw attention to the processes and mechanisms through which social problems come to be treated as criminal legal problems; and to highlight that there are alternatives. To investigate the relationships between criminalisation and women’s experiences of social, economic, health and/or civil legal issues, we adopted three methods of data collection and analysis: • the review and classification of 108 anonymised Fitzroy Legal Service client case files relating to women with criminal legal matters • the retrieval of publicly available statistical data on women in prison and women respondents on intervention orders • the thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with 11 legal and social service practitioners with current experience of working with criminalised women These methods generated rich quantitative and qualitative data on the policing and criminalisation of women, especially women experiencing DFV and allowed us to identify opportunities for systemic changes that would prevent criminalisation. Much of what we found has already been spoken and written about at length by women and gender diverse people with lived experience of imprisonment.2 We intend for this research to supplement their expertise and lend further evidence to their campaigns and calls for action. By triangulating the data gathered and analysed through the methods above, this report explores the following questions and main findings, outlined in Table 1

Melbourne: Fitzroy Legal Service, 2022. 44p.

By Jenna Russo

While all UN multidimensional peacekeeping operations are mandated to prevent and respond to conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV), the missions in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and South Sudan, as well as in the Central African Republic, are also mandated to protect civilians from sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV). While SGBV is often used and understood interchangeably with CRSV, SGBV is broader in scope, as it encompasses nonsexual forms of gender-based violence and need not be connected to armed conflict.

This report examines how missions are implementing their mandates to protect civilians from SGBV, including CRSV, and assesses good practices, gaps, and opportunities for improvement. The report draws on lessons learned from the UN missions in South Sudan (UNMISS) and the DRC (MONUSCO). It considers how the complexities of preventing and responding to SGBV necessitate a whole-of-mission approach to the protection of civilians (POC) that encompasses not only physical protection from violence but also activities that address cultural norms related to gender, strengthen the rule of law, and enhance women’s participation. This report thus considers a range of protection activities carried out by missions, as well as structures and processes that promote the effective integration of gender into mission planning and activities.

The paper concludes with several recommendations for UN peacekeeping missions, the UN Department of Peace Operations (DPO), and member states on the Security Council to strengthen work on SGBV.

New York: International Peace Institute, 2022. 33p.