This book examines the strength of laws addressing four types of violence against women--rape, marital rape, domestic violence, and sexual harassment--in 196 countries from 2007 to 2010. It analyzes why these laws exist in some places and not others, and why they are stronger or weaker in places where they do exist. The authors have compiled original data that allow them to test various hypotheses related to whether international law drives the enactment of domestic legal protections. They also examine the ways in which these legal protections are related to economic, political, and social institutions, and how transnational society affects the presence and strength of these laws. The original data produced for this book make a major contribution to comparisons and analyses of gender violence and law worldwide.

This book examines the strength of laws addressing four types of violence against women--rape, marital rape, domestic violence, and sexual harassment--in 196 countries from 2007 to 2010. It analyzes why these laws exist in some places and not others, and why they are stronger or weaker in places where they do exist. The authors have compiled original data that allow them to test various hypotheses related to whether international law drives the enactment of domestic legal protections. They also examine the ways in which these legal protections are related to economic, political, and social institutions, and how transnational society affects the presence and strength of these laws. The original data produced for this book make a major contribution to comparisons and analyses of gender violence and law worldwide.

This book examines the strength of laws addressing four types of violence against women--rape, marital rape, domestic violence, and sexual harassment--in 196 countries from 2007 to 2010. It analyzes why these laws exist in some places and not others, and why they are stronger or weaker in places where they do exist. The authors have compiled original data that allow them to test various hypotheses related to whether international law drives the enactment of domestic legal protections. They also examine the ways in which these legal protections are related to economic, political, and social institutions, and how transnational society affects the presence and strength of these laws. The original data produced for this book make a major contribution to comparisons and analyses of gender violence and law worldwide.

Arguing that law must be looked at holistically, this book investigates the ‘hidden gender’ of the so-called neutral or objective legal principles that structure the law addressing violence against women. Adopting an explicitly feminist perspective, it investigates how legal responses to violence against women presuppose, maintain and perpetuate a certain context that may not in fact reflect women’s experiences. Carline and Easteal draw upon relevant legislation, case law and secondary studies from a range of territories, including Australia, England and Wales, the United States, Canada and Europe, to contextualize and critique different policy responses. They go on to examine the potential and limits of law, making recommendations for best practice models of policymaking and law reform. Aiming to help improve government, community and legal responses to women who experience violence, Shades of Grey – Domestic and Sexual Violence Against Women: Law Reform and Society will assist law-makers, academics, policymakers and a wider audience in understanding the complexities of violence against women.

This book theoretically explores intersectionality within human rights norms on violence against women and the derived duties for States.

Violence against women remains one of the most pervasive human rights violations in the world today, and it permeates every society, at every level. Such violence is considered a systemic, widespread and pervasive human rights violation, experienced largely by women because they are women. Yet at the international level, there is a gap in the legal protection of women from violence. There is currently no binding international convention that explicitly prohibits such violence; or calls for its elimination; or, mandates the criminalisation of all forms of violence against women. This book critically analyses the treatment of violence against women in the United Nations system, and in three regional human rights systems. Each chapter explores the advantages and disadvantages coming from the legal instruments, the work of the monitoring systems, and the resulting findings and jurisprudence. The book proposes that the gap needs to be addressed through a new United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Violence against Women, or alternatively an Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women. A new Convention or Optional Protocol would be part of the transformative agenda that is needed to normatively address the promotion of a life free of violence for women, the responsibility of states to act with due diligence in the elimination of all forms of violence against all women, and the systemic challenges that are the causes and consequences of such violence.

"This book explores how women from diverse backgrounds interact with the law in response to intimate partner violence, over time. Every year, millions of women globally turn to law to help them live lives free and safe from violence. Women engage with child protection services and police. They apply for civil protection orders and family court orders to help them manage their children's contact with a violent father, and take special visa pathways to avoid deportation following separation from an abuser. Women are often compelled to interact with law, through their abuser's myriad legal applications against them. While separation may seem like a solution, it often accelerates legal engagement providing new opportunities for continued abuse. Countless women who have experienced Intimate Partner Violence are enmeshed in overlapping, complex and often inconsistent legal processes. They have both fleeting and longer-term connections with legal system actors. Their stories demonstrate how abusers harness multiple aspects of the legal process, and its actors, to continue their abuse. They highlight the regular failure of legal processes and actors to comprehend the significance of non-physical abuse. Women show how legal system actors' common expectation that separation is a single event, rather than a process, has implications for their connections with law and the outcomes they achieve. From time to time, the women in this study attained the safety and closure they sought from law, sometimes in circular and unexpected ways, but their narratives demonstrate the level of endurance, tenacity and time this often required"--