This article examines government and advocacy group texts on three recent Canadian domestic violence policy moments. Drawing on governance, feminist poststructuralist, and social movement perspectives, it examines men's rights advocates' and feminists' discursive actions and their influence on officials. The research aim is to explore the provisional, intrinsically incomplete, and indeed questionable success, to date, of Canadian anti-domestic violence advocates' strategies and tactics of resisting men's advocates' efforts to delegitimize gendered constructions of domestic violence. At the level of political action, the article contributes to efforts by feminists internationally to safeguard protections and supports for abused women and children in a political context marked by the increasingly prominent influence of men's rights and associated antiprogressive backlash.
This article presents findings from ongoing research on interventions for violent and at-risk youth in Ontario through partnerships authorized under Canada's 2003 Youth Criminal Justice Act (YCJA). After briefly describing and theoretically situating the YCJA's “preventative partnership” ( Garland 2000 ) strategy, we analyse an interview with a 16-year-old Ontario high school student (one of 85 interviews with female and male youth recruited through high schools, community agencies, youth advocacy networks, and correctional facilities between 2002 and 2006). In this interview, “Connie” describes her experiences with family and peer violence and her efforts to deal with these experiences through a range of escape and help-seeking behaviours. Drawing broadly upon governmentality discourses on advanced liberal governance, our analysis focuses on the ways in which victimization, running away, child protection involvement, criminal activity, and social exclusion are linked. We also discuss the promises and challenges of efforts to address the needs of youth caught up in this trajectory through community partnership strategies.
This paper situates the Harper government's 2006 restructuring and effective dismantling of Status of Women Canada and its 2011 take down of the approximate 12,000 volume online library of the federal Family Violence Initiative in relation to two developments. These are the ascendant influence of men's rights and other antifeminist activism in Canada and globally; and the concurrent rise of a Hayekian-animated New Right neoliberal agenda intent on subordinating civil society and democratic rule to the forces of twenty-first century global capitalism. The paper contends that anti-feminism is among a host of neoconservative forces that the New Right instrumentalizes to augment and advance and its neoliberal agenda. For the New Right, however, the enemy is not gender equality or feminism per se but rather the market inhibiting commitment to social justice that feminism participates in and advances.
KeywordsNeoliberal dismantling; New Right; feminism; men's rights; social justice.
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Anti-Feminist Backlash and Gender-Relevant Crime Initiatives in the Global Context A s we move further into the new millennium, feminist criminologists have found themselves in the midst of a volatile and politicized challenge, the challenge of sustaining the gains of second wave feminism in the face of neoconservative politics and the strength of global capitalism. From the 1990s onward, a body of research has emerged on ways feminist successes appear to be ricocheting back with an ever meaner or harsher twist. One example is the changed landscape of crime and justice for women in the United States-where women are treated "equally" to their male counterparts in the criminal justice system, no matter how (in)appropriate and (ir)rational such equal treatment is-a development Chesney-Lind (2006) poignantly named "vengeful equity" in her contribution to the inaugural issue of Feminist Criminology. A second example is the ways an Internet-linked international men's rights movement is reshaping domestic violence and family law discourse and policy to constitute men as equally or indeed more victimized than women in domestic "conflict," resulting in increases in dual-arrests and the erosion of funding for women's anti-domestic violence advocacy and services in Canada and other jurisdictions (Mann, 2008; Miller & Meloy, 2006). These are but two examples of antifeminist backlash and the very real impacts this backlash is having on policies relevant to female victimization and offending in jurisdictions across the globe. From America to Australia,
<p>This special issue presents a series of papers by scholars who participated in a workshop entitled ‘Men's Groups: Challenging Feminism’, which was held at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Canada, 26-27 May 2014. The workshop was organised by Susan B Boyd, Professor of Law and Chair in Feminist Legal Studies at the UBC Faculty of Law, and was sponsored by the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at UBC, the Peter A Allard School of Law, the Centre for Feminist Legal Studies at UBC, and the <em>Canadian Journal of Women and the Law</em>. The aim of the workshop was to bring together feminist scholars from multiple disciplines and multiple national contexts to explore a source of resistance to feminism that has been largely overlooked in scholarly research: the growing number of nationally situated and globally linked organisations acting in the name of men's rights and interests which contend that men are discriminated against in law, education and government funding, and that feminism is to blame for this. This special edition presents eight papers inspired by the workshop, authored by scholars from Canada, New Zealand, Poland, Sweden and the United States. A second special issue comprised of eight other papers inspired by the workshop was published in the <em>Canadian Journal of Women and the Law</em> as volume 28(1) in 2016.</p><p>To find out more about this special edition, download the PDF file from this page.</p>
This article addresses the dynamics and consequences of emotionality in social movement activity through a case study of a community development effort to establish a shelter for women in a small Ontario community in the early 1990s. From the perspective of involved actors, the shelter-building initiative took on “a life of its own,” producing outcomes that contravened their goals and values, as community workers and as feminists. These included two eventualities that shelter activists were particularly anxious to avoid—an “us-against-them” vilification of a male “opposition” and the stigmatization of abused women as a “problem population.” Theoretical work on the interplay of social structures, cultural repertoires, and the emotionality of the self provides insight into how and why such seemingly “irrational” processes evolve.
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