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.
Please cite this article as:
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,
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.