(Genders and Sexualities in The Social Sciences) Herjeet Marway, Heather Widdows (Eds.) - Women and Violence - The Agency of Victims and Perpetrators-Palgrave Macmillan UK (2015)

Genders and Sexualities in the Social Sciences
Series Editors: Victoria Robinson, University of Sheffield, UK and Diane

Richardson, Newcastle University, UK
Editorial Board: Raewyn Connell, University of Sydney, Australia, Kathy Davis,

Utrecht University, The Netherlands, Stevi Jackson, University of York, UK,
Michael Kimmel, State University of New York, Stony Brook, USA, Kimiko
Kimoto, Hitotsubashi University, Japan, Jasbir Puar, Rutgers University, USA,
Steven Seidman, State University of New York, Albany, USA, Carol Smart,
University of Manchester, UK, Liz Stanley, University of Edinburgh, UK, Gill
Valentine, University of Leeds, UK, Jeffrey Weeks, South Bank University, UK,
Kath Woodward, The Open University, UK
Titles include:
Jyothsna Belliappa
GENDER, CLASS AND REFLEXIVE MODERNITY IN INDIA
Edmund Coleman-Fountain
UNDERSTANDING NARRATIVE IDENTITY THROUGH LESBIAN AND GAY
YOUTH
Niall Hanlon
MASCULINITIES, CARE AND EQUALITY
Identity and Nurture in Men’s Lives
Brian Heaphy, Carol Smart and Anna Einarsdottir (editors)

SAME SEX MARRIAGES
New Generations, New Relationships
Sally Hines and Yvette Taylor (editors)

SEXUALITIES
Past Reflections, Future Directions
Meredith Nash
MAKING ‘POSTMODERN’ MOTHERS
Pregnant Embodiment, Baby Bumps and Body Image
Meredith Nash
REFRAMING REPRODUCTION
Conceiving Gendered Experiences
Barbara Pini and Bob Pease (editors)

MEN, MASCULINITIES AND METHODOLOGIES
Victoria Robinson and Jenny Hockey

MASCULINITIES IN TRANSITION
Francesca Stella
LESBIAN LIVES IN SOVIET AND POST-SOVIET RUSSIA
Post/Socialism and Gendered Sexualities
Shirley Tate
BLACK WOMEN’S BODIES AND THE NATION
Race, Gender and Culture
Yvette Taylor, Sally Hines and Mark E. Casey (editors)

THEORIZING INTERSECTIONALITY AND SEXUALITY
Thomas Thurnell-Read and Mark Casey (editors)

MEN, MASCULINITIES, TRAVEL AND TOURISM
Yvette Taylor, Michelle Addison (editors)

QUEER PRESENCES AND ABSENCES
Herjeet Marway and Heather Widdows

WOMEN AND VIOLENCE
The Agency of Victims and Perpetrators
Kath Woodward
SEX POWER AND THE GAMES
Kath Woodward
THE POLITICS OF IN/VISIBILITY
Being There
Genders and Sexualities in the Social Sciences

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Women and Violence
The Agency of Victims and Perpetrators
Edited by
Herjeet Marway
Lecturer, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom
and
Heather Widdows
John Ferguson Professor of Global Ethics, University of Birmingham,
United Kingdom
Editorial matter, introduction and selection © Herjeet Marway and
Heather Widdows 2015
Remaining chapters © Contributors 2015
Chapter 4:
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Widdows, Heather, 1972–
Women and violence : the agency of victims and perpetrators / Herjeet
Marway, Lecturer, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom, Heather
Widdows, John Ferguson Professor of Global Ethics, University of Birmingham,
United Kingdom.
pages cm
1. Women – Violence against. 2. Women – Crimes against. 3. Violence in
women. I. Marway, Herjeet, 1979– II. Title.
HV6250.4.W65W515 2015
362.88082—dc23 2015019259
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Notes on Contributors viii
Introduction 1
Heather Widdows and Herjeet Marway
Part I Women as Victims of Violence

1 Rape, Women’s Autonomy and Male Complicity 15
Sarah Sorial and Jacqui Poltera
2 Women between Agency and Coercion 34

Elena Alonzo
3 Prostitution and the Concept of Agency 52

Rhéa Jean
Part II Women as Perpetrators of Violence

4 Self-Harm as Violence: When Victim and Perpetrator Are One 71
Hanna Pickard
OPEN This chapter is available open access under a CC BY license
via palgraveconnect.com
5 Autonomy, Value and Violence: Assessing Substantive

Accounts of Autonomy 91
Jules Holroyd
6 Female Suicide Bombers and Autonomy 110

Herjeet Marway
7 Women Raping Men 129

Iain Law
Part III Governance, Violence and Agency

8 Andrea Dworkin’s Pornography: Men Possessing Women –
A Reassessment 145
Bob Brecher
v
vi Contents
9 Violence, Techno-Transcendence and Feminism:

Thinking about Agency in the Digital Age 162
Gillian Youngs
10 ‘Not Just Victims ... But’: Toward a Critical Theory of

the Victim 178
Robin May Schott
Part IV Theorizing Violence and Agency

11 Women’s Agency and the Fallacy of Autonomy:
The Example of Rape and Sexual Consent 197
Paul Reynolds
12 What Is Violence? 216

Amanda Cawston
13 Ontology, Freedom and the Body That Can Birth 232

Alison Assiter
Index 251
Acknowledgements
This volume emerged from a conference of the same title held at the
University of Birmingham in June 2011. We thank the university and
the Roberts Fund for providing financial assistance to support the confer-
ence. We are grateful to fellow students and staff (as well as the occasional
unsuspecting family member) for providing logistical support, without
which this event would not have taken place. Thanks also to the Centre
for the Study of Global Ethics, Department of Philosophy, and PhD
students at the University of Birmingham for fostering an environment
in which feminist philosophy has been allowed to flourish. In partic-
ular, we would like to acknowledge a cohort of Heather’s PhD students,
who formed a supportive and creative group during this period. Finally,
thanks to our friends and families for all their encouragement with this
project. It has been a pleasure to work on a topic we are passionate about
with many scholars who share this passion.
vii
Notes on Contributors
Elena Alonzo holds a PhD from the University of Genoa, Italy. Her
research interests revolve around the topic of political unfreedom in
contemporary liberal societies. In particular, during the past three years,
she has worked on the concept of institutionally structured oppres-
sion. In her dissertation thesis, she developed a conception of freedom
as nonoppression that can work as an analytical device for uncovering
and analysing the specific inner and outer forms of unfreedom that
typically affect certain minority groups such as women.
Alison Assiter is Professor of Feminist Theory at the University of the

West of England, United Kingdom. She teaches philosophy focusing
particularly on Kant and Kierkegaard. Her works include Althusser and
Feminism (1990), Enlightened Women (1996), and Kierkegaard, Metaphysics
and Political Theory (2009). Her book Kierkegaard, Eve and Metaphors of
Birth which expands on the essay in this volume, will be out in May
2015. She is also the editor of a series, Reframing the Boundaries: Thinking
the Political, with Evert van der Zweerde.
Bob Brecher is Professor of Moral and Political Philosophy and

co-director of the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics, and Ethics
(CAPPE) at the University of Brighton, United Kingdom. He founded
the journal Res Publica and serves on various National Health
Service, research and clinical ethics committees. Bob’s research inter-
ests include metaethics and applied ethics, with particular interest
in issues of moral responsibility and debates on torture. He has
published extensively, including the books War and Terror: Politics,
Representation, Practice (2010) and Torture and the Ticking Bomb (2007),
and given various conference papers including on ‘Philosophy and
Sex’ (2008).
Amanda Cawston holds a PhD in Philosophy from Downing College,

University of Cambridge, United Kingdom. Her main research interests
concern political violence and pacifism, feminism, and animal ethics.
In her dissertation, she developed an alternative analysis and theory
of political violence, thereby laying the groundwork for a reformulated
version of pacifism.
viii
Notes on Contributors ix
Jules Holroyd is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Nottingham,

United Kingdom. She has published on autonomy, responsibility, praise
and blame, feminist philosophy and free will.
Rhéa Jean holds a PhD in Philosophy from the Université de Sherbrooke

and the Université Laval, both located in the Province of Quebec,
Canada. Her thesis, supervised by Professor André Duhamel, was about
how prostitution limits women’s sexual autonomy. After a three-year
postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Luxembourg, she published
a monograph on the subject: L’intime et le marché: Réflexion éthique sur
l’autonomie et la prostitution (2014). She is also a founding member of the
Concertation of Struggles Against Sexual Exploitation, a state-funded
organization based in Montreal (active since 2004) seeking alternatives
for women involved in the ‘sex industry’.
Iain Law is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of

Birmingham, United Kingdom. His main interests are in meta-ethics,
applied ethics and ethical theory, and he is currently working on papers
in moral theory, moral psychology, the philosophy of medicine and
applied ethics. Along with Lisa Bortolotti and Heather Widdows, Iain
is a founding member of the Health and Happiness Research Cluster
at the University of Birmingham. This cluster undertakes research and
runs a Master’s program on Health and Happiness and various workshop
and seminar series on these themes, as well as producing co-authored
publications. He has published on the themes of happiness, autonomy,
utilitarianism, health and human rights.
Herjeet Marway is a lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the

University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. Her research interests
include global ethics, relational autonomy, feminist theory, virtue ethics
and race. She has written on female suicide bombers, commodification,
commercial surrogacy and feminist bioethics.
Hanna Pickard is a reader in Philosophy at the University of Birmingham

and a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. She specializes in the philos-
ophy of mind and psychiatry and clinical ethics, exploring philosoph-
ical questions that arise out of clinical practice and related science, law
and policy. Her current research involves articulating the concepts of
responsibility and blame that are used within clinical contexts and
their relevance to philosophy and criminal justice, and she also works
on addiction. As well as being a philosopher, Hanna works in a thera-
peutic community for patients with personality disorder and complex
x Notes on Contributors
needs, and develops and delivers training on responsibility and blame in

mental health and other contexts.
Jacqui Poltera is a manager in Primary Health in Australia. Recently she

was a research associate at the University of Tasmania and worked for the
Department of Health and Human Services in Tasmania. Jacqui holds a
PhD in Philosophy from Macquarie University and has held positions at
Macquarie University, the University of Western Sydney, the University
of Wollongong and the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal. Her research inter-
ests include the areas of practical identity and agency, ethics, feminist
philosophy and political violence. She has published in journals such as
Philosophical Explorations, Hypatia and Critical Horizons.
Paul Reynolds is Reader in Sociology and Social Philosophy at Edge Hill

University, United Kingdom. His main areas of research are in sexual
ethics and politics, and on the philosophical and theoretical questions
of radical critical theory. He is co-convenor of the International Network
of Sexual Ethics and Politics (http://www.insep.ugent.be) and co-editor-
in-chief of its journal. He is also co-director of the International Network
‘Cultural Difference and Social Solidarity’ (http://www.differenceand-
solidarity.org/). Paul is currently writing on the ethics of sexual consent
and sex beyond consent, and the development of frameworks of sexual
literacy and well-being, and developing work around the particular
problem of consent and lack for people with intellectual disabilities or
deficits associated with advancing age.
Robin May Schott is a senior researcher in the section for Peace, Risk
and Violence at the Danish Institute for International Studies. Her more
recent books include School Bullying: New Theories in Context (co-edited
with Dorte Marie Søndergaard, 2014), Birth, Death, and Femininity:
Philosophies of Embodiment, editor (2010), Philosophy on the Border
(co-edited with Kirsten Klercke, 2007), and Feminist Philosophy and the
Problem of Evil, editor (2007). She works on ethical and political issues
related to conflict, war, gender and sexual violence.
Sarah Sorial is a senior lecturer in the Philosophy Program in the

Faculty of Law, Humanities and Arts at University of Wollongong,
Australia. Between 2008 and 2011, she was an ARC Post Doctoral
Research Fellow at Macquarie University (2008) and the University of
Wollongong (2009–2011). Sarah completed her undergraduate degrees
in Philosophy and Law at Macquarie University. She holds a PhD in
Philosophy from the University of New South Wales (UNSW). Sarah
has also taught at Macquarie University and UNSW. Sarah’s research
Notes on Contributors xi
specialization is primarily at the intersection of political philosophy and

philosophy of law. Her recent book, Sedition and the Advocacy of Violence
(2011), addresses the limits of free speech and deliberative democracy.
She has also published widely in journals including Law and Philosophy,
Journal of Value Inquiry, Ratio Juris, Canadian Journal of Law and Society
and Critical Horizons.
Heather Widdows is John Ferguson Professor of Global Ethics at the

University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. She is the author of Global
Ethics: An Introduction (2011) and The Connected Self: The Ethics and
Governance of the Genetic Individual (2013), and co-editor of The Routledge
Handbook of Global Ethics (with Darrel Moellendorf, 2014), Global Social
Justice (with Nicola Smith, 2011) and Women’s Reproductive Rights (with
Itziar Alkorta Idiakez and Aitziber Emaldi Cirión, 2006). Heather also
serves on the Nuffield Council on Bioethics.
Gillian Youngs is Professor of Digital Economy at the University of

Brighton and has a background in the media, business and academia.
She is a founding editor and now editorial board member of the
International Feminist Journal of Politics and has published extensively on
feminist theory and issues related to international relations, communi-
cations and media and digital economy. Her books include International
Relations in a Global Age (1999), the edited volume Political Economy,
Power and the Body (2000), Global Political Economy in the Information Age
(2007), the coedited volume Globalization: Theory and Practice 3rd ed.
(2008), and the edited volume Digital World: Connectivity, Creativity and
Rights (2013).
Introduction
Heather Widdows and Herjeet Marway
This collection considers the agency of women who do violence and

have violence done to them. Topics considered by the authors of these
chapters include rape, pornography, prostitutions, suicide bombing
and domestic violence. Each of the contributions in this collection
goes some way to interrogate and offer new insights to debates about
violent women or women who suffer violence. In particular, the volume
addresses questions about agency, including the extent to which the
agency of women might be both more and less than is imagined in
competing frameworks of passive victims and empowered survivors;
the power of gendered norms, constructs and stereotypes which feed
into the specifically gendered assumptions about how female violence
is perceived, described and understood; and practical concerns about
how feminists can escape such polarizations in order to actually
address violence to and by women. The final point is fundamental.
Women who experience violence and commit violence are not ‘theo-
retical women’.
While this work begins within the philosophical tradition, it does not
end there, and the importance of this debate for policy and practice
is one which all who work in this area should have at the forefront of
their thoughts. It matters whether a ‘victim framework’ is adopted. For
instance, those who experience domestic abuse are often represented as
passive and meek, especially in the law courts (Schneider 2008; Abrams
1998–1999; Mahoney 1991). These women are presented as effectively
nothing but ‘victims’, lacking agency and autonomy. Of course, even
when situations are constrained, women may – and usually will – experi-
ence and exhibit some agency, for instance, in making preparations to
leave or in continuing in the relationship as preferable to leaving (ibid.).
Indeed one of the reasons why feminists and activists have so often
1
2 Heather Widdows and Herjeet Marway
rejected the victim framework is that it disempowers women and denies

agency. Alternatively, to simply deny ‘victimhood’ and adopt ‘empow-
erment frameworks’ can make it difficult to recognize the pain and
suffering which women who experience violence feel (see Robin May
Schott’s chapter in this volume). To take the example of domestic abuse
again, while most women are portrayed as victims, there are competing
discourses which suggest women have agency: that they should have
acted, and if they did not, then they are to blame. The women is
responsible and blameworthy (Abrams 1998–1999). Thus, discourses
of responsibility and empowerment may assume agency and control
which women do not in fact have. Feelings of helplessness and power-
lessness and the stripping of agency which often accompany experi-
ences of violence, do not cease because the empowerment and survivor
framework is now dominant. Being told one is a survivor can be just
as alienating and dehumanizing as being told one is a victim. Both are
types and stereotypes, which too often alienate women from their own
experience. Importantly, these frameworks are all or nothing. They do
not fit the experience of real women or give us ways of understanding
violence against women or ways of addressing it. They are caricatures,
tropes and unreal, and importantly, in both frameworks women lose.
This is just as true for women who commit violence, when often they
are either perceived as monsters (not really women) or the violence is
regarded as some kind of aberration (because women do not do that)
(Sjoberg and Gentry 2007). Because how we see, and therefore under-
stand, violent women and women who have violence done to them, is
so ideologically coloured that it is particularly important that the debate
about violence and women happens in the theoretical realm as well as
in policy and practice.
This volume aims to contribute to the theoretical debate as well as to
social and political responses, and so in some small way to how violent
women and women who suffer violence are treated, and to debates
about how such violence can be addressed. As such, this volume includes
some thought to how we might make the women we discuss (and those
we do not discuss) and their lives go better, why and how we should
prevent certain forms of violence, how we can recognize agency in lives
surrounded by violence, and what theoretical concepts can make sense
of the way in which violence occurs and is perpetuated in reality. To this
end, the volume is multidisciplinary and aims to speak across the range
of the debate.
The topic of women and violence in itself is interesting for feminists,
theorists and policymakers. Stereotypically, and to caricature, women
Introduction 3
are not expected to be violent. Violence, and its corollaries of aggres-

sion and sometimes even assertion, is the province of men. In contrast,
women are stereotyped as passive and submissive. Such binary thinking
which gives men certain traits and women others is now familiar and,
some might say, outdated feminist thinking. However, there is a long and
still important feminist tradition which critiques the binary construc-
tion of women as everything men are not. This goes back to Simone
de Beauvoir’s foundational feminist observation that ‘he is the Subject,
he is the Absolute – she is the Other’ (1949, 16). Arguably the nonvio-
lent stereotype of women is in decline, and there is some suggestion
that women are increasingly able to be violent and express themselves
violently, and perhaps in ways where the behaviour is not regarded as
analamous (Alison 2003; Morrissey 2003).
However, while some assumptions may be changing and certainly are
less passive, females are being introduced into the cultural mainstream –
the princess in Disney’s Brave rejecting the ‘girly’ duties and the goal
of a marriage, in favour of horse riding and her bow and arrow – it is
less clear that such changes have actually fed through into our under-
standings of the actions of real women. Furthermore, one might be very
worried if they did. If women, in practice, were seen as able to be (ille-
gitimately and legitimately) as violent as men, would the difference in
physical force or in physical threat that typically exists between them be
denied? For instance, while feminists may have (in practice) advocated
female strength and self-defense, part of why rape is a gendered crime
is about brute physical strength. Thus, while rape must be understood
as arising in a context of subordination within patriarchy, what practi-
cally happens is crucial. Both theoretical and practical issues need to be
considered and considered together.
It is because violence, power and agency are such complex concepts,
weighed down with masses of ideological and gendered assumptions
and constructions that the topic of women and violence is so fasci-
nating and important. A book could be written about each of these
concepts, and indeed many have.1 For instance, violence can be under-
stood in various ways (and this terrain is explored in detail in this
collection by Amanda Cawston). In the volume, we have employed a
broad definition which ranges from serious physical and/or psycho-
logical harm to the individual, to harm of a social nature (for instance,
when assumptions and constructions of what is female impact upon
all women), to harm of a political nature (in terms of laws and norms).
Violence can be other directed as well as self-directed, a physical act or a
threatening intention, individual or structural, local or global. Indeed,
it can involve any combination of these factors at any one time and
vary in its degree and severity. It may appear, for instance, in the private
sphere in the form of domestic or sexual violence in the relationship
between adults and children, between children or between adults. It
occurs too among acquaintances and complete strangers, such as in
crime involving assault and battery, sexual violence and the intimi-
dation of individuals through verbal or – increasingly through social
media – written (in 140 characters or less) abuse (Mantilla 2013; Tjaden
and Thoennes 2000; Bachman and Saltzman 1994). It may also be a
social and cultural harm, for example, in the propagation of assump-
tions about women which make violence more likely and acceptable
(Burt 1980), as well as in cultural norms about what women do and
do not do, which limit agency, understanding and even language (the
ability to name and express experiences of violence or responses to
violence) (Ferraro and Johnson 1983). Other social and political harms
which some would consider violence to women would be pornography
or laws which limit women’s ability to marry or to leave a marriage,
or to work outside the home (MacKinnon 1985; Okin 2002). Likewise,
laws which make it difficult either to claim rape (in certain jurisdic-
tions, such as China, where rape within marriage is still legal, and in
Somalia, where women instead of men can end up being punished)
or to get convictions (in other jurisdictions, such as where sharia law
exists and several witnesses are required to corroborate the charge, and
in the United Kingdom and United States, where women are routinely
demonized and disbelieved in courtrooms and the media) can be
considered violence.2 In addition, violence may include self-harm
(cutting, burning oneself or substance abuse) and suicide (as Hanna
Pickard discusses in this volume). In an age of the Internet and instant
global communication, such harm might include online pedophilia,
pornography and incitement to carry out terrorism too (some of which
is discussed in Gillian Youngs’ chapter). Although some question the
extent of violence perpetrated by women (Pollock and Davis 2005),
examples of women carrying out violence include violence in intimate
relationships in which those who suffer include partners and children
(Babcock, Miller and Siard 2003; Chavez 1992; Faller 1987); violence
against strangers, acquaintances or those under one’s care (Goldhill
2013; Batchelor 2005; Dickie and Ward 1997); and political violence
as part of militaries, insurgencies and political leadership (Ness 2008;
Sjoberg and Gentry 2007). The violence, whether done to or done by
women, may be a one-off, isolated incident, or it may be sustained over
a long period, and the harm may be individual, collective or social.
Introduction 5
These different sites of violence, moreover, can overlap in various

ways: sexual violence in intimate relationships may reflect an overall
structural problem of the failure of police and criminal systems to take
such violence seriously (as Elena Alonzo in this collection argues).
Likewise, violence at the hands of states through trade sanctions or
embargoes may lead to incidents of increased violence at the local level
through maintaining poverty or inadequate resources for the people
at large. Importantly, with global communications and increasingly
homogeneous images of women, further constraints may emerge as the
norms of femaleness and assumptions about ‘normal’ women become
less diverse and so potentially more limited and confining.
That violence is gendered is not a controversial claim. This is true
in many of the most common types of violence: across the globe
domestic violence is more likely to be perpetrated by men, just as sexual
violence against intimate partners is typically carried out by male part-
ners and pedophilia is usually done by men to children (Pollock and
Davis 2005; Watts and Zimmerman 2002), and likewise terrorism and
political violence more often than not involve male actors (Atran 2004).
In such instances, the vast majority of those who suffer such violence
are women.3 The extent to which violence upon women is one of the
results of patriarchy is not an issue which the volume addresses directly,
although a number of chapters touch on topics pertinent to this debate
(including – although certainly not limited to – chapters by Bob Brecher
on pornography and Sarah Sorial on rape, both of whom note the
gendered underpinnings of such violence). That said, gender, and the
gendered nature of violence, is core to the debate. Indeed even when
women perpetrate violence, gender is critical, as a number of chapters in
the collection show (Hanna Pickard on self-harm highlights the propen-
sity of women to direct aggression inward in a way men tend not to do,
while Jules Holroyd and Herjeet Marway examine a conspicuous display
of political violence that is both destructive of the self and others that is
typically thought to be the domain of men). While many philosophers
have developed differing understandings of gender, most accept it as
both a social (involving socially learned habits, behaviours and identi-
ties) and a political (involving hierarchies of domination and subordina-
tion) construct (Haslanger 2000; Butler 1990; Frye 1983; Pateman 1988;
de Beauvoir 1949). In this volume, we have not adopted a specific inter-
pretation, but endorse this general position. Although not necessarily
explicitly explored, this approach is visible in the thinking of a number
of contributors (such as Alison Assiter’s discussion of the birthing body –
a biological and social, role – and Paul Reynold’s drawing attention to
the passivity often associated with women and problems with this for
agency). Thus we – along with most of the contributors in the volume –
adopt a broad understanding of gender.
The collection is divided into four main parts: women as victims of
violence; women as perpetrators of violence; governance, violence and
agency; and theorizing violence and agency.
The first section on women suffering violence starts with a chapter
by Sarah Sorial and Jacqui Poltera. It explores the way rape (actual and
implied) threatens women’s autonomy and the way in which men
(whether they commit a rape or not) are complicit in rape culture. They
argue that, rather than the onus being on women to prevent or defend
against rape (to take self-defense classes or to lock their windows in
stifling heat, for instance), men should bear responsibility for addressing
rape and rape culture. This takes seriously the idea that rape is a social
and moral problem, that autonomy is relational and that men and
women are equal moral agents. Sorial and Poltera end by offering seven
recommendations to help redistribute responsibility for rape culture.
Elena Alonzo examines intimate partner violence (IPV). She considers
the ways in which traditional notions of positive and negative freedom
do not account for the complexity of ‘unfreedom’ in IPV and how atom-
istic frameworks do not represent women’s agency sufficiently well.
Drawing attention to institutions as well as social categories in which
women who suffer such violence fall, she argues for a multipronged
approach to understanding women and IPV in her ‘freedom as non-op-
pression’. This takes into account both positive and negative freedom, as
well as structural relationships to understand the degrees of agency and
freedom at play. Alonzo concludes her chapter by offering some brief
policy implications for her account of freedom as nonoppression.
The next chapter is by Rhéa Jean, who examines prostitution. Jean
argues that concerns that (libertarian or liberal) supporters of prostitu-
tion voice about radical abolitionists denying sex workers agency, or
that (postmodern) theorists have about abolitionists undermining
that women are free-willed, nonvictims, is unfounded. The abolition-
ist’s focus is not solely about the individual’s decision or her ability to
negotiate fairer deals, but about social factors that underpin and erode
agency. Jean reinforces this by exploring Joseph Raz’s three conditions
for internal and external conditions for autonomy, and ways in which
a market in sex work is coercive with knock-on effects in other sorts of
work. She concludes both that the sex industry reduces women’s agency
and that sex workers can be as rational as other individuals, and that
these are not contradictions.
Introduction 7
The section on women as perpetrators kicks off with a chapter that

bridges the themes of violence done to and done by women. In exploring
self-harm, Hanna Pickard offers an analysis of agency in which perpe-
trator and victim are one and the same, and in which the violence
involved is misunderstood (as not actually violence or as irrational)
and ultimately undermines women’s agential abilities to express certain
emotions and enact certain behaviour. To clarify these issues, Pickard
locates self-harm squarely as a form of violence, and identifies similari-
ties and differences between and reasons given for self- and other-di-
rected violence to underscore that self-harm is non-pathological, but
rather is often a response to particular psycho-socio-economic contexts.
Using these understandings, she tackles concerns about agency and how
we might effect change about violence, both clinically as well as socially
and politically.
In the next chapter, Jules Holroyd explores the case of Palestinian
suicide bombers and why substantive accounts of personal autonomy fail
to capture intuitions and firsthand reports about these women’s choices.
She argues that pinning autonomy to holding nonoppressive norms or
the correct normative standards – in the way substantive accounts tend
to do – overlooks the examples of agency that exist despite the women’s
oppressive contexts and that there are contested views about whether
terrorism is the right normative standard that might make ascribing
autonomy difficult. Holroyd further argues that two possible defenses of
a substantive account – epistemic humility and acceptance of normative
standards – fail: either they ignore those who seem more autonomous
because of their commitments in difficult circumstances or they move
to a debate about values rather than autonomy. Thus Holroyd rejects
substantive accounts of autonomy for understanding female suicide
bombers’ actions.
Herjeet Marway picks up the same example of female suicide bombers,
but argues that, where the goal is to track the complexity and nuances
of the women’s decision-making, a substantive account of autonomy is
preferable. After arguing that common representations of the women
serve to deny them agency, Marway goes on to examine procedural and
substantive relational models of autonomy, as possible candidates for
illuminating instances and degrees of agency. She argues that substantive
approaches are able to capture internal and external elements that impact
decision-making and that these can be reflected along a spectrum of
autonomy. While procedural accounts can do some of this, she contends
that substantive ones do them better, and so are more appropriate when
trying to recognize the agency of the female suicide bombers.
Using a different framework, Iain Law closes the section on violent

women by discussing women who rape men. He introduces an example
of Jo and Sam, and asks why the nonconsensual act that takes place
is any less problematic if the genders of the characters are reversed.
Although acknowledging that it is usually men who rape women, he
argues that women do rape men, and that both men and women are
damaged by assumptions that only men can rape. Men are thought
always to be up for sex, which is demeaning, and women are thought
not to be instigators of sex, which denies them agency, for instance. Law
contends that rape should be a gender-neutral category, both ethically
and legally, in order to recognize and punish it no matter the gender of
the perpetrator.
The third section of the collection tackles governance, violence and
agency. It opens with a chapter by Bob Brecher, who discusses Andrea
Dworkin’s Pornography: Men Possessing Women. He argues that – despite
Dworkin’s liberal language and framework – there are antiliberal under-
pinnings to her work. He clarifies that violence and harm are not only
direct but indirect, and not only individual but social, and he draws
out the central tenets of Dworkin’s claims that there is an affiliation
between pornography and patriarchy, and that the practices of pornog-
raphy shape how sex is done and not done in our culture. Brecher then
argues, indeed, that pornography does exemplify patriarchy, that it is
capitalistic, with assumptions about those who act in pornography and
those who produce and consume it, and that women are objects while
men the authentic subjects. He concludes that Dworkin’s position is
antiliberal in all these senses.
Gillian Youngs examines connections between the Internet and social
media and women, violence and agency. She discusses the blurring or
‘techo-transcendence’ that the Internet has allowed of traditional under-
standings of violence (it is a medium for both perpetrating and coun-
tering violence, for instance) and she illustrates some of the violence
that exists and occurs online (such as pornography and self-generated
indecent material). With regard to agency, she argues that the Internet
both perpetuates nondigital world inequalities, which undermine
agency, and permits individual support, activism and lobbying, which
bolster instances of agency. Youngs notes that, given the importance of
technology and science in shaping new realities and worlds, and that
women have historically been excluded from these areas, these must be
made more accessible for women and girls.
Robin May Schott ends the governance section with her exploration
of victimhood and empowerment in two discourses. In Anglo-American
Introduction 9
antirape discourse, Schott traces the genealogy of the rape victim and
argues against theorists who suggest that violence is a momentary act,
rather than a systemic problem. She contends that our understanding
of the victim should focus on subjectivity. She argues that in contem-
porary security discourse, notions of the victim have disappeared alto-
gether, with more of a focus on resilience and empowerment. Yet, she
argues that the concept of the ‘resilient agent’ is just as troubling as
the ‘disempowered victim’. Schott ends by arguing for a critical theory
of the victim: we should not abandon the term ‘victim’, assuming it is
purely negative, but rather utilize it to recognize and potentially elimi-
nate systemic violence wherever it occurs.
The final section of the book theorizes violence and agency. Paul
Reynolds’ chapter explores how we might better conceptualize agency.
He is deeply skeptical of the autonomy model since it relies on a liberal
individualism and an atomistic notion of volition and reason that
obscures the complexities of agency. He suggests that autonomy tends
to veer toward labeling women as victims or transgressors and that this
is unhelpful and indeed obfuscates what is happening on the ground.
Using the example of rape, Reynolds contends that we need a concep-
tion of agency that sits dialectically between reason and affect, that
recognizes the interrelated array of factors surrounding any moment of
agency, and that reflects the experiences and perspectives of the person.
This, he argues, better theorizes agency.
Amanda Cawston proposes a definition of violence as an attitude,
specifically one of egoism. This, she argues, gets to the core of what
violence is, and it avoids some of the problems of competing accounts.
The violence in pornography, for instance, is properly captured neither
as suffering nor as rights violations since these fail to engage with the
deeper underlying concerns. It is better captured, Cawston argues, as
an attitude of egoism which reveals not just how consumers of pornog-
raphy are satisfying self-directed desires, but (more importantly) how
pornography distances their sexual desire from uncomfortable truths
about it that would otherwise compel them to see it as a wrong. Cawston
concludes by noting how her definition demands a radical (rather than
liberal) and broad (rather than narrow) approach to feminism and femi-
nist philosophy generally.
In the final chapter, Alison Assiter examines metaphysical aspects
of agency. She questions the assumptions that philosophers have long
held in debates on ontology and freedom that privilege the mental over
the physical. This tendency, she argues, ignores the birthing body of
women, and this has problematic consequences for all conceptions of
agency – for men and women alike. Assiter offers readings of Immanuel
Kant that demonstrate the displacement of our maternal origins, as
Luce Irigaray puts it, and she discusses how Irigaray’s philosophy might
illuminate a difficulty for Kant about his notion of freedom. She then
sets out how Søren Kierkegaard’s work could be used to overcome the
problem of how to do wrong freely, and in particular how a conception
of freedom and agency could be grounded in the natural world. This is
more like the kinds of human beings we all are and the type of agency
we all have.
This collection, then, explores and interrogates a plethora of issues that
surround the topic of women, violence and agency. In their own ways,
the contributions each stress the significance of structural frameworks
and features of violence and agency, and the importance of accounting
for the real and lived experiences of women – as victims or perpetrators,
or sometimes both, of violence. We hope that the volume adds to the
debate and opens up the possibility of dialogue between theoreticians
and practitioners, and between various disciplines, while remembering
that what ultimately matters is the reduction of violence of all types –
individual, collective and social – and particularly gendered violence.
Notes
1. For instance, the following all deal with conceptual (as well as practical) issues
of agency, violence, power and women: Madhok, Phillips and Wilson 2013;
Schneider 2008; Morrissey 2003; Fitzroy 2001; Walker 1980.
2. For a concise survey of different laws on rape, see http://www.economist.com/
node/21561883.
3. Although since men are associated with being violent, it is also true that men
are likely to be victims of violence too, and this is especially so in the context
of war (Elshtain 1995).
References
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Eelam’, Civil Wars, 6(4), 37–54.
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Introduction 11
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Part I
Women as Victims of Violence
1
Rape, Women’s Autonomy and
Male Complicity
Sarah Sorial and Jacqui Poltera
Introduction
Rape is a ubiquitous, gendered crime overwhelmingly committed by men

against women.1 Being raped can severely damage a woman’s capacity
for autonomy and change the structure of her will. However, women
need not experience the horror of being raped to find their autonomy
threatened by fear thereof. The threat of being raped is a persistent
reality in the lives of most women, and is one that constrains women’s
actions and their motility, at least some of the time (Brownmiller 1975;
Card 1991). The prevalence of rape or sexual assault stems from a lack
of recognition and respect for women as equal moral agents. Our view
is that, despite significant advances in law reform2 and in education
programs,3 rape and the fear of rape persists in many societies, and its
prevalence threatens and can diminish women’s autonomy.
We understand autonomy in relational terms as something that
is achieved in relation to existing social and cultural institutions and
supportive relationships. On our account, autonomy is not a given,
although we are in one sense ‘autonomous beings’ just in virtue of being
persons. The sense in which we are autonomous is that we each have
the capacity for autonomous agency, but the extent to which we can
be autonomous or exercise autonomy is not only up to us: it is framed
by the nature of our relations with others and the context in which we
find ourselves. Not all situations or cultural norms will be conducive
to achieving/exercising ‘full’ autonomy, even though we may be able
to exercise/achieve a degree of autonomy despite being in an oppres-
sive social environment. The prevalence of rape in our culture is one
of the ways in which the autonomy of women is threatened relative to
men. The fact that rape threatens autonomy is relatively uncontested in
15
16 Sarah Sorial and Jacqui Poltera
the philosophical literature on rape. The more difficult question is how

women are to achieve autonomy despite the persistence and prevalence
of rape. It is this question that we seek to address in this chapter. While
it is the case that women are commonly presented as lacking agency
because of male aggression, we do not think that the achievement of
autonomy is impossible for women. But nor do we think that promoting
women’s autonomy is something that women, as either individuals or as
a group, are primarily responsible for.
We will argue that, because exercising full autonomy requires
socially supportive relations, including relations of mutual recognition,
promoting women’s autonomy is as much the responsibility of men as it
is of women. That is, in the same way women and women’s groups have
been demanding recognition of women as equal moral agents, and have
been resisting male dominance and aggression in various ways, including
by agitating for law reform, men also have various responsibilities to alle-
viate and eventually eradicate the prevalence of rape within our culture.
There are several reasons for focusing on men’s complicity in, and respon-
sibility for, alleviating the incidence of rape or sexual assault.
First, there seems to be an asymmetry in how responsibility for
avoiding and preventing sexual assault is understood and distributed
within the existing philosophical literature on sexual assault and within
our culture more generally. For example, one of the foremost recommen-
dations for increasing women’s autonomy in the philosophical litera-
ture is for women to learn self-defence. Although this is by no means the
only avenue for promoting women’s autonomy and reducing instances
of rape, we are interested in this strategy since it is arguably one of the
most common. As an avenue for promoting women’s autonomy, we
argue that self-defence explicitly places the onus on individual women
to address the prevalence of rape and to take responsibility for cases in
which their autonomy is threatened by (some) men. The more pressing
issue here is that women would not have to find ways to defend them-
selves from would-be rapists if rape were not a persistent social crime.
To this end, we argue that philosophers working on rape and women’s
autonomy need to increase their focus on how men can and should take
responsibility for addressing rape, rather than on educating women to
resist rape through learning self-defence, given that men are on average
more complicit (to varying degrees) in the prevalence of rape and given
that it is primarily men who fail or refuse to recognize and respect
women as equal moral agents.
Second, while men are more complicit in sexual violence against
women, as a collective, they do not take equal responsibility for it.
Rape, Women’s Autonomy and Male Complicity 17
This is attributable to a variety of reasons, including the fact that many

men benefit from existing (unequal) gender relations or are ignorant
about the extent to which their actions threaten women’s autonomy.
Third, because male violence is a specifically male issue, men are better
placed to understand it and to find ways of addressing it. Although rape
theorists like Susan Brison (2002), Anne J. Cahill (2001), Claudia Card
(1991) and Keith Burgess-Jackson (1996) may be sympathetic to this
approach, focusing on ways in which men can take responsibility to
promote relations of mutual recognition, and by implication, women’s
autonomy, has yet to be explicitly introduced in the debate on rape and
women’s autonomy.4 Because rape threatens women’s autonomy, and
because autonomy is relational, it follows that women should not be
solely responsible for challenging male violence. We start by sketching
an account of autonomy in order to explain how rape and fear thereof
can threaten women’s autonomy. The purpose of this section is to lay
the foundation for our claim that the prevalence of rape exemplifies
the ways in which an ‘individual’s autonomy can be diminished or
impaired through damage to the social relations that support autonomy’
(Anderson and Honneth 2005, 127). In next section, we explain why it
is problematic to overemphasize women’s taking self-defence courses
to increase their overall autonomy and resist rape. We also provide a
preliminary account of the ways in which men are complicit in rape
culture. In next section we develop our claims about social recognition
and provide the foundations for a positive account of how women can
achieve/exercise autonomy.
How rape and fear thereof threaten autonomy
Minimally specified, to exercise autonomy, an agent needs the capacity

for reflexive self-awareness; to identify and choose to act on the basis of
her defining motivations; and to exercise ownership with respect to her
actions and decisions. These broad agentic skills require that she sustain
certain attitudes of self-trust, self-respect and self-esteem (Anderson and
Honneth 2005, 130). For example, an agent needs to trust that she knows
what her defining motivations are; she needs to respect her deliberative
processes and reasons for acting on the basis of those; and she needs a
sense of self-worth and confidence that her life, actions and decisions
are meaningful in order to be autonomous. Each of these agentic skills is
socially supported: an agent’s capacity for self-trust, self-esteem and self-
worth can be enhanced or threatened by the actions, decisions and treat-
ment of other agents. Further, insofar as the body is the locus of agency,
and an agent’s autonomy can be damaged when others violate her body,
embodiment is also a feature of agency. We understand autonomy in
relational terms since agents are social beings whose actions and deci-
sions take place within a social milieu.5 It is precisely because autonomy
is ‘shaped by complex, intersecting social determinants and constituted
in the context of interpersonal relationships’ (Mackenzie and Poltera
2010, 48) that being autonomous depends on socially supportive ‘rela-
tions of recognition’ (Anderson and Honneth 2005, 144).
The act of rape, by its very nature, damages the victim’s autonomy
since it violates her bodily integrity and disrupts her sense of ownership
over her actions and decisions. Being raped can also dramatically alter
the agent’s psychological life, interpersonal relationships and identity.6
Rape shatters the victim’s assumptions about her safety in the world and
trust in others. It can change the very structure of the agent’s will, and
it can take years before the victim is able to restore a sense of ownership
over her psychological life, actions and decisions. Representative here is
Susan Brison’s account of how being raped and left for dead profoundly
changed her life. Brison experienced post-traumatic stress disorder
(PTSD) in the aftermath of the assault. She describes the symptoms of
PTSD as follows:
The immediate psychological responses to such trauma include,

terror, loss of control, and intense fear of annihilation. Long-term
effects include the physiological responses of hypervigilance, height-
ened startle response, sleep disorders, and the more psychological,
yet still involuntary, responses of depression, inability to concentrate,
lack of interest in activities that used to give life meaning, and a sense
of a foreshortened future. (Brison 2002, 39–40)
Setting goals and making life plans – some of the very foundations of a
meaningful life – are not things Brison feels able to do because she feels
overwhelmed by anxiety. Brison’s experience illustrates how rape can
destroy an agent’s capacity for autonomy, even if only temporarily. In
Brison’s case, she was initially only able to exercise local autonomy with
respect to actions like taking her medication each day, or getting out of
bed.7 Over time, and with the help of others, she was able to exercise
autonomy with respect to other aspects of her life. For example, she
enrolled in a self-defence course. Brison was able to piece her life back
together and restore her capacity for autonomy in many ways. Yet, she
likens being raped to the death of her, saying she is no longer the same
person as she was before the assault (Brison 2002, 21).8
While victims of rape will experience a higher level of fear and

anxiety, women need not be raped to fear the threat thereof or to feel
vulnerable to harm.9 An upshot of rape culture is that women’s fear of
rape can result in a loss of ‘self-confidence, self-respect, and self-esteem;
nightmares and other sleep disorders; distrust and suspicion of strangers
and acquaintances; chronic anxiety, stress, and depression; inability to
live alone (where that is desired); and increased dependence on men
for protections, which in turns undermines self-respect and self-con-
fidence’ (Burgess-Jackson 1996, 186–187).10 Although there are excep-
tions, many, if not most women whether consciously or not, exercise a
level of hyper-vigilance in these kinds of ways on a regular basis. It may
well be that many of these fears about random attacks are unfounded,
given that most rapes or sexual assaults are by someone who is known
to the victim. The fear may simply be a part of female socialization, but
whether women’s fears of rape by a stranger are unfounded, the fact
remains that at the descriptive level, most women do exercise a level of
hyper-vigilance with respect to their safety in ways that men do not.11
This is not to say that all women will have their autonomy compromised
in the same way. Autonomy admits of degrees, and the woman who has
been a victim of rape will find it more difficult to achieve autonomy than
a woman who has not, but whose actions are still somewhat constrained
by fear thereof. Our point is that where rape culture exists, women’s
autonomy will be more difficult to achieve relative to men’s.
There can be considerable social pressure on women to maintain
constant vigilance over their safety. Representative here is a recent case
in Sydney, Australia, where women were being sexually attacked in
their bedrooms. Police advised women to exercise additional cautions
like ensuring their windows were shut and locked, despite the stifling
summer humidity; ensuring their doors were locked; and varying their
daily routines.12 Such pragmatic, fairly routine advice illustrates how
women are socialized to perceive their own safety and mobility as dimin-
ished relative to men’s. It also implies (although unintentionally in this
case) that the responsibility for avoiding sexual assault falls largely to
women qua potential victims, a point we revisit shortly. Such sociali-
zation plays an important role in the construction of feminine bodily
comportment (Cahill 2001) and can reinforce feelings of defenceless-
ness, fragility and powerlessness on the part of some women.13
Rape culture is an acute and violent form of gender inequity and male
dominance. Like gender inequity, rape culture is pervasive and exists in
a variety of forms in most societies (May and Strikwerda 1994; Burgess-
Jackson 1996; Cahill 2001). It is also manifest at the private and public
level. Rape culture is in part made possible because many of the social
conditions that support women’s autonomy are diminished. Just as
pervasive male dominance fosters the conditions for rape culture to be
sustained and legitimated, so rape culture can also beget gender inequity
when it functions as a form of social control by which men keep women
in a state of fear and subservience (Card 1991, 299). At the private level,
rape victims can be silenced and rapes underreported, which contrib-
utes to sustaining and overlooking the prevalence of rape. At the public
level, the harmful effects of rape can be diminished and the act of rape
tacitly condoned when, for example, public sporting figures or celebri-
ties escape harsh penalties for rape. This can normalize and legitimate
rape.
Rape culture is a pressing social and moral problem that profoundly
threatens many women’s autonomy. While we agree that male domi-
nance in general, and rape culture in particular, threaten women’s
autonomy relative to men, we do not think that male dominance is
intractable. Nor do we think that women are primarily responsible for
achieving a degree of autonomy, as some of the literature on rape seems
to suggest. For example, within the literature on rape and women’s
autonomy, self-defence is cited both as a way of enhancing women’s
autonomy and as a way of addressing rape culture. In what follows,
we explain the motivations for this approach and why we think it is
problematic.
Self-defence and rethinking men’s complicity
Rape theorists argue that learning self-defence can increase women’s

autonomy by decreasing their fear and sense of vulnerability to men.14
Representative here is Burgess-Jackson’s argument that learning self-de-
fence is one way to reduce women’s sense of vulnerability to, and thus
their fear of men. Drawing on empirical evidence, he argues that women
who have been trained in self-defence ‘reported feeling stronger, braver,
more active, more in control, bigger, more efficacious in a variety of
arenas – and less afraid’ (Burgess-Jackson 1996, 190). Further, he stresses
the importance of modifying conventional femininity and teaching
women physical skills like fending off attacks, striking targets and so
on. The underlying idea here is that women need to be socialized and
educated differently to better equip them to resist rape. Burgess-Jackson
even suggests that state-subsidized self-defence courses could signifi-
cantly decrease women’s fear of crime by breaking ‘the cycle of [women’s]
socialized vulnerability and victimhood’ (Burgess-Jackson 1996, 191).
In a similar vein, Brison argues that learning self-defence can be

crucial to restoring autonomy in the aftermath of rape. She claims that
it enables rape survivors to know that they can kill in self-defence, and
to exercise their agency free from ‘debilitating fears’ (Brison 2002, 65). It
does this by enabling rape survivors to feel in control of their lives again
without feeling they have to ‘restrict their behaviour in ways never
expected of men’ (Brison 2002, 76).15
Cahill has also argued that women’s learning self-defence is one of the
most effective means of resisting rape culture and empowering women.
Her claim is that self-defence training ‘resists in a variety of ways the
discourses that make sexual violence not only possible but likely’ (2001,
203). She cites three main reasons for this claim: self-defence training
‘locates the means of resistance squarely within the women them-
selves, thereby undermining the construction of women as (peculiarly
culpable) victims’ (Cahill 2001, 203); because such training consists in a
powerful reaction against sexual violence, it ‘precludes the construction
of women as passive victims’ (Cahill 2001, 204); and it ‘challenges the
discourse of a rape culture by giving would-be rapists good reason to fear
women’ (Cahill 2001, 204).
To be sure, self-defence courses can decrease some women’s sense of
vulnerability to men and to rape, which can in turn enhance their sense
of autonomy. And, learning self-defence can be an effective aspect of
recovery in the wake of a sexual assault. However, learning self-defence
will not necessarily enhance women’s autonomy. For example, physi-
cally small or weak women who have had self-defence training may
nevertheless feel extremely vulnerable, and constrain or adapt their
preferences and actions. This is not to say that women cannot achieve
comparable physical strength or are incapable of behaving aggressively.
It is only to suggest that embodied differences, particularly with respect
to size, are relevant here.
Another concern is that learning self-defence can make women more
acutely aware of their vulnerability to harm than they might other-
wise be, to the point that this can in turn threaten their autonomy.
Purely anecdotally, one of us grew up in South Africa, where self-defence
courses formed part of the extracurricular activity during high school.
South Africa has ‘higher levels of rape of women and children than
anywhere else in the world not at war’ (Moffett 2006, 129). We were
taught how to break free from or stun a rapist trying to penetrate us
from various angles; how to dislocate a rapist’s hips prior to or during
penetration; and how to kill someone at close range. These were poten-
tially valuable lessons. Yet just as the instructors equipped us with some
basic skills to fend off attack, so they alerted us to the extent of our
vulnerability to harm. As with most self-defence courses, the take-home
messages were ambiguous: if you can, run away rather than fight; do not
put yourself in so-called compromising positions (walking alone, being
in poorly lit places, being alone with men you do not know well and so
on); and ensure that you carry out any of the self-defence moves you’ve
been taught effectively lest you further enrage your attacker and invoke
more harm. These messages not only bred fear and heightened overall
anxiety but also tacitly held us, qua potential victims, responsible for
the outcome of the actions of potential perpetrators.
This leads us to the most important point: the emphasis on self-de-
fence in the existing literature is illustrative of an asymmetry in how
responsibility for avoiding and preventing sexual violence is under-
stood and distributed. There is a tendency to focus on re-educating and
resocializing women in ways to equip them to resist rape where this
inadvertently holds them responsible for mitigating the risk of rape.16
And yet, ‘rape should be seen as something that men, as a group, are
collectively responsible for’ (May and Strikwerda 1994, 135). At the very
least there should be as much theoretical and practical attention paid to
educating men about the ways in which their actions and decisions can
threaten women’s autonomy and contribute to rape culture, as there
is on educating women to feel more autonomous and able to defend
themselves. Although the theorists we discuss above would not refute
this, focusing on self-defence training is akin to treating a symptom of
the problem rather than the problem itself.
This does not imply that women ought not to take self-defence classes.
Rather, the point here is that there is something fundamentally wrong
with a social and political environment in which women’s autonomy
can be so impoverished relative to many men’s that the main way to
maintain a sense of autonomy is through learning self-defence and
resisting violence. It is as pressing to find ways to address the broader
social problems that underpin rape as it is for women to find ways to
defend themselves against it.17 In order to begin to do this, we provide
a preliminary account of the ways in which men are complicit in this
social problem. With that in place, we then outline some of the ways in
which men can take responsibility for rape culture.
One way to avoid inadvertently placing the onus on women to avoid
rape and address rape culture is to provide an account of the ways in
which men are complicit in rape culture and thus, in systematically
threatening women’s autonomy. We assume here that there is a correla-
tion between the degree to which an individual or group is complicit in
a social problem and the degree to which they should take responsibility
for addressing it. With that in mind, our claim here is modest: insofar as
rape culture is a social problem, members of the society in question are
complicit in it to varying degrees. Since rape is a gendered crime in part
made possible by gender inequity, men are on average more complicit
in and thus responsible for rectifying rape culture and preventing sexual
violence than are women. In so saying, we take ourselves to have shifted
the focus of the discussion from the underlying assumption that women
need to take responsibility to address rape culture by learning self-de-
fence, to focusing on the ways in which men are complicit in and thus
responsible for the problem.18
The claim that men are complicit in rape culture does not imply
that all men are rapists or potential rapists, or that all men are equally
complicit.19 Moreover, it does not follow from recognizing men’s
complicity in rape culture that all men actively or consciously threaten
women’s autonomy, or that all women’s autonomy is necessarily threat-
ened by all men. Rather, in the same way that autonomy admits of
degrees, we think that complicity also admits of degrees. Although a
detailed discussion of complicity and responsibility lies outside the
scope of this discussion, we provide a rough sketch of what we have in
mind here. At one extreme, we have in mind those men who actually
rape and violate women. Such men are clearly responsible for damaging
the victim’s autonomy and for contributing to a culture of fear of rape
that in turn threatens women’s autonomy more generally.20
Men are also complicit if they tacitly condone rape or directly
contribute to rape culture, but do not actually rape women. Men can
contribute to rape culture by socializing other men to diminish inhibi-
tions toward rape through, for example, minimizing or ignoring the
harms of rape and encouraging rape fantasies (May and Strikwerda
1994). Men can also contribute to rape culture if they have the power
and position to prevent a rape or to apprehend a rapist, but do not.
Representative here is the recent case of a major American footballer,
sponsored by Nike, who raped an intoxicated 20-year-old student in
the bathroom of the club where they were both drinking. The victim’s
friend appealed to the bodyguard for help, but was ignored. Prosecutors
said they would neither file charges for this rape nor for others the foot-
ball player was accused of, owing in large part to incompetent police
work. It is alleged that police officers were too in awe of the player to
do their jobs properly, although they did reprimand him for his behav-
iour. Nike continues to sponsor him, despite recently dropping another
player for cruelty against animals. Apparently, rape does not warrant
similar penalties.21 This case is by no means an isolated incident.22 On

our account, the bouncers, police officers, prosecutors and Nike are all
complicit in the rapes in question. They are also complicit in contrib-
uting to rape culture and damaging the social conditions that support
autonomy by failing to oppose it. The men in this example also exem-
plify how men can cultivate cultures of male bonding and socializa-
tion which contribute to rape and rape culture (May and Strikwerda
1994, 135).
Alternatively, men can be minimally complicit in rape culture by
virtue of benefiting from it. We have in mind here male feminists who
promote gender equity and are acutely aware of the ways in which rape
and rape culture constrain women’s autonomy and disrupt their lives,
but remain unaware of the effects fear of rape has on women’s day-
to-day existence.23 We suggest that such men can also be complicit in
rape culture through their inaction and for failing to acknowledge the
benefits conferred on them by patriarchal culture more generally (May
and Strikwerda 1994), for example, if they do not actively challenge rape
culture by talking publicly about it or attempting to socialize other men
to recognize women as equal moral agents deserving of recognition and
respect. Nonetheless, the ways in which male feminists are complicit
in rape culture are distinct from the ways in which rapists or men who
inadvertently condone rape are. The former are complicit insofar as they
generally know better and could do something about it, while the latter
are complicit because, whether they know better or not, they are perpe-
trators or accessories to perpetrators.
Many, if not most, men will fall somewhere between these two
extremes.24 Men can be complicit in threatening women’s autonomy
and in sustaining rape culture through epistemological ignorance. For
example, if men fail to realize the ways in which women’s autonomy
is threatened by rape culture or choose to ignore rape culture because
they benefit from it, then they are complicit. Similarly, men may not
realize the degree to which women’s autonomy can be constrained
by male dominance and gender inequity. These men may indirectly
contribute to rape culture. Similarly, those men who have not raped
and who are adamantly opposed to it, but who might rape were they
in a situation ‘where their inhibitions against rape were removed’ (May
and Strikwerda 1994, 146), are also complicit in rape culture. Finally,
men can be complicit in rape culture by inadvertently contributing to
silencing women even when they do not mean to. We have in mind
here police officers and lawyers who can make rape victims feel like
the rape was somehow their fault, and family members or members of
a community whose attitudes about bringing shame on the family or

community silence victims.25
There are two main reasons for discussing men’s complicity in rape
culture. First, doing so takes seriously the deeply intersubjective nature
of autonomy and the fact that rape culture is a widespread social and
moral problem. Second, there remains widespread resistance to the
view that men as a group are responsible for rape, which, we think,
needs to be addressed if women’s autonomy is to be improved. Moffett’s
analysis of rape and rape narratives in South Africa is illustrative here
(2006). Moffett discusses two short films that went to air in South
Africa in 1999 to raise awareness about rape and gender-based violence.
Hollywood actress Charlize Theron was the spokesperson. The broad-
casts started with her asking South African men whether they had ever
raped a woman. Moffett argues that it was the first time that men had
been acknowledged as responsible for rape and rape culture, ‘much less
addressed, in a public information broadcast’ (Moffett 2006, 132). It
was also one of the first times that ‘the constitutional enshrinement of
equality for all’ was explicitly scripted as a ‘socially endorsed and cohe-
sive view’ that in the new democratic South African society, ‘women
should not be raped, and men should be held responsible for their acts
of violence’ (Moffett 2006, 133). Within weeks the film was banned from
airing because it was deemed offensive to men and stereotyped them as
either complacent about or complicit in rape.
Although Moffett’s concern is to theorize how the gender-based
nature of rape is subsumed under narratives of race or class, her analysis
of the ways in which society as a whole can be reluctant to treat rape
as a social problem that can only be placed ‘squarely within discourses
of violent gender and patriarchal domination’ (Moffett 2006, 136) is
salient. Specifically, we think that Moffett’s diagnosis that one of the
reasons societies may be reticent to acknowledge that men are primarily
responsible for addressing rape culture, is that doing so forces us to face
the fact that we are a long way off achieving gender equality.
Redistributing responsibility for rape culture
We have argued that the prevalence of rape is in part made possible by

social conditions like gender inequity, as well as a tendency to overlook
men’s complicity in rape culture and responsibility for addressing it. In
this section, we provide an account of some of the ways men can take
responsibility for rape culture. Both men and women need to appreciate
that men are on average more complicit in and thus responsible for
addressing rape culture. However, acknowledging men’s complicity does

not involve demonizing all men or treating men as a group qua poten-
tial rapists since doing so can similarly destabilize relations of mutual
recognition. Increased attention must be paid to focusing on ways of
educating men to accept responsibility for and reduce rape culture, and
to promote women’s autonomy where possible.
As a society we need to commit to decreasing women’s vulnerability to
men and protecting their autonomy. This will involve significant social
change geared toward reducing rape culture and promoting women’s
autonomy at the global level. Male socialization patterns which ‘instill
negative attitudes about women’ or contribute to a social climate that
encourages rape (May and Strikwerda 1994, 137) need to be stamped out.
The main benefit of this kind of approach is that it does not tacitly place
the onus on women to find ways of achieving autonomy, but focuses on
the broader social problem, including the need for institutional recogni-
tion of the harms of rape, and the fact that men ought to take ownership
for their role in the problem.
Insofar as a lack of recognition occurs when men fail to recognize
and respect women as autonomous agents or fail to respect their dignity
and bodily integrity, educating and resocializing men will have to
involve finding ways to teach men to treat women as equal moral agents
deserving of respect, recognition and bodily integrity. This could include
1) alerting men to the ways in which widespread gender inequity and
rape culture constrain women’s autonomy; 2) educating men about the
fact that rape culture is made possible by a lack of mutual relations of
recognition between men and women; 3) raising awareness about the
kinds of social conditions required to scaffold autonomy and teaching
men how to promote them; 4) getting influential men like celebrities
and sports stars who could contribute to rape culture to publicly oppose
it in all its forms; 5) resocializing men to be active rather than passive
bystanders; 6) getting male feminists who are attuned to women’s
struggle for recognition to socialize men elsewhere on the spectrum of
complicity to see that their actions are contributing to rape and to want
to change that; and 7) making men ambassadors against gender ineq-
uity and male dominance.26
The first place to start would be to rethink how we teach sex education
and gender relations in schools, especially in high school. According to
the most recent study of sex education in schools (public, Catholic and
Independent) commissioned by the Australian Research Centre in Sex,
Health & Society at La Trobe University, April 2011, the vast majority of
sexual health teachers in Australia are female Health and PE teachers aged
20 to 39, suggesting that sexuality education still is delegated to female

teachers. The study found that a list of 30 sexuality education topics
was provided, including topics on sexually transmitted infections, HIV/
AIDS, safe sex practices, reproduction and birth control methods, as well
as social aspects (managing peer influence, relationships and feelings,
alcohol and decision-making, sexual activity and decision-making and
dealing with emotions). Interestingly, the study found that these topics
were most likely to be covered in years 9 and 10 (14–15 year olds) of
secondary school, with the exception of puberty, reproduction and body
image, which were covered earlier. There was very little, if any, sexuality
education in years 11 and 12 (16–18 year olds). The study found that
pleasure of sexual behaviour/activity was taught by less than 50% of
respondents, indicating that Australian sex education programs focus
more strongly on negative outcomes of sexual behaviour, as do most
of the traditional education programs (Smith et al, 2011). These results
suggest that education programs are not nearly as extensive as they
ought to be, and are not as effective as they could be. Other studies, such
as those conducted by Foubert and McEwen, demonstrate the extent to
which knowledge about issues such as consent and mutual pleasure in
sexual behaviour were lacking in university-level male students.27 This
draws attention to the fact that such issues need to be addressed and
integrated more comprehensively in secondary or high school education
and reiterated again at tertiary levels. Moreover, this particular college
education program found that young men were more responsive and
open to changing their views about women in all-male environments,
suggesting that men need to take a greater role in educating young men.
The study also found that peer-education programs were especially effec-
tive because by treating men as potential helpers rather than potential
rapists, defensiveness about rape prevention programs was avoided. The
first change then, ought to be in how we teach sex education.
Second, the content of sex education programs also needs to be
addressed to focus on what has been called ‘communicative sexuality’.
Feminists like Lois Pineau have argued that the problem with current
understandings of consent is that it ‘sets up sexual encounters as contrac-
tual events in which sexual aggression is presumed to be consented to
unless there is some vigorous act of refusal’. Instead, she argues that we
ought to think of consent as a ‘presumption in favour of the connection
between sex and sexual enjoyment’ so that when a sexual encounter is
being initiated, a man ‘has an obligation to ensure that the encounter
is mutually enjoyable ... communicative sexual partners will not over-
whelm each other with the barrage of their own desires. They will treat
negative, bored or angry responses as a sign that the erotic ground needs
to be either cleared or abandoned’ (p. 236). Male feminists and educa-
tors such as Weinberg, Biernbaum (1993) and Kimmel (1993) also draw
attention to the need to educate young men about consent in terms
of communicative sexuality and to emphasis mutual pleasure in sexual
encounters. This is one way of ensuring that men treat women as equal
partners, with their own desires and needs that ought to be respected.
Other ways in which men can take collective responsibility for
addressing rape is for prominent male celebrities and community
leaders to support events such as ‘White Ribbon Day.’ This is an
Australian campaign designed to engage male community leaders and
decision-makers in speaking out and stopping violence against women.
The organization engages men because it sees violence as a male issue
for which men are collectively responsible. It is also aimed at raising
awareness about violence against women and its unacceptability. While
campaigns such as these are to be lauded, they need to be bolstered by
more extensive and far-reaching education campaigns aimed at young
men in particular at both secondary and tertiary education levels and
also in all-male environments in which such anti-social and violent
behaviour flourishes. We have in mind here education programs aimed
at young men in sporting clubs and the military.
There are also ways in which men can take responsibility at a personal
or individual level. For example, Larry May describes situations at venues
like conferences at which male speakers have made jokes or statements
that are overtly sexist. If a woman points this out, the usual response is
for men to roll their eyes or make comments that the woman has a ‘thin
skin’ or ‘can’t take a joke.’ If, however, another man points to the sexist
nature of the joke, men in the audience, as well as the speaker, will often
look uncomfortable or guilty.28
A possible objection to our view is our claim that we need to focus on
the ways in which men can be educated and held responsible for rape
culture is based on a flawed assumption. Namely, if men are alerted to
the ways in which their action or inaction threatens women’s autonomy
and contributes to rape culture, they will be more likely to support
women’s autonomy and respect them as equal moral agents. Recent
empirical evidence outside the discipline of philosophy suggests that
raising awareness does not always change behaviour (Carmody 2006).
However, there is also evidence to suggest that it does.29 Even if it is the
case that change through education is possible, however minimal, we
think this is reason enough to adopt this as a viable strategy, alongside
serious law reform to sexual assault laws in general. It is also the case,
as May rightly points out, that while men are the perpetrators of rape
and sexual harassment and those most likely to exclude or diminish the
status of women as equals, many men are also enraged, saddened, guilt-
ridden and ashamed of their position in society (p. 146). It is these men
who ought to be at the forefront of such campaigns.
Conclusion
Our aim in this chapter has been to develop the foundations for a posi-
tive account of how women can realize autonomy despite rape culture
and widespread fear of rape. In doing so, we have also aimed to provide
an account that can go some way toward reducing rape culture. At the
descriptive level, we have argued that on average, women are still treated
as a subclass and not recognized as moral equals to most men. We have
argued that there is an asymmetry in advocating responsibility for rape
culture since the focus is overwhelmingly on recommending ways that
women must change or adapt to resist subordination in general and
rape in particular. The normative aspects of our argument are that any
adequate account of how women can realize autonomy despite rape and
rape culture needs to pay attention to the social conditions that scaffold
autonomy; responsibility for addressing rape culture needs to be fairly
distributed between men and women; increased attention needs to be
paid to educating men in ways that better equip them to reduce rape
culture; and relations of mutual recognition between men and women
must be improved if we are to address rape culture.
Notes
1. We focus here on the ways in which rape and fear thereof constrains women’s
autonomy, although we concede that it constrains some men’s autonomy as
well. We also use the terms ‘rape’ and ‘sexual assault’ interchangeably.
2. For example, there have been significant shifts in recent years in the way the
criminal justice system conceptualizes consent. Extensive legislative reform
has occurred throughout Australia and across the globe. While each jurisdic-
tion in Australia has particular ways of defining consent or lack of consent and
the type of knowledge the defendant needed to have at the time of the assault,
there is a legislative shift to what is called a ‘positive’ model of consent. This
means that there is a free agreement between all parties involved, with no
coercion, force or intimidation of any kind; and an individual will actively
display his/her willingness to participate and consent to sexual activity.
Consequently, submitting to sexual activity, or not actively saying ‘no’, is not
enough to demonstrate consent, and the consent of the other party in a sexual
encounter should never be assumed, and should be actively sought after and
affirmed. See Bianca Fileborn, Sexual Assault Laws in Australia, Australian

Institute of Family Studies, 2011, for a summary of different jurisdictions and
an account of why, despite such extensive law reform, most sexual assaults
are not reported and, where they are, the rates of attrition remain high.
3. Examples include the Australian Government campaign, ‘Australia says No’
to violence against women, and White Ribbon Day.
4. By women we do not mean all women and thus do not preclude the possi-
bility that some women’s autonomy will be unaffected by male violence and
gender inequity. We also acknowledge that other scholars have addressed
ways in which women can exercise autonomy that do not rely on self-de-
fence. See for example, the collection of essays in Mackenzie and Stoljar,
Relational Autonomy. We have chosen to engage with this argument because
it seems to be a recurring one in the philosophical literature, as the discus-
sion in section will demonstrate.
5. The collected papers in Diana Meyers (1997), and Catriona Mackenzie and
Natalie Stoljar (2000) are representative here. We do not engage with the
debate on relational autonomy here.
6. We treat identity as a practical term that denotes the agent’s defining charac-
teristics, projects, goals, commitments, values and cares.
7. An agent can achieve autonomy locally, with respect to particular actions,
decisions or aspects of her life, or globally, with respect to her life overall
(Meyers 1989).
8. Cahill argues that it is precisely because rape is an assault on the ‘whole
body-self of the victim’ that it has ‘profound effects on the victim’s person-
hood and being’ (2001, 130).
9. See Brison (2002, 18–19) for empirical evidence to support this claim.
10. There are several mundane examples of the ways in which women’s fear of
rape constrains their autonomy. Many women routinely choose not to walk
home late at night or to exercise outdoors alone after dark. Some women
avoid going to certain places, such as public restrooms, bars or on blind dates
unchaperoned by friends for fear of their safety. Moreover, women generally
tend to be more vigilant than men about locking doors or ensuring their car
keys are readily available so they do not have to rifle through their handbag
in quiet parking lots or at their front door. Women may also be wary of part-
ners, family members, colleagues or friends since the majority of rapes are
typically committed by men the victim already knows. These are concerns
few men have. This information is readily available. See, for example, http://
www.ausstats.abs.gov.au/ausstats/subscriber.nsf/0/F16680629C465E03CA2
56980007C4A81/$File/41280_1996.pdf and http://www.nswrapecrisis.com.
au/LatestNews/National_Plan/Prime_Minister%27s_speech_29.4.09.pdf.
11. Of course, the level of vigilance will vary between societies and cultures,
and the fear may be more founded in one society over the other, but the
fact remains that many women live in fear of what men could do to their
bodies.
12. Les Kennedy, ‘Serial rapist back to his old haunt’, in Sydney Morning Herald, 3
November 2004.
13. It might be objected that, because women choose to be more vigilant, they
are nevertheless autonomous. While these may be choices in some weak
sense, they are not fully autonomous choices. Full autonomy involves
‘the real and effective capacity to develop and pursue one’s own concep-
tion of a worthwhile life’, where this can only be achieved under ‘socially
supportive conditions’ (Anderson and Honneth 2005, 130). The so-called
choices outlined above are the result of women’s adapting their preferences
and constraining the range of options available to them out of fear or a
sense of vulnerability to men. These are also examples of the ways in which
women’s autonomy is undermined by rape culture and by unsupportive
social conditions.
14. Other avenues for promoting women’s autonomy advanced by the theorists
we discuss here include making rape narratives public (Brison 2002) and
improving legal reform (Brison 2002; Burgess-Jackson 1996; Cahill 2001).
15. For example, Brison writes, ‘the confidence I gained from learning how to
fight back effectively not only enabled me to walk down the street again,
it gave me back my life’ (Brison 2002, 15). Taking self-defence enabled her
to break the cycle of shame and self-blame and feel anger at her attacker.
As such, learning self-defence can enhance a woman’s sense of safety in the
world and be therapeutic for victims of rape (Brison 2002, 16–17).
16. May and Strikwerda (1994) are an exception to this trend.
17. Burgess-Jackson’s suggestion that self-defence classes should be subsidized
or tax free, and Brison’s claim that they should be run as credit courses at
universities go some way to addressing the broader social problems.
18. Similarly, May and Strikwerda argue that men are collectively responsible
for rape and rape culture. On their account, ‘insofar as male bonding and
socialization in groups contributes to the prevalence of rape in western socie-
ties, men in those societies should feel responsible for the prevalence of rape
and should feel motivated to counteract such violence and rape’ (1994, 135).
Although we do not discuss their account in detail since their concerns are
somewhat distinct from our own, their analysis of how men contribute to
rape culture shapes some of our discussion of men’s complicity.
19. We aim to avoid operating with an oversimplified picture of gender rela-
tions whereby men and women are treated as hegemonic groups: women are
potential victims who need to learn to defend themselves against men, the
potential perpetrators.
20. For example, in her study of the prevalence of rape in South Africa, Helen
Moffett refers to an interview in which a taxi driver candidly described how
he and his friends would cruise around on weekends, looking for women to
abduct and have sex with. When the interviewer pointed out that his actions
constituted rape, the man was visibly astonished and responded that ‘these
women, they force us to rape them!’ He went on to explain that he and his
friends only picked those women who ‘asked for it’, namely, ‘the cheeky
ones – the ones that walk around like they own the place, and look you in
the eye’ (Moffett 2006, 138). While South Africa does have exceptionally
high rates of rapes compared to other jurisdictions, rape remains a persistent
feature of many women’s lives across most jurisdictions. The above example
is merely intended to highlight more extreme forms of complicity.
21. Timothy Egan, ‘Nike’s Women Problem’, New York Times, 23 June 2010.
22. See also the recent case in Australia of a former detective who was pressured by
other officers to drop charges against footballers charged with the rape of two
women: Paul Millar and Michael Gleeson, ‘Detective “pressured” over Saints
rape claim’, The Age, 22 June 2010. Consider also the failure of the judiciary
to recognize the harms done to women and to appropriately enforce the law.
In the case of R v Johns, Bollen J claimed, ‘There is, of course, nothing wrong
with a husband, faced with his wife’s initial refusal to engage in intercourse,
in attempting, in an acceptable way to persuade her to change her mind, and
that may involve a measure of rougher than usual handling’. Consider also
Bryan J’s comments about trauma: ‘the aggravated rape was most serious, but
having regard to the unusual circumstances that the victim was not trauma-
tised by the event, indeed, was probably comatose at the time, a sentence
significantly less than the maximum is deemed appropriate’: R v Stanbrook
(10 November 1992, Vic SC, unreported). We suggest that all these men are
almost as complicit as the actual rapists.
23. Illustrative here is May and Strikwerda’s example of male professors real-
izing that their female colleagues had not noticed how pretty the university
campus looked at night because if they ever were on campus at night, they
were too anxious to notice (1994, 147–148).
24. These are not clearly delineated categories. Individual men may move
along the spectrum during the course of their lives. For example, May and
Strikwerda recount being members of a group which directly contributed to
rape culture through sexually harassing women and engaging in frequent,
lively discussions about rape. However, they later shifted away from the
group and over time became acutely aware of their own complicity in rape
culture (1994, 134–135).
25. This is one clear way in which men and women alike can be implicated in
rape culture. See Rae Langton (1993) for an account of silencing.
26. See Carmody (2006) for an empirical account of what it means to be an
active, ethical bystander. Briefly, being an active bystander means preventing
other men from raping and intervening in situations in which you know
that a rape is occurring. For example, had the bouncer in the Nike celebrity
example been an active bystander, he would have stopped the rape or at least
attempted to do so. Being an active bystander also involves challenging and
opposing men who contribute to rape culture. This stems from the insight
that rape should be understood as a public, cultural problem rather than a
private act (May and Strikwerda 1994, 135).
27. A recent example that supports this claim is the ‘pro-rape’ Facebook site
established by Sydney university students. For more see http://www.smh.
com.au/technology/elite-college-students-proud-of-prorape-facebook-page-
20091108-i3js.html and http://www.smh.com.au/ ... /sydney-university-ex-
pands-sexassault-policy-20100224-p3ly.html.
28. May writes, ‘there is no room for a conspiratorial nod or chuckle toward
other men since it is not clear whether these other men will side with the
speaker or with the man who has challenged the speaker. In addition, men
cannot easily dismiss the criticism since it emanates from a position where
it is assumed that male experience is taken seriously. For these reasons, criti-
cism of male behaviour will sometimes be more believable if it is issued by
men rather than by women’ (p. 147).
29. See, for example, J. Foubert and M. McEwen (1998) ‘An All-Male Rape
Prevention Peer Education Program: Decreasing Fraternity Men’s Behavioral
Intent to Rape’, in Journal of College Student Development, 39(6), 548–556.
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Carmody, M. and Carrington, K. 2000. ‘Preventing sexual violence?’, Australian
and New Zealand Journal of Criminology, 33(3), 341–361.
Christman, J. and Anderson, J. (eds) 2005. Autonomy and the Challenges to
Liberalism: New Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Friedman, M. 2005. ‘Autonomy and Male Dominance’, in J. Christman and
J. Anderson (eds), Autonomy and the Challenges to Liberalism: New Essays.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 150–176.
Langton, R. 1993. ‘Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts’, Philosophy and Public
Affairs, 22, 293–330.
Mackenzie, C. and Poltera, J. 2010. ‘Narrative integration, fragmented selves and
autonomy,’ Hypatia, Special issue on Feminist Ethics and Social Theory, edited
by Diana T. Meyers, 31–54.
Mackenzie, C. and Stoljar, N. (eds) 2000. Relational Autonomy: Feminist Perspectives
on Autonomy, Agency and the Social Self. New York: Oxford University Press.
MacKinnon, C. 1989. Towards a Feminist Theory of the State. Cambridge MA:
Harvard University Press.
Meyers, D. 1989. Self, Society and Personal Choice. New York: Columbia University
Press.
Meyers, D. (ed.) 1997. Feminists Rethink the Self. Boulder, CO, and Oxford:
Westview Press.
Moffett, H. 2006. ‘These women, they force us to rape them’: Rape as narratives of
social control in post-apartheid South Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies,
32(1), 129–144.
Eamonn, D. 2004. ‘Shock rape figures spark plan for sex crimes court’ The
Sun-Herald, http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/11/20/1100838276610.html
http://www.ausstats.abs.gov.au/ausstats/subscriber.nsf/0/F16680629C465E03CA
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Prime_Minister%27s_speech_29.4.09.pdf
2
Women between Agency and
Coercion
Elena Alonzo
Introduction
This chapter addresses the overall theme of this collection on women,

violence and agency by illustrating the phenomenon of domestic
violence and the ways in which it reduces, shapes and restrains women’s
desires, choices and actions. My aim is to provide a theoretical frame-
work in which to analyse women’s experiences in the domestic sphere,
as well as outside the home, and underline the restrictiveness of the
institutional background in which women live and battering occurs.
In doing so, I will analyse the major factors of intimate partner violence
(henceforth, IPV) and their interconnections as they manifest in Italy,
or in international landscapes that have economic, political, social and
cultural conditions that are similar and comparable to that country.
Accordingly, I will show how individual acts of violence take place within
large social contexts that make those actions possible, conceivable and
even acceptable. I will argue that the traditional dichotomy drawn by
Isaiah Berlin (1969) between ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ conceptions of
freedom is theoretically inadequate to capture the internal and external
forms of ‘unfreedom’ suffered by the victims of IPV.1 In this respect, I will
demonstrate that by appealing to those conceptions, and dealing with
the atomistic social perspective which informs them, theorists tend to
attribute agency and freedom to women when they are actually trapped
and overlook choices and agency when they are exercised. Then, I will
present the main lines of a new model of freedom – namely, the concep-
tion of freedom as non-oppression – that borrows some elements from
both positive and negative ideals and focuses on larger social contexts in
which internal and external barriers are created and operate. My aim is to
suggest that this enlarged perspective allows us to better address women’s
34
Women between Agency and Coercion 35
experience and account for the specific constraints that battered women
systematically face in making their own choices and actions. Moreover,
by drawing from the existing literature on rape and violence, as well as
from surveys and quantitative data on IPV based on sociological, social
policy and criminological perspectives, I will offer empirically assessable
criteria for measuring the degree of unfreedom suffered by the victims of
IPV. These criteria can serve as a basis for policymaking and for the reform
of the institutional practices (by medical staff, police officers, judges and
courts, for example) that provide the context in which domestic violence
is currently taking place.
Varieties and effects of IPV
As defined for the purposes of this chapter, IPV is the name for the
violence inflicted by intimate male (former, or current) partners against
female (former, or current) partners.2 These types of harms are directly
and indirectly perpetrated through material and psychological abuse. To
elaborate, material abuse encompasses a wide range of physical abuse
(such as slapping, beating, punching and murder), sexual abuse (such
as coerced sex through intimidation, threats and physical force), and
economic abuse (such as denial of funds, denial of foods and basic needs
and controlling career choices and exploitation). In addition, there are
many different forms of psychological abuse (such as threats of abuse,
threats to take away the custody of children, isolation, verbal aggres-
sion, systematic humiliation and devaluation). Although these catego-
ries are listed separately, they are not mutually exclusive; indeed, they
often go hand in hand, and their interactions have crucial physical,
psychological and economic consequences for the victims.
For example, broken bones, bruises, internal bleeding, preterm labour,
miscarriage and death of the fetus are only some of the more acute,
concrete and ‘visible’ physical effects of violence. Chronic health condi-
tions (such as chronic pain, ulcers and migraines) are less visible, but
still serious signs of IPV (Berrios and Grady 1991).3 Besides the physical
effects, there are the psychological consequences of IPV, such as fear, anxiety
and sexual dysfunction, as well as post-traumatic stress Disorder (PTSD),
which are extremely hard to detect, report and counter because of their
hidden and intangible nature. They deeply affect the victims, leaving
them in a situation in which they are often made to feel mentally desta-
bilized, powerless, guilty and unable to see exit options (Vitanza et al.
1995, 23–24).4 Finally, there are the economic effects, such as financial
dependence and lack of economic resources due to the fact that abused
36 Elena Alonzo
women often do not work and lack employable skills because their part-
ners prevent them from working or studying (Hirschmann 2003, 111).
Therefore, they do not have the opportunities to be autonomous, inde-
pendent and take care of themselves and their children.
This analysis shows that IPV is a complex harm that – through direct
(external) and indirect (internal) material and psychological forces, and
their interconnections and effects – systematically restrains the range of
opportunities effectively available to women, reducing their choices and
actions and moulding their lives in particularly problematic ways. On
the one hand, then, women’s agency and freedom are restricted through
direct and ‘concrete’ infringements such as physical coercion, threats and
many different forms of actual interference that come from the outside
and are intentionally and purposefully exercised by identifiable abusive
mates. On the other hand, there are a variety of inner and ‘intangible’
psychological barriers that precede, accompany and frequently follow
material and external abuses and incapacitate women from within, by
indirectly shaping their beliefs, preferences and desires. In this regard,
being battered, raped, threatened, deprived of funds or isolated are not
just external and concrete interferences sometimes coloured with impor-
tant psychological components; instead, they are actions that have deep
psychological consequences which are always present and inextricable
from the outer harms. This entails that the line between external and
internal forces of IPV is not neatly drawn; rather, the two must be seen
as mutually constitutive and inevitably intertwined to maintain an
inextricable trap around women.
Therefore, in order to analyse IPV and the lack of freedom it implies,
we should reject mainstream conceptions of freedom. They still divide
along the lines offered by Isaiah Berlin (1969) in his influential essay
‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, of two senses of freedom, negative and posi-
tive, which rely respectively on the existence of concrete interference
from outside the individual and the presence of pervasive barriers inside
the person. Since Berlin’s work, these two accounts of freedom have
been usually considered as mutually exclusive and at times not inter-
twined. However, as the analysis of IPV highlights, a persistent lack of
negative freedom in fact harms victims psychologically, causing them
to lack positive freedom and vice versa. Thus, if we want to capture the
complex processes through which external forces of IPV result in deeper
harms that incapacitate women from within, we necessarily need to set
aside the traditional dichotomy between negative and positive concep-
tions of freedom and dismiss the related sharp distinction between inner
and outer constraints.
From analysis of the individual’s acts of IPV to analysis of

the institutional context that makes them possible
Consider woman X, who lives with her abusive partner and appears not
to be doing anything to help herself. Some people will maintain that
she is in fact free to leave because no one is either physically restraining
her, by binding her hands and feet, or waiting outside the door with a
gun. Others will answer that, although no one is effectively preventing
her from doing whatever she might want to do, she may be blocked
by threats of physical coercion, the absence of work that pays enough
to allow for her financial independence, or the lack of a secure place
in which to seek refuge. Others will suggest that she might be staying
because she is paralysed by fear, stress, the inability to see a ‘way out’,
guilty feelings or a lack of self-worth that make her unable to press
charges against her partner.
All these responses may appear correct. The first answer, for instance,
refers to a narrow (‘pure’) negative conception of freedom, according to
which she counts as unfree because there is an identifiable agent who is
purposefully making it physically impossible for her to take action. The
second reaction also focuses on a negative conception of freedom, but
(different from the first) it expands the notion of the barriers that can
preclude her from making choices and actions, by including threats and
other social obstacles that are in the control of individuals who can be
held accountable. Finally, following a positive conception of freedom,
the third response relies instead on internal barriers that arise from the
abuse that affect her way of thinking and behaviour, and prevent her
from doing what she really wants. However, it would be a mistake to
consider these three perspectives on what constitutes a restraint on
woman’s freedom and agency as mutually exclusive: if we focus on just
one of these dimensions of unfreedom at a time, the risk is that we end
up considering that women are ‘free’ when they are in fact trapped, or
are making a choice when they have in fact been forced in a particular
direction, or vice versa.
In other words, in order to analyse women’s experience and account
for the specific infringements battered women face in making their
own choices, we do not need to appeal to a model of liberty that entails
either a problem of negative freedom, or a problem of positive freedom.
Rather, we should consider the traditional distinction between positive
and negative freedom – or between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ freedom
(Hirschmann 2003) – as not neatly drawn, and that the positive and
negative liberty elements are mutually constitutive and inevitably
38 Elena Alonzo
intertwined to effectively constrain and mould the victims. Violations

of external freedom – through direct material forces of violence –
turn out to result in deeper indirect harms that slide into the kinds
of psychological harms that violations of internal freedom entail. For
instance, systematic beatings result in PTSD, which robs the victims of
their self-esteem and sense of self-worth. As a consequence, they may
not work, which can worsen their economic dependence, making them
even more vulnerable to further (material and psychological) attacks,
and so on.
But there is one further insight to provide in this account. That is,
in order to detect IPV and better address women’s experience, we also
need to capture the complex social reality in which both inner and
outer barriers of freedom are created, operate and have meaning. In fact,
individual acts of violence are made possible and take place in institu-
tionalized structural contexts wherein women may seem free to make
their own choices and actions, but are actually trapped and reduced
by the interaction of direct (external) and indirect (internal) material
and psychological forces (such as beating, threats, stress, fear of further
violence against themselves and their relatives, lack of resources, absence
of family support and so on) that make women particularly vulnerable
to the abuse, foreclosing some of their opportunities and leading them
to choose that to which they are in fact restricted.
I have argued that combining both internal and external liberty
elements in the same model of freedom is an important starting point
for uncovering the specific forms of unfreedom suffered by the victims
of IPV. Now, I maintain that this condition, although relevant, is still
insufficient. In order to better address women’s experience, we need
something more. We also need to reject the atomistic social framework
of freedom and its constraints and to capture the complex social reality
in which internal and external barriers are created, operate and have
meaning. Therefore, the emphasis on both external and internal barriers
has to be followed by a complementary analysis of institutional structures
that – regardless of the explicit and direct awareness and control of any
particular agent – restrict women’s internal and external freedom, and
make individual acts of violence possible, conceivable and even accept-
able. Thus, we need to analyse not just the individual harms and the
ways they constrain women’s freedom, but the entire structural context
that surrounds them and makes them an individual moral wrong as well
as a structural practice which is overtly tolerated and deeply embedded
in unquestioned norms, habits and symbols that rule the functioning of
our social institutions.
To explore this insight that IPV is a problem that lies in our collec-
tive arrangements, namely an injustice of our practices and institutions
that curtail women’s freedom as a consequence of unjust networks of
relationships and illegitimate distributions of power, rather than as
the result of individual wrongdoings, consider, for instance, the police
(Hirschmann 2003, 114–115). Although the charge rate relative to
domestic violence is extremely low, there are, of course, women who
report abuse.5 Therefore, the police are particularly well positioned to
provide assistance to the victims, but very often their own prejudices,
lack of training and reluctance to intervene (especially in poorer and non-
white areas where intervention is considered highly dangerous to police
officers) hinder them from dealing with IPV (Ferraro 1993, 166; 1989).
Studies show that police often fail to arrest the abuser, arresting instead
the victim, display a dismissive attitude towards women’s complaints,
consider IPV a private affair, tend to have conciliatory approaches and
fail to see women’s fear of their abusers as what motivate their reluc-
tance to press charges or leave (Ben-Ishai 2009).
Similarly, the legal system should have a key role in the struggle against
IPV. It could strongly reinforce the message that IPV is a serious criminal
matter for which abusers will be held accountable (Hirschmann 2003,
116–117). Nevertheless, most of the time it fails to take domestic violence
seriously by leaving the victims without adequate protection and
revictimizing them. For instance, in courts, discourses about domestic
violence are often trivialized by the use of terms like ‘quarrel’, ‘argu-
ment’ or ‘contention’, namely, terms that highly mitigate or obscure
the nature of the harm and restrain the public acknowledgement of the
injustice that has been perpetuated. This leads to lighter punishments
and sentences that usually do not seem to take into account the serious-
ness of the problem.6 For instance, since the entity of the harm some
women face (and the associated consequences) is often denied or under-
estimated, women/mothers do not usually get justice; instead, they are
often left without adequate protection, and are questioned and even
accused of having exercised violence when they were simply trying to
defend themselves.7 Similarly, those who seek to escape their batterers
and safeguard themselves and their children from considerable risks by
moving away are often seen by courts as ‘criminals’, acting against the
best interest of the children – which are supposedly attained by joint
custody – despite the fact that living in a different city from the batterer
may reduce the likelihood of further aggression.8 Finally, because of
the harm they suffer (or have suffered), battered women are frequently
believed to be (physically and psychologically) unfit mothers: unsuitable
40 Elena Alonzo
to take care of themselves and their children (Kernic et al. 2005). Thus,
initially seen as victims/accusers, women paradoxically become respond-
ents and viewed as ‘insane’ in courts, which tacitly condone and even
support the violence systematically directed at them.9
The various aspects of the criminal justice system with its institutional
mechanisms, laws, norms, police, courts, provisions, assumptions and
prejudices are not the only institutional barriers that systematically
and unjustifiably restrain women’s agency and freedom. The health-care
system also has a fundamental role in maintaining and reproducing the
specific forms of unfreedom that women face and that make them partic-
ularly vulnerable to attacks (Hirschmann 2003, 117–118). Very roughly,
since the vast majority of battered women visit a health facility at some
point in their lives – for instance, during pregnancy or to get treatment
for themselves or their relatives – the medical system and its personnel
are well placed to identify abuses and refer them to other services aimed
at intervening on their behalf. The reality, however, is that, far from
playing a proactive role, the health-care system is usually unresponsive
to women facing IPV, blind to their needs and inclined to trivialize the
problem (Ptacek 1988, 152–155). Medical personnel screen for IPV in
only 6% to 10% of cases, fail to inquire into the cause of the trauma,
accept unrealistic and clearly false explanations (e.g. ‘I bumped into a
door’), and give women tranquilizers that can put them at greater risk of
attacks (Hirschmann 2003, 117). However, medical personnel may report
to authorities suspected acts of domestic violence, regardless of women’s
will and wishes. Patently ignored or treated as passive, non-autonomous
or irrational subjects, women tend to refrain from seeking medical aid.
This is especially true for those who have children: in cases of reported
abuse, women risk losing their children to foster care on the basis that
they are unfit mothers and that IPV harms the child (Smith 2000).
Another institutional structure that highly affects women’s lives is the
Catholic Church. Along with other religious structures, it has the highest
negative influence on battered women. Despite the fact that victims of
IPV contact clergy for help more often than any other source, clergy
have been found to rebuff women’s requests with responses backed up
by biblical passages (that reveal all their patriarchal power), suggesting
that women should be subservient, patient, keep their marriage together
despite high emotional or physical costs to themselves and their chil-
dren, and try to ‘save’ or ‘redeem’ their abusive husbands from the ‘sick-
ness’ that affects them. Furthermore, the belief and advice that divorce
is a sin and is prohibited by clergy exposes women to higher risks
(Hirschmann 2003, 118).
Not only formal institutions but also broad social categories such as
race, sexuality and class are significant to analysing and understanding
battered women’s experiences. Although IPV is present everywhere,
cutting across boundaries of race, culture, class, education, income
and age (for example), violence breaks out frequently where economic
conditions are difficult; cultural norms lead to acceptance – by the
perpetrators, wider community and victims too – that battering is a
normal part of marriage; the level of education is low, and biases and
prejudices about women’s roles allow sexist behaviours to exist; ethnic
minority women do not wish to subject themselves, or their batterers, to
the racism of the criminal justice system, or, because they may not have
papers or the right to legally work in the country, they do not want to
draw the attention of the authorities to themselves (Hirschmann 2003,
118–119; Crenshaw 1995).
Finally, the media play a central role in addressing violence against
women. That is, it gives people the lens through which to look at the
phenomenon. Yet, to a certain degree, the media makes such violence
possible, and even tolerable. Newspapers and mass media generally
report ‘bloody’ crimes of passion that sensationalize and draw in readers.
News about desperate or enraged husbands who kill their spouses and in
turn commit suicide, for example, often influences both judges, whose
sentencing of batterers may be unduly lenient, and the public at large,
who may give credit to scientifically unfounded hypotheses (such as
PAS), and weakens negative judgments about batterers. Accordingly,
articles rarely mention the sustained harm that precedes the dramatic
event (which occurs in at least 75% of cases of violence perpetrated by
men over women, but not vice versa (Campbell 1992, 99–113)) and
describe these episodes as though they were the matter of an unpre-
dictable ‘emotional outburst’ or ‘madness’, rather than the outcome of
continuous abuse.10 This misleading representation of IPV leads battered
women to believe that if they only experience some stalking or some
tugging from their partners, they are not victims of IPV.
This analysis clearly shows that the fundamental institutional struc-
tures that govern well-meaning liberal societies reinforce, on a daily
basis, batterers’ power over women, undermine victims’ agency and
freedom, and limit the effective and concrete resources that women (not
only those who directly face harm) have to escape damaging attacks.
If it is true that at the micro-level, there is an accountable batterer X
who intentionally harms his partner Y, it is also true that, according to
an enlarged perspective, there is an entire social context which moti-
vates, reproduces and enables – through direct and indirect material
42 Elena Alonzo
and psychological forces that often exceed the grasp and control of any
particular individual – asymmetrical relations between men and women,
making individual acts of violence possible, conceivable and, in some
sense, even acceptable. It is in such a context that victims of IPV shape
their lives and attitudes. They learn that society, sometimes tacitly, but
more often overtly, allows or condones the violence perpetrated against
them and offers few opportunities for an easy way out of the situation.
Hence, battered women adopt a variety of strategies to bear the injury
and cope with their powerlessness and helplessness. For instance, they
may try to keep away from the abusive partner, hope he will change,
deny that violence is happening and adopt self-deceptive behaviours,
claim responsibility for the injuries in order to persuade themselves
they have some control, and go limp during the beating to lessen the
damage. Theorists explain that many battered women are trapped in a
‘cycle of violence’, namely a complex system of interactive material and
psychological forces that lead them to wait and wish that the violence
will suddenly stop and the situation will turn out to be ‘normal’ again
(Walker 1979).
In sum, battered women face individual acts of violence as well as
institutionally structured constraints that directly and indirectly limit
their options and make them extremely vulnerable to the abuse.
Nevertheless, they are generally conceived (by theorists, judges, medical
personnel, media, relatives, friends, women who have never been
abused, for instance) as free, and free are their choices and actions to stay
or return to their abusive partners and continue to be systematically
beaten and blamed.
The conception of freedom as non-oppression
In this section I will draw the core features of a model of freedom,

henceforth a conception of freedom as non-oppression, which can work as
an analytical device for uncovering and analysing the specific forms of
unfreedom suffered by victims of IPV. In particular, this approach is an
attempt to go beyond the traditional dichotomy between negative and
positive conceptions of freedom by pointing out that we need a more
complex understanding of the relationship between interference, imper-
sonal social forces, individual action and inner and outer constraints,
than Berlin gives us. In this respect, I argue that, by making a sharp
distinction between internal and external constraints on freedom and
by adopting an atomistic social perspective that exclusively focuses on
individuals’ intentional actions and ignores the restrictiveness of the
framework in which battered women express their choices and agency,

the traditional dichotomy between negative and positive conceptions of
freedom deliver an analysis of unfreedom that is completely blind to the
actual constraints that abused women systematically face. Therefore, by
appealing to these conceptions, we would both continue to blame the
victims of IPV by attributing agency and freedom to them when they
are in fact responding to fear of imminent physical abuse, anxiety, false
consciousness or adaptive preferences, and overlook agency and choices
when they are exercised.
On this basis, I suggest that an adequate account of freedom requires
us to borrow some aspect from not only the negative but also the posi-
tive notion of freedom and, at the same time, reject their atomistic
social framework. By combining both the negative-liberty emphasis
on external constraints and the positive-liberty emphasis on internal
constraints with a particular attention to the institutional context in
which those barriers to women’s freedom and agency are created, repro-
duced and operate, the conception of freedom as non-oppression is able
to capture how the persistent lack of negative freedom harms women
psychologically, causing them to lack positive freedom and vice versa.
Accordingly, this conception is well equipped to reveal the distinctive
ways in which not only individual and assignable acts of violence but
the entire social context, with its rules, laws, customs, beliefs and norms,
systematically presents inner and outer barriers to women’s agency and
freedom, denying them certain opportunities, curtailing their agency
and leading them to choose that to which they are in fact restricted.
In order to underline the specific internal and external forms of
unfreedom directly and indirectly suffered by women, the conception
of freedom as non-oppression focuses its analysis on structural relation-
ships and patterns of institutional constraints, rather than on one-to-one
relationships or individual sets of constraints. By shifting its perspec-
tive from the individual to the structural relationships among groups,
the conception of freedom as non-oppression adopts a macroscopic
perspective that allows theorists to make comparisons among groups
and determine whether and how a particular social context constrains
women more than men. In other words, by shifting the perspective
from individual abused women to the structural relationships among
women and men, this model illuminates the asymmetrical and coer-
cive background conditions in which women are deeply embedded, and
allows individuation in order to analyse the systematic restraints they
(non-accidentally) encounter in their lives as compared to their male
counterparts, who have – in virtue of their different membership – more
44 Elena Alonzo
power, effective opportunities and easier access to benefits and social

acknowledgement.
Moreover, by looking at structural relationships rather than one-to-one
relationships or individual sets of constraints, the conception of freedom
as non-oppression provides a concrete and empirically valuable measure
of social unfreedom, avoiding the charges that are constantly made
against positive accounts of freedom. Positive conceptions of freedom
have rightly been criticized for not being able to provide an objective and
non-controversial analysis of unfreedom. They often rely on psycholo-
gized accounts of social constraints and sectarian assumptions about the
good life (Carter 1999). They generally entail ‘second-guessing’, according
to which others may claim what you want better than you do yourself.
In this respect, Berlin defines positive accounts of freedom as ‘paradoxes’
because they imply that individuals may be forced (by others, and specifi-
cally by the state) to be free.11 In other words, people may be coerced to
do Z because Z is for their own good, and because it is for their own good,
and if they knew it was, they would want it. Therefore, to be constrained
to do Z is not being coerced: while people are forced to do Z, their liberty
is actually enhanced. Thus, whereas positive conceptions of freedom
usually fall prey to the ‘totalitarian menace’ of second-guessing and the
connected risks of ‘paternalism’ and ‘psychologism’, the conception of
freedom as non-oppression – although it borrows some elements from
the positive accounts of freedom, such as attention to inner barriers, the
concepts of self-development and self-determination – has the benefit of
avoiding these conspicuous problems.12
By focusing on the structural nature of constraints, the conception
of freedom as non-oppression offers theorists uncontroversial analysis
of unfreedom that implies neither arbitrary assumptions about an
individual set of constraints nor personal judgments about the good
life, which involve treating people as ‘patients’, rather than agents.
Accordingly, through the application of intersubjective criteria that can
be operationalized (such as observable behaviour, status relationships,
resource distribution, data on hospitalization, medical reports) and the
evaluation of concrete and verifiable data (such as empirical evidence
on mortality rates, resources, privilege or influence), this account makes
it possible to critically investigate whether, in a given context, women
are systematically and unjustifiably constrained by any of several and
pervasive direct and indirect material and psychological structural forces
that inexorably mould their choices and actions.
In this regard, I maintain that the conception of freedom as non-
oppression allows theorists to acknowledge which choices count as
‘real choices’ and which choices are instead ‘obliged choices’, overtly or
covertly imposed by the socio-relational circumstances in which battered
women are called daily to express their agency. For instance, if the anal-
ysis reveals that C is a context in which men and women have equal
moral consideration, economic resources and legal opportunities, we
should conceive of a woman’s choice to return to her abusive husband
as a free choice which obeys the woman’s ‘second-order desires’, namely
those desires with which she identifies and which reflect her ‘real’ self.
By contrast, where the inquiry shows that C is a context in which IPV
is a largely ‘tolerated’ social practice, women’s voices are often overtly
ignored, resources for battered women are a low funding priority, the
media obscures the violence, and police and media personnel often
disbelieve women that report abuse, then to consider a woman’s deci-
sion to remain in a violent relationship as free is wrong and, in some
sense, disrespectful towards her. It is also harmful to those women
who have never been subject to direct attacks (yet) and, nevertheless,
turn out to be systematically restrained. Although their experience has
never been one of dramatic beatings and tortures, they live (in fact)
in a cultural landscape in which being harmed is a latent risk that can
always become an overt reality and in which the social conditions that
allow intimate abuse are unquestionably accepted as ‘normal’. In other
words, by virtue of the fact that they are women in social contexts that
unjustifiably constrain their freedom, everyday brings with it a constant
sense of fear and uncertainty.
By objectively investigating women’s concrete resources and opportu-
nities in a given context, the model of freedom as non-oppression offers
the tools for addressing women’s experiences and judging whether
their – rational – decisions to remain in violent relationships can be
considered, in actual fact, free.
Thus, whereas the common public view of IPV is dominated by
responses that alternate among disdain, sorrow and pity, the concep-
tion of freedom as non-oppression offers the possibility of recognizing
whether battered women are free and free to express their agency, but
do so within severely restrained contexts that in turn affect their under-
standing of their chances and options.
Towards a restructuring of society
By critically investigating whether and how women’s freedom is

diminished as a consequence of structurally institutionalized forms
of domestic violence, the conception of freedom as non-oppression is
46 Elena Alonzo
able to provide new solutions, evaluation criteria and integrated inter-

ventions for restructuring society and making it more just. By drawing
from the existing literature on rape and violence, as well as from surveys
and quantitative data on IPV based on sociological, social policy and
criminological perspectives, this model offers theorists empirically
assessable criteria for measuring the degree of unfreedom suffered by
the victims of IPV. These criteria can serve as a basis for policymaking
and for the reform of the institutional practices (by medical staff, police
officers, judges and courts, media and religious leaders, for example)
that provide the context in which domestic violence is currently taking
place. For instance, from an analysis of the criminal justice system, the
necessity arises to enact domestic violence legislation that prohibits the
specific harm against women and provides them with adequate protec-
tion – security for themselves, their relatives and property – and effec-
tive assistance to enable them to continue their lives and avoid further
attacks. Moreover, there is a need to consider the importance of training
and sensitizing judges and police officers to the dynamics of IPV and
its phenomenology in order to make them aware of the complexity of
the problem, hold them accountable for their own decisions and behav-
iours, and prevent secondary victimization of the women concerned.
Likewise, education and training for health-care personnel is essential
to ensure early screening and the correct identification of women who
are suffering IPV. Moreover, at the educational level, curricula that teach
non-violence, gender issues, conflict resolution and so on should be
encouraged and promoted by professors and experts. Similarly, media
campaigns can create new messages aimed at reversing social behav-
iours that tolerate violence by questioning usual attitudes accepted as
the ‘norm’. Finally, religious individuals and groups can raise public
awareness of IPV and further its condemnation, re-examine doctrines
that justify harmful behaviours, and create role models for young
people based on principles of equality, respect and dignity for women
that encourage victims to press charges for the harm they unjustifiably
suffer.
The central idea is that IPV can be countered and prevented only
when the structural causes of violence are detected and addressed, and
cultural norms, beliefs, stereotypes and attitudes that govern individual
actions are problematized and finally challenged. Thus, by consid-
ering the interconnections between direct and indirect material and
psychological structural forces responsible for IPV, my conception is
able to uncover the systematic constraints faced by abused women and
draw, within an integrated framework, multilayered interventions for

contrasting violence and providing immediate resources and available
facilities to the victims of abuse.
Conclusion
In this chapter, I considered the IPV phenomenon and the structural

context that makes it possible with a view to underlining the major –
direct and indirect material, psychological – factors of violence and their
systematic interconnections and explaining how they are able internally
and externally to restrain women’s agency and freedom.
I maintained that everyday infringements of freedom suffered by the
victims of IPV are usually dismissed or misunderstood by the dominant
discourse on freedom. I argued that, although there is no simple answer
to the question of whether and to what extent women’s freedom and
agency are diminished in any case of domestic violence, traditional
conceptions of freedom are totally inadequate to fully encompass this
complexity. On this basis, I sketched the main lines of an account of
freedom as non-oppression that combines some elements from both
positive and negative ideals of liberty – paying attention, in particular,
to inner and outer constraints – with a focus on larger institutionalized
social contexts in which internal and external barriers are created, have
meaning and operate. I claimed that this enlarged perspective, on the one
hand, allows theorists to investigate structural frameworks within which
battered women are shaped and their choices and actions are formed,
and, on the other, enables theorists to understand the way in which
personal and impersonal forces work to reduce and mould women’s
agency and freedom. Accordingly, this model offers the possibility of
better addressing women’s experiences and recognizing whether they
are effectively free to make their own choices and actions, or whether
they are actually trapped and ‘free’ to choose only among severely
constrained and impoverished options. At the same time, it can provide
new solutions and empirically assessable criteria for evaluating public
policy and rethinking those institutions that systematically curtail and
drain women’s lives.
To conclude, it is my hope that this analysis of the phenomenon of
IPV can be useful both to readers interested in the overall debates about
‘women, violence and agency’ not only from a philosophical but also a
political and a social, perspective too, and represent a theoretical footing
for stimulating further research and discussions on this topic.
48 Elena Alonzo
Notes
I am very grateful to Herjeet Marway for her detailed and thoughtful revisions
and comments. Deep gratitude also goes to Valeria Ottonelli, Elisabetta Galeotti,
Enrico Biale, Chiara Testino and Irene Ottonello for many very helpful insights
and suggestions. Finally, a portion of this work was presented in talks to the
Workshop ‘Women and Violence: The Agency of Victims and Perpetrators’ at the
University of Birmingham, and I very much appreciate the feedback and ideas
offered on that occasion.
1. As will become clearer later, when I talk about forms of ‘unfreedom’, I refer
to the inner and outer constraints that systematically affect battered women,
reducing their options, limiting their agency and making them unable to
express themselves and live their lives.
2. In this regard, I make some preliminary remarks. According to my definition,
I will not consider domestic abuse inflicted on women by other relatives, even
though they occur within the boundaries of the home. Moreover, I will focus
essentially on male-on-female violence. This is not to deny or uncritically
dismiss the reality of female-on-male violence, but to analyse the phenom-
enon as it systematically happens. Whatever, in fact, the possible rates of
violence against men, the rich literature on IPV clearly shows that it is highly
unlikely that female-on-male domestic violence is as prevalent as its coun-
terpart. For a detailed analysis of the ‘battered husband syndrome’, see, for
instance, Steinmetz (1978) and Steinmetz and Lucca (1988). For a critique of
these insights, see Pleck et al. (1977), Mills (1984), and Tjaden and Thoennes
(2000, p. 27). Importantly, although my interest here is exclusively on male-
on-female domestic violence, I am not excluding the possibility of lesbian or
homosexual violence. This occurs in fact at statistically significant rates, and
it would deserve, at least, a chapter on its own to be accurately analysed. On
this, see, for instance, Renzetti (1992) and Island and Letellier (1991).
3. An Italian survey of 870,122 Italians made on ‘formal acts’ (charge, medical
reports, calls for assistance etc.) shows that in Verona (Italy) in 2006, there
were 2,106 calls for assistance to police and other institutions; 64.8% of
women were physically assaulted by a current or a former partner; 70.5% of
the time, victims present bruises, broken bones or lacerations. See Osservatorio
Nazionale Violenza Domestica (2006a; 2006b).
4. An Italian survey reveals that 35.1% of the time, battered women experience
depression; 48.8% lack of self-esteem and trust; 44.9% powerlessness; 41.5%
sleeplessness; 37.4% anxiety, 24.3% lapses in concentration; 14.3% generalized
problems to take care of children; and 12.3% self-mutilation and attempted
suicide. See Istituto nazionale di statistica, ISTAT (2006, p. 16).
5. According to the ISTAT (2006, p. 14) survey, 7.2% of domestic violence is
reported. Women report less sexual violence perpetrated by partners (4.7%)
than physical violence (7.5%), and less assault at the hand of current partners
than at the hand of former partners. Whereas few women charge their part-
ners, many of them (47.6%) call the police or report the assault (including the
most violent), and they face judges, lawyers and professional caregivers.
6. In general, restraining orders are hardly pronounced, and even when they are
assigned they are often made ineffective and difficult to enforce by lack of
funds and resources. There is a great deal of evidence of cases in which judges
discount women’s testimonies and underestimate an individual’s dangerous-
ness, instead releasing batterers who subsequently persecute or even killed
their partners (Ptacek 1999; Saba et al. 2008). Moreover, phenomena that in
comparison with murders or rapes are considered ‘less entity’ harms, such as
stalking, have recently been configured as crimes; therefore, in such cases the
enforcement of the laws is extremely imprecise and undetermined. There is
a tendency to understand these forms of interference as transient reactions
destined to quickly disappear, rather than the prelude of more intense, inva-
sive and preannounced harm (Tjaden and Thoannes 2006).
7. Women who harm their partners in self-defence risk being arrested because
judges tend to consider domestic violence as mutual. Moreover, it often
happens that women who kill their partners are treated more harshly than
their counterparts (Ferraro 1993, 169; Barron 2000, 89–96).
8. It may be useful to remind readers that, in many states, restraining fathers
from seeing their children or limiting their visitation rights is worse than
exposing women and children to the risk of further attacks. Therefore, it is
common that courts prevent women/mothers from moving away, far from
the abusive partners and grant child custody to both parents (Kernic et al.
2005).
9. On the other side, batterers tend to become persecuted people: discriminated
in courts, turned out into the street, separated from their children, viewed as
desperate men. In this regard, I may mention parental alienation syndrome
(PAS) and the way in which it has recently been used in child custody deter-
mination processes to award sole custody to fathers. Although no professional
association has recognized PAS as a relevant medical syndrome or mental
disorder, and it is not listed in the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA’s)
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, it is often endorsed by
fathers’ rights groups and by newspapers in relation to women’s murders
and harassment at the hand of male partners. This has led judges to issue
less severe sentences and public opinion to undervalue the batterer’s moral
blameworthiness (APA 2008).
10. For a detailed analysis of the ways in which, according to an Italian study, IPV
is generally reported by newspapers, see Quaglia (2004) and Crisma (2004).
11. According to positive conceptions of freedom, people can have ‘first- and
second-order desires’. ‘First-order desires’ are desires for something other
than a desire (while trying to quit smoking, the desire to smoke a cigarette,
for example), while ‘second-order desires’ are instead desires about a desire
(the desire to be rid of the desire to smoke a cigarette, for instance). People
experience their desires and purposes as higher or lower, noble or base,
good or bad. Because of these conflicting capacities, people may follow
desires, compulsions and addictions that are at odds with their ‘true’ selves
and that impede their liberty. This entails that in order to be free, it is not
enough to experience the absence of external barriers, because the internal
factors people have may frustrate their true will and push them to violate
their real desires. These internal factors can work as ‘internal barriers’ and
keep people from pursuing their higher desires (Taylor 1979). It follows
from this notion that others may claim to know what is good for me better
than I do myself and preserve my true self from false desires; in so doing,
50 Elena Alonzo
while restraining me from pursuing low desires, they actually increase my

freedom.
12. Very briefly, whereas the ‘totalitarian menace’ of second-guessing or ‘totali-
tarianism’ refers here to the determination of the will by the state as well
as by others that can paradoxically force me to be free, the word ‘pater-
nalism’ defines the interference of a state or an individual with another
person, against his/her will, and it is motivated by the claim that the subject
interfered with will be better off or protected from harm. Finally, the term
‘psychologism’ concerns the positions that apply psychological techniques
to exploring the depths of people’s mind to find their higher desires and true
will.
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3
Prostitution and the Concept of
Agency
Rhéa Jean
Introduction
Supporters of sex work frequently accuse (anti-prostitution) radical

feminist abolitionists of victimizing women in the sex industry and
denying their agency. This accusation seems based on the pro-sex work
theoreticians’ misunderstanding of two different aspects of agency. First,
a lack of agency does not necessarily imply that the individual has no
capacity for agency, and second, social oppression or some external pres-
sure and coercion can impact the possibility of choice. The goal of this
chapter is to clarify these two philosophical sides of agency and to argue
that there is no contradiction in arguing that, on the one hand, the sex
industry lowers the possibility of women’s agency, while, on the other
hand, we can consider women in prostitution as being equal, in their
rational capabilities and their strengths, to other people. This chapter
can be a tool for social workers as well as philosophers and ethicists, who
consider prostitution as a form of violence but want to be respectful to
women in the sex industry.
An important aspect of this chapter is to explain how the violent
sexual nature of the sex industry (transforming sexuality into a work
duty) undermines women’s sexual agency by reducing their capacity
to personally choose and refuse sexual acts. Furthermore, prostituted
persons are victims not only of the sexual demands in prostitution but
also of what the job market is offering to job seekers (especially female).
Even if we acknowledge that people in prostitution do have a capacity
for agency, we nonetheless consider that the possibility for agency has a
lot to do with the social context in which one lives. This draws a distinc-
tion between the social and the personal aspects of agency (based partly
on the work of Joseph Raz). Finally, this chapter will argue that the
52
Prostitution and the Concept of Agency 53
separation of sexuality from the work sphere constitutes an important

political change in ensuring that women can have control of their sexu-
ality and not be forced to comply with sexual duties generally dictated
by men’s demand.
Feminist debates on agency and prostitution
The debate about the agency of women who are in a situation of oppres-
sion can lead to a host of misunderstandings, especially with regards to
the issue of prostitution. Radical feminist abolitionists have pointed out
that men sexually oppress women in prostitution, and that this oppres-
sion has been an important threat to women’s sexual agency. These
feminists believe that we should not view men’s access to women’s
sexuality through social and economic power as legitimate, and that
we should struggle instead for a world in which women can have real
sexual agency, free from patriarchal and capitalistic pressure. The aboli-
tionist point of view argues that prostitution is a form of commercial
sexual exploitation. The other common point of view on prostitution
is the pro-sex work view, held by many libertarian theoreticians and
postmodern feminists. This view berates the abolitionist perspective as
victimizing women and denying them the agency that, in their opinion,
women in prostitution can exercise. On the one hand, as Sheila Jeffreys
explains, ‘In the case of libertarians, their object is the defense of their
own sexual pleasures, which they believe are under threat from the femi-
nist analysis of sexual violence and sexuality’ (Jeffreys 1997, 150). On
the other hand, in the case of postmodern feminists, ‘the emphasis is on
the protection of their view of themselves as powerful, free-willed agents
of their own destinies who are not limited by the victimhood of women’
(ibid.). These two views are nonetheless similar in their celebration of
‘sex work’ and intertwine quite often when these two groups oppose
feminist abolitionists’ view on prostitution. I will therefore use the term
‘pro-sex work theoreticians’ to refer to both.1 Pro-sex work theoreticians
focus on the idea that women can rationally choose prostitution and
that they are able to negotiate with their clients in their everyday life.
So, for pro-sex work theoreticians, that would mean that women do
have agency within prostitution.
Let us first consider the conditions of agency. In short, as we will see
with Raz (1986), agency can be achieved by (1) having the capability
to make rational choices; (2) being free from external coercion; and (3)
being free from social stigmatization.2 This view of agency (the ideal
of an autonomous agent making choices in his/her life) is generally
54 Rhéa Jean
shared by liberal philosophers and radical feminists alike (see Cowling

and Reynolds 2004; Primoratz 2001). However, radical feminists point
out that liberal philosophers often interpret these conditions in a too
narrow and individualistic sense. Indeed, what does it mean for women
to be free from coercion and social stigmatization when they live in
a world in which they are oppressed and are socialized to be more
obedient to men? As Tracy Isaacs puts it, ‘Feminine socialization shapes
women in ways that make them more likely to be dependent, not in
control of significant parts of their lives, often coerced, at the mercy
of social forces, often primarily concerned with the welfare of others’
(Isaacs 2002, 132).
When abolitionist feminists analyze the issue of prostitution, they
focus on the fact that women’s sexuality in prostitution is coerced,
and that women are denied the right to experience their own sexual
autonomy. In the common liberal point of view, women are supposed
to ‘consent’, but consenting to sexual acts defined by patriarchy and by
the market is more of a survival strategy than any real sexual agency
in which women can choose the terms of their sexual encounters. As
Carole Pateman (1988) pointed out, the question is not whether or
not a woman gives her consent, but why men have the legitimacy to
control women’s sexuality, using their economic power or other forms
of pressure. Pateman questions the liberal tradition of contract theory,
which is often interpreted as a strong model for agency. The idea that
the contract makes us free agents is challenged by Pateman, who shows
that the social contract is a tool used by men to oppress women and to
present the latter as consenting to their own oppression.
Pro-sex work theoreticians tend to minimize the socialization of
women and their traditional oppression. Instead, they argue that
when women in commercial sex choose to be in the sex industry and
are able to negotiate with their clients, they are no longer victims of
male domination. Pro-sex work theoreticians see the word ‘victim’ as a
notion that represents women as powerless and weak. They also claim
that when abolitionist feminists state that women lack agency in pros-
titution, they mean that women in prostitution have less rationality
and personal capabilities for agency. For supporters of sex work, we
should focus on work conditions instead of inequality between men
and women. For instance, pro-sex work sociologist Wendy Chapkis
considers that ‘the prostitute cannot be reduced to one of a passive
object used in male sexual practice, but instead it can be understood
as a place of agency where the sex worker makes active use of the
existing sexual order’ (Chapkis 1997, 29–30). Some moderate liberal
pro-sex work theoreticians like Martha Nussbaum (1999) also focus on

the capability for women to show agency in a context of prostitution.
Likewise, Barbara Sullivan considers that, even if there are good reasons
to consider that there is a coercive aspect in prostitution (for the pros-
tituted person), ‘more attention needs to be paid to the power relation
which both coerce sex workers and construct their consensual capa-
bility’3 (Sullivan 2004, 127).
It seems, however, that what pro-sex work theoreticians argue about
agency in prostitution can be pernicious. On the one hand, they are
right to consider that women in prostitution can make rational deci-
sions in their everyday life. Pretending that they do not have the
mental capability to exercise rationality would indeed be a discrimina-
tory view of women in prostitution. Many women can rationally decide
that prostitution can be their best economic option and their only
way to feed their children and pay their rent. They can also develop
different strategies with their clients in order to try to avoid engaging
in certain sexual acts or getting sexually transmitted disease, or to be
paid more. On the other hand, what radical feminist abolitionists such
as Pateman (1988), Jeffreys (1997) and Miriam (2005) defend is not that
women in prostitution do not have these kinds of rational capabilities
that most people have and nor do they deny that many prostituted
women can show strength and resilience. Rather, what makes a prosti-
tuted woman a ‘passive object in male sexual practice’ or a person who
is ‘coerced’ is not her incapability of making rational decisions, but the
context of prostitution itself, which represents a threat to her agency.
We are talking about a context of sexual commodification, sexism
and lack of alternatives for women that makes them more likely to
‘consent’ to unwanted sex for money. Describing and condemning that
context – as Pateman, Jeffreys and Miriam do – does not underestimate
the individual rational capabilities of women in prostitution. On the
contrary, most abolitionist theoreticians consider that women in pros-
titution often show courage, strength and resilience in the oppressive
context in which they find themselves. But saying that these women
can be courageous and resilient should never be a reason for accepting
an institution (like prostitution) that is destroying the life of many
women, that is perpetuating inequalities between classes of individ-
uals and that is based on economic and sexual exploitation. Similarly,
saying, for instance, that many survivors of a genocide or a situation of
slavery have been resilient and have been able to show their capability
of agency in a context of survival absolutely does not entail that we
should accept genocides and slavery.4
56 Rhéa Jean
Anthropologist Paola Tabet (2005) has shown how, in societies that

traditionally consider men’s sexuality as more valuable than women’s,
women have traded sex for goods.5 Women have often been reduced to
providing ‘sexual services’ to men instead of being the subject of their
own sexuality. The economic impoverishment of women and their lack
of access to food, money or other kinds of resources, in a patriarchal
society, have made them vulnerable and dependent on men’s resources.
Prostitution has emerged in many forms and many contexts due to this
situation of economic and sexual inequality between men and women.
In today’s society, some women benefit from similar advantages and
rights as men, while others still have access to resources through a tradi-
tional and exploitive sexual market.
I agree with the idea that women in prostitution can exercise a rational
choice when they accept to prostitute themselves because they believe
that this will help improve their situation. These women therefore do
not lack rationality, which would make them less able to exercise agency
than other people. Granted also is the fact that many of them have some
ability to negotiate, to show strength in oppressive conditions and to
be resilient. It would be unfair to state that all women in prostitution
are weak. We need to acknowledge the strength that some women can
show during and after their experience of prostitution. On this issue, I
think that radical feminist abolitionists should answer their critics by
being clearer and specifying that their critique of prostitution and of
patriarchal oppression is by no means a way of representing women in
prostitution as weak or unable to show agency.
However, just because women in prostitution are rationally capable
of agency and are developing survival strategies in an oppressive situa-
tion, does not mean that we should refuse to see that prostitution is a
patriarchal institution per se that is denying sexual agency to women.
That is, prostitution opposes women’s right to have a sexuality devoid
of pressures and coercion; prostitution as an institution forces women to
give up some agency in their sexuality. After all, what is sexual agency
for any individual? It is the ability to choose one’s partner, have the
right to spontaneously say ‘no’ to a sexual relationship at any time, and
not be pressured into sexual relationships. Prostitution denies all this
because, as a sexual contract, it redefines sexuality in terms of work: the
‘partner’ becomes a client, who can be anyone and who can demand
whatever he wants, and the prostituted woman is not supposed to say
‘no’ but ‘yes’ when her clients give her money (consent to sex is bought
by the client, and when a prostituted person refuses certain sexual acts,
the client remains able to up the price in order to get what he wants).
Lack of agency in prostitution: A question of capabilities

or possibilities?
In the debate concerning prostitution, the question of agency needs to

be clarified. It would appear that when pro-sex work libertarians claim
that radical feminist abolitionists are denying the agency of prostituted
women, they think of agency in terms of capabilities rather than possi-
bilities. Agency hinges on these two aspects of capabilities and possi-
bilities: we can show agency by making rational choices, but if we live
in an oppressive social context, it becomes particularly hard to exer-
cise this agency. Pro-sex work theoreticians focus only on the agent’s
mental capability for agency instead of the social situation that reduces
the possibility of agency, which is the main concern of radical feminist
abolitionists.
Joseph Raz (1986) can be helpful for our understanding of these
internal and external conditions of agency. Raz sets three sine qua non
conditions for evaluating an agent’s capability and possibility for auton-
omous choices – conditions which go further than the simple proce-
dural capability for autonomy defended by libertarians.6 One condition
is related to our rational capability, the other two to the social context
in which the individual lives. The absence of any condition makes it
impossible for the individual to be an autonomous agent. So, even if
the prostituted person has the rational capability to be an autonomous
agent, the context in which she lives might deny her the possibility of
agency.
The first condition of autonomy proposed by Raz, constitutes the
common basis for all defenders of an agent’s individual choice: the
agent’s mental capability, which means the person is not subject to
major psychological or cognitive problems. An agent must be able to
use minimal mental abilities in order to be able to show agency. ‘These
include minimum rationality, the ability to comprehend the means
required to realize his goals, the mental faculties necessary to plan
actions, etc.’ (Raz 1986, 372–373). We cannot presume that women in
prostitution are lacking the mental capability necessary to show agency.
Even if many women in prostitution suffer psychological problems, such
as depression, addiction and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) (cf.
Farley 2003) from their experience of prostitution, we cannot assume,
however, that most have less capability for rationality to begin with. The
psychological problems experienced by many women in prostitution
are, for the most part, related to life experiences, and do not mean that
these women are a priori less rational individuals. It is dangerous even
58 Rhéa Jean
to consider women in prostitution as coming from a ‘particular’ demo-

graphic, an idea popular in the Victorian period but also more recently
because there is not a typical personality that brings someone to the sex
industry.7 Even if it is accepted that some persons might be more vulner-
able than others (because of a lack of financial and relational support), it
is safe to say that life circumstances have more to do with being sexually
exploited than a deficit of rationality.
The second condition for autonomy proposed by Raz is the adequacy
of options that an individual can have: the more the options are varied
and respect the individual’s integrity and values, the more this indi-
vidual can experience an autonomous life. Conversely, if an individual
can only choose between a situation of life and death, he/she cannot
really show agency and exercise an autonomous choice. As Raz argues,
‘For most of the time the choice should not be dominated by the need
to protect the life one has’ (Raz 1986, 376). Raz gives the example of
a woman on a desert island who cannot have an adequate range of
options to choose from:
The Hounded Woman. A person finds herself on a small desert island.

She shares the island with a fierce carnivorous animal which perpetu-
ally hunts for her. Her mental stamina, her intellectual ingenuity, her
will power and her physical resources are taxed to their limits by her
struggle to remain alive. She never has a chance to do or even to think
of anything other than how to escape from the beast. (Raz 1986, 374)
This woman might be free to walk around the island, but she runs the
risk of being attacked by the beast at every misstep. This woman is
constantly in a situation of survival; she is not living an autonomous
life even if she possesses the mental capability to do so. Her situation
denies her any agency, even if, in a different situation, she could be able
to show agency. As Martha Nussbaum explains,
Raz’s point is that many poor people’s lives are nonautonomous in

just this way. They may fulfill internal conditions of autonomy, being
capable of making bargains, reflecting about what to do, and so on.
But none of this counts for a great deal, if in fact the struggle for
survival gives them just one unpleasant option, or a small set of (in
various ways) unpleasant options. (Nussbaum 1999, 296)
Even if most women in prostitution have sufficient mental capabilities,

external conditions, such as poverty and the lack of available options
experienced by many women in prostitution, impact levels of agency.

Acknowledging that women in prostitution have limited options
and that this is a threat to their agency is not the same as saying that
these persons do not possess the mental capabilities to be free agents.
Advocating this idea might be the key to promoting social change and
to starting to consider agency beyond the individualistic and reductive
view of the mental state.
Lastly, Raz puts forth the independence of the individual as a condi-
tion. This concept of independence entails freedom from manipula-
tion and coercion. If the adequacy of options concerns an absence of
external coercion, then independence refers more, according to Raz,
to an absence of internal oppression experienced by an individual. Raz
gives the example of slavery becoming an internal oppression, even in a
context in which slaves suffer no physical coercion.
That is why slaves are thought to lack autonomy even if they enjoy
a range of options which, were they free, would have been deemed
sufficient. Manipulation, unlike coercion, does not interfere with a
person’s options. Instead it perverts the way that person reaches deci-
sions, form preferences or adopts goals. (Raz 1986, 377)
Another example of a lack of independence could be a traditional caste

system (as in India) that lingers, even where the legal equality of citi-
zens has been secured. Even if people of the ‘lower’ castes have the
same rights as people in ‘higher’ ones, it does not follow that they will
be able to show as much agency; rather, it is quite possible that the
‘higher’ class will still continue to lord over the ‘lower’ class, especially
if the lower caste still shows the behaviour expected of their caste. Social
conventions as well as the symbolic order maintain the hierarchy and
contribute to undermining agency.8
The natural fact that coercion and manipulation reduce options or

distort normal processes of decision and the formation of prefer-
ences has become the basis of a social convention loading them with
meaning regardless their of actual consequences. They have acquired
a symbolic meaning expressing disregard or even contempt for the
coerced or manipulated people. (Raz 1986, 378)
If we can understand how the caste system can undermine people’s

agency, we can also see how discrimination based on sex can contribute
to undermining women’s agency, despite the fact that Western societies
60 Rhéa Jean
tend to have equal rights for men and women. The result of this sexual
discrimination can be seen in the fact that women tend to be economi-
cally disadvantaged, have more parental responsibilities and be sexually
objectified by men.
Prostitution is a good example of this socialization between men and
women. We can consider that prostitution undermines the agency of
women, not so much because of the first condition of autonomy (the
mental capability), but rather because the second condition is often
lacking (women in prostitution often have a limited range of options
available) and because the third is also generally lacking (the fact that
women are still socially considered inferior to men, as sexual servants, as
responsible caretakers of children, as expected to sacrifice themselves for
others and as sexual objects rather than as sexual subjects). This situation
still prevails even if women can be legally considered equal to men.
So, we can see that, for Raz, agency depends not only on mental
conditions but also on social ones. Even if Raz is a liberal defender of
pluralism and tolerance, he is nonetheless aware that individual choices
are socially oriented, not only in a homogenous and prescriptive society
but also in a pluralist one. For him, the virtue of tolerance should not
be a pretext for an impoverished moral sensibility towards others. In his
perfectionist liberal tendency, Raz considers that political governance
and public policies can and must have an impact on citizens’ pursuit of
a good life. It is one of the roles of political decisions to offer citizens an
adequacy of options and help them be free from negative social condi-
tioning. This can be achieved, among other ways, by what we consider
as ‘work’ and what we consider decent relations between individuals or
between groups of individuals. What are considered as ‘acceptable’ ways
to make a living have always evolved:
it has to be remembered that social, economic and technological

processes are constantly changing the opportunities available in our
society. Occupations and careers are being created while others disap-
pear all the time. The acceptable shapes of personal relationships are
equally in constant flux, and so is the public culture which colours
much of what we can and cannot do. (Raz 1986, 411)
There are many good reasons to think that prostitution is damaging

to our conception of both decent work and decent relations between
individuals, and between groups of individuals (men and women, rich
and poor, people from the North and those from the South). There are
many good reasons to think that prostitution constitutes a threat to our
possibility to show agency in the work sphere as well as in our sexual

life. As part of a structural system that involves discrimination based
on sex, sexual exploitation of women, and economic disparity between
classes, prostitution undermines the individual’s possibility to show
agency, even if prostituted individuals possess mental capabilities equal
to non-prostituted people.
Economic pressures on sexuality: A threat to women’s

agency
Prostitution is a patriarchal and capitalistic institution that raises many

questions on how we define decent work and how we define decent
sexuality. When sex is part of a contract, as it is in the sex industry,
how can we protect the workers from sexual harassment in a context of
work? If it is considered legitimate to exchange sex for money in the sex
industry, how can we consider a context in which an employee must
have sex with her boss in order to keep her job as exploitation? How can
we justify something that is considered exploitative for one part of the
population as ‘legitimate work’ for another set that has fewer economic
alternatives?
In addition to these questions concerning work ethics, prostitution
undermines our experience of sexuality as a choice free from any pres-
sures, which has been a major social progress in democratic societies.
That is, in the last three decades, most Western countries have consid-
ered that sexuality must be a free choice. For example, we consider that
choosing a sexual or life partner must be an individual choice, not a
community one, and so we oppose forced marriage as well as rape. The
idea that sexuality should be part of a contract was challenged when it
was no longer legitimate for a man to compel conjugal duties or have
the right to rape his wife. We also consider nowadays that compulsory
heterosexuality is wrong and that a person can freely choose to experi-
ence same-sex relations. Finally, freedom from sexual harassment has
also been an important concern in our societies. All these social and
legal changes are based on the idea that sex should be a private and
individual choice, free from pressures coming from individuals, families,
communities or political institutions. Yet the defenders of these indi-
vidual sexual freedoms are often the same ones that suggest we accept
the pressures of the market on sexuality in the case of prostitution. How
can we consider, again, that some of the population can have sex in
order to make a living, when we fight for the right for others to have a
sexuality they freely choose?
62 Rhéa Jean
By making sex a job, libertarian pro-sex work advocates present the

sexual contract as acceptable. They do so by using two contradictory
arguments. Their first main argument, related to identity and self-ex-
pression, treats sex as an important element of human pleasure and,
therefore, dictates that one should never oppose sexuality. Their second
main argument is the Cartesian and rational idea that prostitution is
just a job, and that there is absolutely no problem in using sex as a work
instrument. Kathy Miriam explains that ‘this version pictures a disem-
bodied, Cartesian subject who can stand in the same external relation to
her body and capabilities as she can to other (material) objects’ (Miriam
2005, 7). These are the two common yet contradictory sophisms used
to trivialize the notion of sex work: ‘sex work is just ... sex!’ and ‘sex work
is just ... work!’ They are often used alternately by the very same pro-sex
work advocates.
These two arguments are indeed contradictory: if sex is such a personal
and ‘expressive’ experience for an agent, and if sex should remain a
freely chosen aspect of our lives (both points with which I agree), then
it should not be associated with the duty, the pragmatism and the subor-
dination that we find in work. In recent decades, we have managed to
define sex and sexuality as a human dimension in which we express our
identity and as something we should liberate from personal and insti-
tutional oppression – the struggle for gay rights, and the fight against
forced marriages, sexual harassment and rape in marriage, for example,
were underpinned by this ideal. But when sexuality becomes a mere
job that can legitimately be defined by patriarchy and capitalism, we
are no longer advocating such sexual freedom. On the contrary, we are
allowing less sexual agency to women. This is very far from the vision
of sexual freedom for which feminists have historically campaigned. As
Miriam (2005) points out, what is the meaning of agency when the situ-
ation is itself taken for granted as inevitable? Since women are being
oppressed as women, we must also address the question of collective
agency (see also Isaacs 2002). Prostitution cannot be simply considered
as an individual right for people who claim to choose it, but should
instead be seen as a threat to women’s sexual rights as well as a threat to
workers’ and citizens’ rights.
Debra Satz has raised the idea that some things should not be on the
market. Prostitution, for her, should not be regarded as a mere voluntary
choice even if some people do appear to make such a choice. The fact
that it is an economic transaction – that it is a market – makes it a social
problem that goes beyond personal choice alone. That is, the fact that
prostitution is an economic option has an impact on what women as a

group consider as a possible work, on the way men and women perceive
their sexuality, and on the way sexuality is perceived in the workplace.
Allowing so-called ‘voluntary prostitution’ has, in fact, another effect on
women’s situation in general. As Satz pointed out, ‘if you allowed pros-
titution as just another form of work ... you would be imposing a cost
on people who do not want to engage in that. They are going to have a
different set of employment opportunities than they would have had had
this market been closed off’ (Satz 2010, 79). That is, individual choices of
profession are generally closely linked to what is available on the market
and to our survival strategy. The sexualization of work has an impact
on what kinds of ‘jobs’ are available on the market and are proposed
to job seekers. For example, in addition to ‘traditional’ prostitution, we
can also find a sexualization of other jobs that are normally not sexual,
such as ‘erotic’ dancers (stripteasers), ‘erotic’ masseuses, ‘sexy’ (naked)
waitresses, ‘erotic’ hairdressers and ‘erotic’ maids, and, to these, we can
add cases in which nurses have been asked by patients to provide sexual
services, and female employees who are expected to have sex with their
boss. Even if many employees have denounced these kinds of sexual
demands (a nurses’ union in the Netherlands has recently refused to
add sexual therapy to their work duties), it nonetheless shows that there
is a phenomenon of sexual pressure on women in the work sphere that
reduces their possibilities to refuse unwanted sex.
Prostitution makes poor people, especially poor women, have less
sexual agency than others (see Anderson 2002). Poor people are less
likely to oppose sexual harassment in the workplace and prostitution
because they have fewer opportunities in life. Some libertarians would
say that women in prostitution might exercise their sexual agency in
their private life even if they do not in prostitution. But even if women
in prostitution can possibly be free sexual agents in their private life, the
economic transaction, the market and the work context are nonethe-
less denying their sexual agency. Prostitution’s ‘work duties’ make them
less likely to have the possibility to decide with whom and how they
have a sexual encounter, to spontaneously say ‘no’ at any time, and
to avoid being pressured into sexual acts. The coercive aspect of work9
that is present in prostitution (as in any work) cannot ensure sexual
expression for people who have to do their ‘work’ (which is to perform
sexual tasks) and cannot protect them against sexual exploitation. Such
an outcome is incoherent with a sexual ethics that struggles not only for
sexual freedom but also against sexual exploitation.
64 Rhéa Jean
Conclusion
Pro-sex work theoreticians often accuse radical feminist abolitionists of

perpetuating an image of weak, prostituted women incapable of any
agency. I have tried to show that this accusation is generally unfounded
because radical feminist abolitionists are not claiming that women in
prostitution are incapable of agency through a lack of rationality. They
are instead arguing that the patriarchal and capitalistic institution of
prostitution is constraining the possibility of agency (their possibility to
have the sexuality they want and to have a job free from sexual harass-
ment). I consider that the debate on the question of prostitution would
probably gain more clarity by the distinction between the individual’s
(in)capability of agency and the social (im)possibility of agency.
Acknowledging the capability of agency that women can have does
not mean that we therefore have to accept prostitution. We should
instead see women’s capability of agency as an opportunity for struggle
against patriarchal oppression, in solidarity with all women. As Isaacs
has pointed out, agency should be seen not only from an individual-
istic perspective. Women should also rise to their collective agency.
Collective agency can be achieved through changes in social structures
and through solidarity between women (for example, by struggling
against the sexualization of work and by advocating for a distribution of
income that would be more profitable for women). We need to remain
coherent and continue to struggle for a sexuality freed from any kind
of pressure, duty or work. To separate sexuality from the market is an
important step in order to achieve a world in which sexual agency is
possible for all women.
In no way can a sexuality that is defined within the context of work
be freely chosen; in no way can a sexuality be experienced as personal
expression, identity and spontaneity (meaning one can stop at any
moment) in a context of work; in no way can sexuality be free from
coercion in a context of work, because work almost always has a coer-
cive aspect. If we want sexuality to remain as much as possible free from
coercion, then it should not be defined by a context of work and by the
market.
Notes
1. It is surprising to see that even an alleged left liberal like Martha Nussbaum
(1999) can also be attracted by this notion of sex work. We nonetheless
consider that the defence of sex work is more a libertarian view than a left
liberal view.
2. We use the term ‘capability’ instead of ‘capacity’ because we consider the

term more related to personal abilities (including intellectual and emotional
abilities).
3. Radical feminist abolitionists are frequently accused of ‘victimism’ by pro-sex
work theoreticians, such as Katie Roiphe (1993). As radical feminist Sheila
Jeffreys pointed out, ‘For Roiphe and others like her, the emphasis is on the
protection of their view of themselves as powerful, free-willed agents of their
own destinies who are not limited by the victimhood of women’ (Jeffreys
1997, 150). Others, such as Jo Doezema, consider that the abolitionist point
of view is colonialist. For her, in these ‘feminist discourses, the “third world”
sex worker is presented as backward, innocent and above all helpless – in need
of rescue’ (Doezema 2001, 31). We can answer these accusations.
Firstly, the term ‘victim’ in itself does not mean that someone is weak
and cannot show agency. If someone steals my belongings, I’m a victim
of theft. That does not mean that I cannot show agency in my life in
general. Many abolitionists have nonetheless avoided the term ‘victim’
and have used instead the term ‘survivor’, which seems more empow-
ering. However, for Jeffreys (1997, p. 151), the avoidance of the word
victim may have left the way open for these attacks from pro-sex work
defenders. Some sex work defenders like Laura Agustin consider that it
is the term ‘victim’ in itself that maintains women in a lower situation
(instead of saying that it is the patriarchal and long social oppression that
maintains women in that situation). Contrarily to what Agustin (2007)
seems to believe, however, erasing the term victim and proclaiming that
women are free agents would not magically change the reality of women.
It would instead silence and deny the harm perpetrated towards women.
Secondly, the accusation of colonialism is disingenuous. Considering
that women in developing countries might have even less agency than
those in developed countries, in terms of social oppression, does not mean
that we consider that these women are less capable of agency in terms of
mental capabilities. Saying that there is social oppression for women in
many countries in Africa, Asia, Middle East and Latin America is not colo-
nialist, but simply realistic. That does not mean that we underestimate
the feminist movement in these parts of the world, as Doezema (2001)
pretends. Rather, it simply means that many women in these countries
have even fewer economic alternatives than women in First World coun-
tries, that they often suffer more stigmatization after an experience of pros-
titution (which contributes to maintaining them in that situation), that
they have fewer educational opportunities, that they live in communities
that have a stronger gender binary and that they live in countries that
might economically depend on sex tourism, which is generally based on
colonialism and inequality between North and South. In fact, defenders
of the sex industry such as Doezema and Agustin hold a point of view that
does not question the colonialism, racism and sexism deeply rooted in
the growth of the sexual industry and sex tourism. They instead put the
blame on abolitionist defenders, who are particularly critical of women’s
oppression in Third World countries. It is as if abolitionists would be,
in their eyes, guilty of not being able to change the situation they are
condemning. The heroes would then be the people celebrating the status
66 Rhéa Jean
quo and trying to see an oppressive situation in a positive way. This ultra-
libertarian ideology can particularly be found in Agustin’s blog: She main-
tains, (Agustin 2011), for instance, that selective abortion of baby girls
does not have to be considered as the deeply problematic situation it is,
not only for women but also for the humankind. On the contrary, she
claims, selective abortion of baby girls could represent an advantage for the
remaining women: ‘Why not think women will migrate to places where
they are lacking, take on traditionally female jobs and enjoy an advan-
tage in the local marriage market or selling sex? Not the most progressive
outcomes possibly but aren’t they better than being expected to wait to
be victimised?’ (Agustin, 2011), implying that as a ‘commodity’ on the
market, women would become a rarer and more expensive resource. It is
indeed astonishing that someone like Agustin is considered as a feminist
and is invited as a speaker to different tribunes on prostitution.
4. In recent years, not only have pro-sex work advocates avoided condemning
the sex industry but they have also considered as ‘weak’, women who have
publicly said that they have been hurt by the sex industry (see, for example,
Agustin, 2007). Celebrating the resilience of people in a difficult situation
should never be an occasion for denigrating those who have not been so resil-
ient. In fact, resilience impresses us precisely because it is not so common
to become strong after a trauma. Most people with such experience would
instead suffer from PTSD. That many survivors of a genocide or a situation
of slavery have been resilient and have been able to show their capability of
agency in such a context of survival is by no means a reason to consider as
‘weak’ the survivors who have not been able to show resilience.
5. Tabet (2005) has compared cases of sex trades for goods or money in different
tribes living in Africa and Southeast Asia, but also in Western society.
6. A procedural autonomy is more related to practices than to principles. For
example, consent by contact would be considered as a proof of agency (in a
legislative sense) despite a context that might morally force an individual to
accept the contract. A more substantial account of autonomy would, rather,
analyse the context of the consent.
7. This view of prostituted women was common at the time of Parent-Duchâtelet
(2008/1836), in the 19th century, when the hygienist philosophy was the only
answer to the behaviour of the ‘fallen women’. (Only some precursors of the
abolitionist movement at that time – such as Josephine Butler – questioned
the social inequalities at the root of prostitution.) More recently, Harold
Greenwald considered that women in prostitution have an ‘extreme type of
behaviour disorder’ (Greenwald, 1964/1958, 12–13).
8. The symbolic order refers to the imaginary world of a culture in many different
aspects, such as language, art, mythology, non-codified social norms, etc.
9. As Satz pointed out, ‘Many forms of labor, perhaps most, cede some control of
a person’s body to others. Such control can range from requirements to be in
a certain place at a certain time (e.g., reporting at the office), to requirements
that a person (e.g., a professional athlete) eat certain foods and get certain
amounts of sleep, or maintain good humor in the face of the offensive behav-
iour of others (e.g., airline stewardesses)’ (Satz, 1995, p. 73). If it were impos-
sible to change that coercive aspect of work, we could nonetheless consider
that we should fight against coercion in sexuality.
References
Anderson, Scott A. 2002. ‘Prostitution and sexual autonomy: Making sense of the
prohibition of prostitution’, Ethics, 112(4), 748–780.
Agustin, Laura. 2007. Sex at the Margin. London: Zed Books.
Agustin, Laura. 2011. ‘If This Were about Men, They Would Be Seen as Empowered:
Sex Selection, Sex Trafficking and Girls’. Available at: http://www.lauraagustin.
com/if-this-were-about-men-they-would-be-seen-as-empowered-sex-selection-
sex-trafficking-and-girls [Accessed 1 March 2012].
Chapkis, Wendy. 1997. Live Sex Acts: Women Performing Erotic Labor. New York:
Routledge.
Cowling, Mark and Paul Reynolds (eds) 2004. Making Sense of Sexual Consent.
Aldershot: Ashgate.
Doezema, Jo. 2001. ‘Ouch ! Western feminists’ “wounded attachment” to the
“third world prostitute”’, Feminist Review, 67, 16–38.
Farley, Melissa. 2003. ‘Prostitution and the invisibility of harm’, Women & Therapy,
26(3/4), 247–280.
Greenwald, Harold. 1964/1958. The Call Girl. New York: Ballantine Books.
Isaacs, Tracy. 2002. ‘Feminism and agency’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 28,
129–154.
Jeffreys, Sheila. 1997. The Idea of Prostitution. Melbourne: Spinifex.
Miriam, Kathy. 2005. ‘Stopping the traffic in women: Power, agency and aboli-
tion in feminist debates over sex-trafficking’, Journal of Social Philosophy, 36(1),
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Nussbaum, Martha C. 1999. Sex and Social Justice. New York: Oxford University
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Parent-Duchâtelet, Alexandre. 2008/1836. La prostitution à Paris au XIXe siècle.
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Pateman, Carole. 1988. The Sexual Contract. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University
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Primoratz, Igor. 2001. ‘Sexual morality: Is consent enough?’, Ethical Theory and
Moral Practice, 4, 201–218.
Raz, Joseph. 1986. The Morality of Freedom. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Roiphe, Katie. 1993. The Morning After: Sex, Fear and Feminism on Campus. Boston,
New York, Toronto, London: Little, Brown and Co.
Satz, Debra. 1995. ‘Market in women’s sexual labor’, Ethics, 106, 63–85.
Satz, Debra. 2010. ‘Ethics, economics, and markets: An interview with Debra
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Sullivan, Barbara. 2004. ‘Prostitution and Consent: Beyond the Liberal Dichotomy
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Paris: L’Harmattan.
Part II
Women as Perpetrators of
Violence
OPEN
4
Self-Harm as Violence: When
Victim and Perpetrator Are One
Hanna Pickard
Introduction
Violence is standardly defined as behaviour involving physical force

intended to hurt, damage or kill. There is no stipulation that the victim
and perpetrator cannot be identical. Indeed, The World Report on Violence
and Health is explicit that violence can be self-directed as well as other-di-
rected (Krug et al. 2002). Based on this inclusion, it is estimated that 50%
of all deaths due to violence are self-inflicted, with 35% due to homicide
and the remainder due to war or some other form of conflict (ibid.).
Yet, to pick two illustrative examples, not one of the 41 chapters in The
Cambridge Handbook of Violent Behaviour and Aggression addresses self-di-
rected violence (Flannery et al. 2007), while the International Handbook of
Violence Research devotes only one out of 62 chapters to suicide (Heitmeyer
and Hagan 2003). Such collections aim to be far reaching and compre-
hensive compilations of state-of-the-art research into violence. Why does
self-directed violence garner so little attention?
One natural answer to this question is that, despite the recognition
by the World Health Organization (WHO) that violence can be self-di-
rected, as a society we find it difficult to conceptualize self-harm and
suicide as violence at all. One reason for this difficulty may be that our
prototype of violence is other-directed. Think of violence, and the kinds
of images that immediately spring to mind are likely to include fights,
brawls, muggings, gang warfare, military warfare and perhaps sexual
violence and the domestic abuse of women and children. But reflection
on these images suggests a further reason for this difficulty, namely, that
our prototype of the violent perpetrator is male.
Men are, indeed, perpetrators of more other-directed violence than
women (Raine 2013). They are also almost twice as likely successfully
71
72 Hanna Pickard
to commit suicide than women (Krug et al. 2002). However, women

are significantly more likely to attempt suicide than men (MHF 2007;
Canetto and Sakinofsky 1998). The received explanation for this discrep-
ancy appeals to the lethality of the means typically chosen by men, such
as hanging, as opposed to women, such as overdosing (Canetto and
Sakinofsky 1998; Schrijvers 2012). In addition, although there is some
evidence that rates of male self-harm are rising (Kerr et al. 2010), women
appear significantly more likely to self-harm than men (NICE 2011). It
is estimated that five to six times as many adolescent girls self-harm as
compared to boys (Hawton et al. 2012), and rates of self-harm in prisons
in England and Wales are ten times higher for female than male inmates
(Hawton et al. 2014). Moreover, just as our prototype of other-directed
violence appears to be male, our prototype of self-harm appears to be
female. Think, for instance, of Girl Interrupted, the film adaptation of
Susanna Kaysen’s memoir of the same name, or of Elizabeth Wurtzel’s
account of self-harm in her autobiography Prozac Nation.
Hence, we may find it difficult to conceptualize self-harm and suicide
as violence, not only because it is self-directed but equally because, unlike
other-directed violence, it is associated in our society with women. As
feminist theorists since Simone de Beauvoir have documented with
painstaking detail, within contemporary culture, women are regarded
as ‘the gentle sex’ (de Beauvoir 1949 [1989]). Aggression and violence in
men is typically viewed as natural. Aggression and violence in women,
in contrast, is typically viewed as unnatural – a violation of our collec-
tive cultural archetype of the ideal woman as a loving, nurturing, mother
figure (Motz 2008).
This image of women as naturally non-aggressive and non-violent
arguably affects our understanding of violence. On the one hand, it may
bar us from recognizing the very existence of female-perpetrated other-
directed violence, making us blind to incidences in which women are
perpetrators. This tendency may be reinforced by the fact that most female
other-directed violence occurs in the private realm, directed towards
parents, partners and children, where it can more easily remain outside
of public view (Motz 2008). On the other hand, when we recognize the
existence of female-perpetrated violence of any form, the archetype of
the ideal woman as naturally non-aggressive and non-violent may cause
us to pathologize it. We may view violence in women, whether directed
towards self or towards others, as an indication of perversion, deviance
and sickness – an abomination of female nature.
Suicide and self-harm are indeed associated with mental health prob-
lems, and so easily pathologized (MHF 2007). Of course, both can and
Self-Harm as Violence 73
do occur outside of such contexts (Fincham et al. 2011). For instance,

suicide may be a rational and dignified end-of-life choice for those who
are terminally ill, or an act of political protest or moral or religious faith
(Holroyd, this volume; Marway, this volume). Self-mutilation and the
endurance of pain are a part of many religious, cultural and beautifica-
tion rituals (Favazza 1987). However, in the context of mental health
problems, an association between suicide and especially self-harm and
women may have a particularly strong impact on our understanding of
the nature of such behaviour. On the one hand, we may barely recog-
nize it as violence at all. For our cultural assumption is that women
are not violent. On the other hand, if we recognize it as violent, we
may pathologize it as the very epitome of irrationality – as hysterical,
emotional, incomprehensible behaviour. For, our cultural assumption is
that, if women are violent, they are sick.
My aim in this chapter is to challenge this conception of suicide and
especially self-harm, arguing that in central instances, it is on the one
hand straightforwardly a form of violence, and, on the other, no more
pathological than central instances of other-directed violence. Different
people self-harm for different reasons, but given a realistic under-
standing of the psycho-socio-economic context which women who self-
harm typically face, it emerges as fully comprehensible behaviour – an
instrumental means to ends that, given the context, we can understand
why women would have. In other words, self-harm emerges as a form
of, broadly speaking, rational agency. As Anna Motz eloquently puts one
component of this idea: ‘To deny female violence is to deny female
agency’ (Motz 2008, 71). But to pathologize female violence is also to
deny female humanity and rationality – to deny the way that aggression
can be as natural for women to feel as it is for men, and that violence in
women can function, as it does in men, not only to express aggression
but also to serve various ends that embody clear and recognizable goods.
This recognition is essential if we are to respond to self-directed violence
in ways that are both effective and ethically appropriate.
The paper is structured as follows. In the next section, I begin by
describing the nature of self-harm in order to establish, lest it be doubted,
that it is indeed a form of violence. I then compare self-directed and other-
directed violence, sketching the differences and similarities. Drawing on
epidemiological data, clinical understanding and first-person reports,
I outline the various functions self-harm has, revealing its meaning
through an understanding of the reasons why people do it. As already
noted, the psycho-socio-economic context in which self-harm typically
occurs is very important to this account. With this non-pathological
74 Hanna Pickard
understanding of self-harm as a form of violence in hand, I then turn in

the final section to issues of agency, responsibility and ethics, sketching
why and how we might hope to support and enable people to desist
from self-harm, within clinical contexts and also through social and
political agendas for change. I conclude by suggesting the need for a
cultural shift, whereby we acknowledge that anger, aggression and the
propensity for violence can exist in all of us, male and female, and so
work together to fashion a culture that is able to better acknowledge and
address this side of human nature.
Self-harm as violence
Self-harm, known also as self-injury, self-poisoning, self-mutilation and

parasuicide, is not easy to define. The WHO defines it as ‘an act with
non-fatal outcome, in which an individual deliberately initiates a non-
habitual behaviour that, without intervention from others, will cause
self-harm, or deliberately ingests a substance in excess of the prescribed
or generally recognised dosage’ (Kerkhof et al. 1994, 7). This defini-
tion aligns with common usage in its focus on the deliberate nature of
self-harm, but is unusual in its claim that self-harm is a ‘non-habitual
behaviour’ and will result in damage ‘without intervention from others’.
Self-harm is often a habit – a repetitive pattern of behaviour. Indeed,
some people self-harm daily. Moreover, it is unclear why an absence of
intervention by others is part of the definition at all – as if the possi-
bility of self-harm depends fundamentally on such non-intervention, as
opposed to depending fundamentally on the self-harmer’s own agency.
In stark contrast to the WHO definition, the UK National Institute
for Clinical Excellence defines self-harm as ‘self-poisoning or self-in-
jury, irrespective of the apparent purpose of the act’ (NICE 2004, 2011).
According to this definition, self-harm need not be deliberate. The moti-
vation for this removal of intent is in all likelihood a desire to accom-
modate forms of self-harm that stem from unconscious or unrecognized
motives or impulses, or that may be foreseeable but not directly intended.
This definition therefore widens the scope of self-harm so that it can
potentially include, for instance, anorexia and other eating disorders,
substance abuse, sexual behaviour that carries health risks or makes one
vulnerable to sexual abuse or violence, and even, arguably, actions like
getting into fights or playing contact sports, where there is significant
risk of physical damage even if that is not the apparent purpose of the
activity.1 However, according to this definition, even genuine accidents
that inadvertently result in self-injury but belie no unconscious motive
and could not have been foreseen will count as self-harm. The WHO
definition is too narrow, but the NICE definition is too wide.
Rather than focusing on defining self-harm, let us consider its central
instances. Prototypical forms of self-harm include cutting, scratching or
burning the skin; smashing one’s body parts with weapons or banging
them against walls; swallowing blades or sharp glass, or inserting them
under the skin or in orifices; overdosing on illicit drugs, alcohol or
prescribed medication, or ingesting poisons or toxic substances; tying
ligatures around one’s neck; or hanging oneself, shooting oneself or
throwing one’s body under trains, into oncoming traffic or off buildings.
Some of these behaviours, of course, can also be forms of suicide. Suicide
and self-harm can be distinguished in principle via intent: the intention
in suicide is to die, while the intention in self-harm is not to die, but
to damage or harm oneself. However, in reality the distinction between
them is often unclear, with people unsure as to what they intend, or
indifferent as to the outcome and reckless in method, so that self-harm
can commonly and knowingly risk death, even if death is not the clear
and conscious intention of the act. Indeed, self-harming behaviour is
associated with a 50–100-fold increase in risk of suicide compared to the
general population (NICE 2011).
Recall that violence is standardly defined as behaviour involving
physical force intended to hurt, damage or kill. Although some of these
prototypical forms of self-harm do not involve physical force, such as
overdosing or ingesting poisons, most do. In central instances, self-harm
is a form of behaviour directed at one’s own body, which uses physical
force to deliberately cause hurt and damage, if not death. Indeed, if we
imagine the actions prototypical of self-harm to be other-directed, the
violence inherent in them is palpable and shocking. As with the NICE
definition, we can choose to extend the idea of self-harm to behaviour
that is less direct in its means or less deliberate in its intention to cause
hurt or damage, by analogy with these central instances, if that would
serve a theoretical or clinical use. There are also potentially both theo-
retical and ethical reasons for widening the scope of violence, so that it
both includes psychological damage as an outcome and also recognizes
threats and exercises of power as nonphysical but yet violent means of
perpetrating hurt or damage, by coercively securing victim compliance
(Krug et al. 2002). But such caveats aside, central instances of self-harm
show that it is prototypically direct and deliberate behaviour involving
physical force inflicted by a person onto their own body with the inten-
tion of causing hurt or damage and even possibly risking death: it is
violence where victim and perpetrator are one.
76 Hanna Pickard
Why would any person, man or woman, do this to themselves? We

commonly assume that, if a person can act so as to avoid harm to them-
selves, they do. Arguably, this is a basic assumption of our culture’s
common sense or folk psychology – a reliable rule of thumb we use to
explain and predict behaviour. But people who self-harm do precisely the
opposite of this: they act to directly and deliberately harm themselves.
Those of us who do not self-harm or have personal or professional expe-
rience with those who do may lack the resources to make sense of it. We
may therefore find ourselves inclining to the view that the only way to
understand self-harm is as an expression of pathology and irrationality.
For, without an understanding of its functions, no sense can be made of
why any person would do this if they could help it. This line of thought
helps underwrite the conception of self-harm as hysterical, emotional,
incomprehensible behaviour – as if the self-directed violence typical of
women is a kind of sickness.
Understanding self-harm in women
To challenge this conception, it is useful to begin by comparing self-

harm in women with our prototype of male-perpetrated other-directed
violence. For it is not difficult for us to understand such other-directed
violence as serving various functions.2 In addition to the use of violence
as a direct means to procuring material goods, violence fulfils multiple
individual and interpersonal psychological purposes. Most straightfor-
wardly, especially male-on-male violence is often viewed as a natural
masculine expression of an equally natural masculine aggression,
stemming from emotions like anger or rage, arguably alongside fear
of shame and vulnerability. Such male-on-male violence is often glori-
fied in popular culture and the media, and may be part of the fabric of
an individual’s family and wider community, perhaps even necessary
to survival and success within it. Even those of us who view violence
as ethically unacceptable can understood the drive towards it, in the
grip of aggressive impulses and strong emotions, within families and
communities that endorse and expect it of men.
The ends served by other-directed violence include (but, of course, are
not restricted to) the following:
(1) Affect regulation. The expression, release and communication of

aggressive impulses and strong emotions, especially anger.
(2) Social and/or interpersonal dominance and/or control and the various
benefits it accrues, especially in conformity with cultural stere-
otypes of masculinity.
(3) Revenge. Retaliation/retribution towards those who have perpetrated

psychological and/or physical harm to the agent or someone they
care about.
(4) Protection from future harm. Violence can signal a willingness to
retaliate/seek retribution and so act as a deterrent, when directed
towards those who have perpetrated past harm or are threatening
to perpetrate future harm.
Other-directed violence that flows from strong emotions, like anger,

rage, shame and fear, is not typically the result of rational deliberation,
understood as a conscious, reflective process of weighing the costs and
benefits of various options, in order to decide what to do. But it is both
typically rational in the sense that it is an instrumental means to these
various ends, as well as subject to choice and a degree of control.3 The
evidence for this is the classic ‘policeman at the shoulder’ test. Consider,
for instance, a man who ‘sees red’ and routinely gets into conflicts and
resorts to violence – except when in view of a policeman. On such occa-
sions, he is highly motivated not to lash out, which he would other-
wise do, lest he be detained and charged with common assault. The
most natural understanding of this man’s behaviour is that he has
the capacity to choose not to be violent and control his aggression – a
capacity, of course, that he only exercises when sufficiently motivated
to do so. There is a basic, common-sense distinction between what a
person can do but won’t (because they don’t want to) as opposed to
what a person wants to do but can’t (because they lack the capacity). In
so far as other-directed violence is responsive to incentives, it appears to
be subject to choice and a degree of control. Exercising this capacity and
desisting from violence would therefore seem to be, in general, some-
thing people can do but sometimes don’t, as opposed to something they
want to do but can’t. Very broadly, this is why we are typically inclined
to view perpetrators of violence as rational agents whom it is appropriate
to hold responsible and to account.4
However, it is extremely important to recognize how difficult it may
be for people to exercise the capacity to desist from other-directed
violence, especially when it is culturally expected if not indeed glori-
fied, and in addition serves ends which, given the context and internal
and external resources available, people may lack genuine or perceived
alternative means of achieving. For example, insofar as other-directed
violence offers affect regulation – a way of releasing, communicating
and acting on strong emotions – refraining from it may require a person
to undergo emotional distress and bear feelings of, for example, extreme
anger, rage, anger, shame and fear, unless and until alternative ways of
78 Hanna Pickard
managing these strong emotions are learned. Men who have grown up in
a cultural context which supports male aggression and violence as a way
of managing emotions may have had little opportunity to learn other
ways of dealing with these feelings. If so, although they retain choice
and a degree of control when violent, we may yet feel these circum-
stances demand that we show them understanding and compassion,
and offer help with emotional management, even if we are not prepared
to excuse the violence. Equally, the general presumption that violence
is subject to choice and a degree of control may, of course, be defeated
in particular circumstances. Perhaps sometimes a person who ‘sees red’
becomes so angry that something ‘boils over’ or ‘snaps’ and choice and
control is lost – they are not then able to stop the flow driving them
towards violence. In such circumstances, if indeed a variety of compli-
cated conditions are met, we may feel that the person ought to be (at
least in part) excused, for they are not, in the moment, possessed of
rational agency, but driven by forces they cannot control.5 But impor-
tant as these caveats are, our basic cultural understanding of (especially
male-on-male) other-directed violence is that it is expressive of rational
agency: a means towards ends that are evidently desirable or valuable
in our cultural context, and, although driven by strong emotions, yet
subject to choice and a degree of control. No matter how much we may
deplore it, we have ample cultural and folk psychological resources to
make good sense of other-directed violence.
Although our cultural and folk psychological resources are less able to
help us make sense of self-directed violence, it in fact serves remarkably
similar ends to other-directed violence. Understanding its functions
requires in the first instance contextualizing the behaviour, by appreci-
ating the associated risk factors. These include (Hawton et al. 2012) the
following:
(1) Sociodemographic and educational factors: female sex; low socio-

economic status; lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender orienta-
tion; restricted educational achievement; exposure to self-directed
violence through peer group.
(2) Psychiatric and psychological factors: mental disorder, especially
personality disorder, depression, anxiety and ADHD; drug and
alcohol misuse; impulsivity; low self-esteem; poor social problem
solving; social isolation; perfectionism; hopelessness.
(3) Individual negative life events and family adversity: parental sepa-
ration, divorce, discord, mental disorder or death; family history
of suicide; interpersonal difficulties, especially childhood bullying;
adverse childhood experiences, including a history of physical and,
especially in women, sexual abuse.6
Women at risk of self-harm have typically come from underprivileged

backgrounds of poor opportunity, and may have sexual orientations
which make them vulnerable to ongoing social ostracization, discrimi-
nation, and violence. They are likely to have had difficult childhoods
without good family or peer relationships and support, during which
they may well have experienced emotional neglect, and physical and
especially sexual victimization and abuse. As adults, they may struggle
with mental health, and drug and alcohol problems, and have problems
with relationships. Their educational and employment opportunities
may be limited. And their self-esteem and self-worth are likely to be
poor. In addition, like men who have been brought up in communities
that fail to support nonviolent modes of male anger management, such
women are also unlikely to have had the opportunity to learn positive
ways of managing strong and difficult emotions and experiences during
childhood, and may therefore lack both inner and outer resources for
dealing effectively with them as adults.
Women who find themselves in this kind of psycho-socio-economic
context will, of course, have very many good reasons for feeling anger
and rage, both towards particular individuals and the world at large.
They may also be subject to the shame and fear that is often associated
with victimhood and sexual abuse in particular, and potentially to have
internalized the negative attitudes towards them such mistreatment
represents. Especially in a cultural context in which female aggression
and violence are deemed unnatural, women cannot easily express or
communicate their anger, rage or negative self-directed attitudes, or act
publicly on their aggressive impulses, without violating gender expec-
tations and norms. They may, therefore, turn these impulses inward
onto their own bodies, enacting them in a private realm in which they
can be kept hidden from public view.
It is important to emphasize that people self-harm for different reasons,
but clinical understanding and patient self-reports reveal self-harm as
serving at least six ends that, with this psycho-socio-economic back-
ground in mind, help explain why people engage in this behaviour.7
Self-directed ends of self-harm:
(1) Affect regulation. Like violence towards others, self-harm is a way

of managing strong emotions, perhaps especially anger, rage and
shame. It can offer relief in various ways: by distracting from
emotional pain by replacing it with physical pain and/or releasing
endorphins; by providing a way of expressing, releasing and acting
on anger and aggression; or, in contrast, by allowing people to feel
something in the face of dissociation and emotional numbing. In
80 Hanna Pickard
other words, self-harm can offer short-term relief from negative

emotional experience of various forms: it is a coping mechanism.
(2) Self-punishment. Women who have internalized the negative attitudes
towards them represented by a history of mistreatment typically have
extremely low self-esteem and self-worth, and often at some level
believe they are bad and deserve to be harmed. Self-harm can be both
expressive of and explained by such negative self-directed attitudes.
Other-directed ends of self-harm:
(3) Communication. Self-harm can be a way of communicating internal

distress by symbolizing emotions in concrete, physical form: ‘the
public expression of ... private pain’ (Adshead 1997, 11). People who
come from backgrounds of psycho-socio-economic adversity may
struggle to identify and talk about their feelings. Self-harm offers a
powerful way of demonstrating what they are going through, and,
potentially, thereby seeking care and help.
(4) Other-punishment. It is natural, for women as much as for men, to
feel anger and rage, and want to be aggressive and violent, towards
those who have harmed either them or those whom they care
about. Self-harm can offer a safe way of expressing such emotions
and impulses, when violence towards others is deemed unaccept-
able. This function of self-harm correlates with the experience of
being attacked that self-harm can provoke in others, as it becomes
like a symbolic weapon, turning anger towards others inwards on
the self, while yet communicating this anger to them.
Self-directed and other-directed ends of self-harm:
(5) Control. Self-harm can create a sense of empowerment and control

by establishing ownership over one’s own body in face of the experi-
ence of being helpless and violated. This function may be especially
important for those with a history of childhood physical and sexual
abuse. For people whose bodies have been harmed by others, it can be
an act both of reclaiming their body and, to use Anna Freud’s concept
(1936 [1992]) of identification with the perpetrator, establishing that
it is they, and no one else, who now has dominance and control.
A desire for death:
(6) The continuum with suicide. When associated with mental health
problems, the desire to kill oneself is typically understood as
expressive of hopelessness and despair – a desire for permanent

escape from the suffering of living. In contrast, self-harm offers
short-term relief, and hence, as Anna Motz has eloquently argued,
can be seen instead as an act of hope (Motz 2009b) – an affirmation
of life. However, as already noted in the previous section, although
the idea of suicide is distinguished from self-harm by nature of
intent – to die rather than to do harm or damage – in reality the
distinction between them is often unclear. Self-harm regularly and
knowingly risks death, due to indifference or recklessness, even if it
does not clearly and consciously aim at it.
Self-harm is a response to psycho-socio-economic adversity and trauma,

in a cultural context in which aggression and violence in women – what
we might in men consider a natural response to such adversity and
trauma – is deemed unnatural. Within this context, self-harm can func-
tion as a means to ends we can understand why women would have, such
as feeling relief from anger, rage, shame and negative emotional expe-
riences more generally, expressing and communicating, seeking care,
attacking or punishing those perceived to have done wrong (including
themselves, via internalization of the negative attitudes expressed
through their past mistreatment), and gaining a sense of power and
control in the face of feelings of helplessness and violation.
Like other-directed violence that flows from strong emotions, self-
directed violence is not typically the result of rational deliberation.
But it is typically both rational in the sense that it is an instrumental
means to these various ends, as well as subject to choice and a degree
of control. The evidence for this, again as with other-directed violence,
is that, despite the extreme difficulty in desisting from self-directed
violence, especially in the absence of genuine or perceived alternative
means of achieving the various ends it fulfils, women who self-harm
may choose not to do so when self-harm would conflict with other ends
they value more. To take a common example, the classic ‘policeman at
the shoulder test’ can here be transposed to a ‘child at the shoulder test’
when, for instance, women who self-harm ensure that their children
never witness their self-directed violence, out of care and concern for
the impact it would have on them. Another kind of example regularly
occurs when women stop ‘cold turkey’ as a condition of joining a therapy
group, much along the model of support groups for addiction, such as
Alcoholics Anonymous.8 Hence self-directed violence in women, like
other-directed violence in men, is not an expression of pathology but
an expression, at least in good part, of rational agency: a means to ends
82 Hanna Pickard
we can understand why women who have suffered adversity, trauma

and abuse would have, and subject to choice and a degree of control.
Consider, in this light, the following first-person report:
I needed to kill something in me, this awful feeling like worms

tunneling along my nerves. So when I discovered the razor blade,
cutting, if you’ll believe me, was my gesture of hope. All the chaos,
the sound and fury, the confusion and uncertainty and despair – all
of it evaporated in an instant and I was for that minute grounded,
coherent, whole. Here is the irreducible self. I drew the line in the
sand, marked my body as mine, its flesh and its blood under my
command.9
It is a harrowing indictment of our society that women suffer such adver-

sity, trauma and abuse, and are possessed of so few genuine or perceived
alternative options, that they choose to be violent towards themselves as
a way of coping with and expressing their experience. Unlike violence
towards others, we do not typically view self-directed violence as morally
wrong, nor, since the legalization of suicide, is it criminalized.10 But it
does violate a basic tenet of any broadly liberal society, which is that
respect and equality are ideally due to all persons, irrespective of who
they are.11 The very universality of this tenet means that, from each of
our perspectives, it must apply not only to others but also to ourselves.
Women who self-harm seem not to treat themselves with the respect
and equality that, given this ethical outlook, they along with all other
persons are due. Situating self-harm within its psycho-socio-economic
context can help explain why women treat themselves and their bodies
with such disregard and brutality: part of the explanation is that this may
be how they and their bodies have been treated by others. Effectively and
ethically addressing self-harm therefore has two interwoven facets. One
facet looks to the rational agency of the self-harmer herself, and the need
to support and empower her to choose self-care over self-harm. The other
facet looks to the context of suffering, adversity and oppression in which
women are situated, and the need to change the ways they are treated in
wider society and the options available to them.
Agency, ethics, and the validation and tolerance of anger
Alongside the tendency to pathologize self-harm and deny the self-

harmer’s rational agency is a corresponding tendency to treat her only as
a victim, helpless and out of control, possibly rendered hysterical by her
emotions. But women who self-harm are rational agents of self-directed

violence – they are not only victims. Effective clinical interventions and
other forms of interpersonal engagement aimed at self-harm cessation
must acknowledge that women who self-harm do so for reasons, and
have choice. For they need to exercise their control and choose to do
things differently in order to stop – by deciding to resist the desire to
self-harm, find alternative ways to fulfil the ends it serves, and, in addi-
tion, question and challenge some of the more self-denigrating ends
self-harm may serve and express. When the desire to self-harm is present
and the behaviour habitual, cessation almost invariably requires the
exercise of rational agency: broadly speaking, women must choose self-
care over self-harm.
But clinical interventions that acknowledge a person’s rational agency
inevitably carry a risk. In this case, the risk is that in acknowledging
and working with women as agents of self-harm, clinicians may end
up judging and blaming the self-harmer for her actions, and experi-
encing or expressing a range of critical, negative attitudes and emotions.
Despite the fact that self-harm is neither criminalized nor intuitively
viewed as morally wrong, it is, after all, a form of violence, and it can
have a profound impact on other people, especially when it is perceived
as an expression of anger and rage, or a symbolic attack. Rational agency
carries the (defeasible) assignment of responsibility, and it can be an
easy slide from an acknowledgement of agency and (potentially) respon-
sibility, to blaming attitudes and emotions, such as disapproval, dislike,
rejection, contempt, disgust and anger – as if ‘the problem’ lies funda-
mentally with the self-harmer herself.
To be effective, clinical engagement must acknowledge agency and
(potentially) responsibility, while at the same time avoiding blame and
maintaining care, concern and respect for women who self-harm. A
blaming atmosphere is likely to re-enact and reinforce past mistreatment
and its impact on women, destroying the possibility of building trust
and understanding. In contrast, a stable environment that maintains
care, concern and respect potentially offers women a corrective experi-
ence, ideally helping them overcome the impact of past mistreatment
on their self-esteem and self-worth, through therapeutic relationships
that validate them and their experiences, and consistently and authen-
tically show compassion and positive regard. In such environments,
women may feel supported and empowered to stop self-harming, and
embark on a process of freeing themselves from past mistreatment and
learning new ways of managing feelings and caring for themselves.12
Given the extent of past mistreatment, this may be a long and painful
84 Hanna Pickard
process, requiring women to have the courage to face traumatic aspects

of their past in order to develop a narrative understanding of its impact
on their present, thereby enabling them to identify patterns and make
changes to improve their lives.13
There are many features of the clinical environment that help avoid
any inclination to blame that may arise, and to maintain care, concern
and respect. In this regard, it is undoubtedly crucial that the basic clin-
ical aim is to help patients, and that this aim structures clinical prac-
tices, roles and relationships, shaping a culture of care. But this culture
is also aided by an awareness of the psycho-socio-economic past and
present context of women who self-harm. Attention to this context is
necessary in any case to the development of a narrative understanding
of the person and to the facilitation of realistic change. But it also acts
as an antidote to any inclination to blame, undercutting it directly by
situating self-harm in relation to underprivileged psych-socio-economic
contexts, and thereby forcing it to exist alongside the attitudes and
emotions that recognition of such inequality and injustice engenders.
For ‘the problem’ does not lie fundamentally with the self-harmer
herself, but with the context of suffering, adversity and oppression in
which women who self-harm are typically situated.14
Alongside supporting and empowering women to choose self-care
over self-harm, effectively and ethically addressing self-harm there-
fore requires challenging psycho-socio-economic contexts that harm
women. The basic tenet of any broadly liberal society, that respect
and equality are ideally due to all persons irrespective of who they are,
supports this wider social and political agenda for change for people of
all genders: we must address suffering, adversity and oppression. Such
an agenda for change may be preventive with respect to self-harm on a
large scale: associations are not the same as causes, but nonetheless, we
should expect that addressing some of the known risk factors may have
an impact on rates of self-harm. But it is also important for enabling
individual women who self-harm to successfully stop: clinical interven-
tions are significantly less likely to be effective if women leave clinical
contexts only to return to psycho-socio-economic contexts in which
they are again subjected to inequality and injustice, and which therefore
re-enact and reinforce precisely the mind-set and habits that clinical
interventions aim to change.
Hence, effectively and ethically addressing self-harm, as well arguably
as other-directed violence, requires working with individuals alongside
working to change wider social and political systems. But I want to
conclude by briefly commenting on how, at a broad cultural level, what
needs to change may include our cultural attitudes towards anger with
respect to both men and women: it may not only be inequality and
injustice that need to be addressed, but also our tendency to condemn
and suppress people’s emotions.
In contemporary culture, anger is viewed as natural in men, but so
too is aggression and violence – indeed, there may be few non-aggres-
sive and non-violent socially acceptable models of behaviour avail-
able to men to deal with angry feelings. For women, in contrast, anger
itself – never mind the aggression and violence it can prompt – may be
treated as unnatural and indeed unacceptable: anger may be thought
‘unbecoming’ in ‘the gentle sex’. An alternative and opposing cultural
outlook maintains that anger – no doubt alongside other difficult
emotions, such as shame and fear – and the aggression and violence
it drives is natural for all people of all genders, especially when we
find ourselves in contexts where we have been harmed. If that harm
is perpetrated by others through mistreatment, neglect of our needs,
outright violation and abuse, or other forms of disrespect, subjugation
or inequality, we may feel angry and want to be aggressive or violent
towards the perpetrators. If the harm is more a product of bad luck
or wider social and political circumstances, lacking an identifiable and
responsible agent, we may yet feel angry and want to be aggressive and
violent in a more inchoate or undirected way, and understandably so.
Either way, anger and the propensity for aggression and violence are
natural human responses to harm and wrongdoing – found in people
of all genders equally.
But in addition to differential treatment of men and women, contem-
porary culture seems also to fail in general to draw a clear distinction,
with respect to all people, between anger and other difficult emotions on
the one hand, and the behaviour that these emotions can drive on the
other. In men, anger, aggression and violence may be accepted, but all
equally condemned as wrong. In women, anger, aggression and violence
are not accepted but culturally suppressed, as well as condemned as
wrong. But an alternative and opposing cultural outlook maintains
that, to the contrary, with respect people of all genders, there is nothing
wrong with feeling angry or indeed feeling any other difficult emotion –
even if it is indeed often wrong to act aggressively or violently.
This alternative outlook is in fact realized in clinical and other
contexts that are designed to heal wounds or resolve conflicts: the need
to acknowledge, validate and tolerate anger and other difficult emotions
is recognized as crucial, in order to enable people who have been harmed
to feel respected, cared for, and that their experience of suffering or
86 Hanna Pickard
mistreatment is recognized and taken seriously by others.15 So too, as

part of a process of validation and tolerance, is providing people with
authentic means of expression, communication and action in relation to
such feelings, as alternatives to aggression and violence.16 Contemporary
culture notwithstanding, the existence of such contexts and practices
establishes that it is possible for people to speak their anger and show
how they feel, without resorting to aggression and violence. Especially
when situated within psycho-socio-economic contexts of suffering and
oppression, anger is understandable and legitimate. Perhaps if anger and
other difficult emotions were better validated and tolerated in our wider
culture, with respect to people of all genders, it would be more possible
for all of us to find means of expressing, communicating and acting on
our feelings, such that we resorted to violence – whether other-directed
and self-directed – less.17
Notes
1. It is both interesting and potentially clinically useful to consider whether these
latter sorts of behaviours represent ways in which men are able to self-harm
in our culture, under the more socially accepted masculine guise of other-
directed aggression and violence. Fight Club, the film adaptation of Chuck
Palahniuk’s novel of the same name, arguably presents male fighting in this
light.
2. It is important to distinguish what has been labelled ‘reactive’ or ‘hot’ violence,
from what has been labelled ‘instrumental’ or ‘cold and calculating’ violence
and which is associated with psychopathy. For discussion of this distinction
and the empirical data supporting it, see e.g. Blair et al. 2005, Howell 2009,
and Raine 2013. My focus in this article is on ‘reactive’ or ‘hot’ violence as
opposed to psychopathic violence. However, the labelling is unfortunate, as
reactive violence is also instrumental, in the sense of serving various functions
or ends, as discussed above.
3. For an important discussion of the difference between rational deliberation
and choice, see Holton 2006. Pickard 2015 offers a more detailed discus-
sion of deliberation and choice in self-directed and other-directed violence
committed by people with personality disorder, in relation to both mental
health and criminal law.
4. For further discussion of this form of argument, especially in relation to the
nature of addiction on the one hand, and personality disorder, and criminal
law on the other, see Pickard 2012, 2013a, 2013b, and 2015.
5. Holton and Schute 2007 draw on philosophy and psychology to understand
the nature of loss of control and link it to the older defence of provocation in
English law. Although this defence was abolished and replaced with a loss of
self-control defence under The Coroners and Justice Act 2009 Sections 54–6,
which widens the emotions relevant to the defence, Holton and Schute’s
discussion of the philosophy and psychology is yet relevant. See too Horder
2005 for discussion of the role of fear alongside anger in loss of self-control.
6. Note that a history of childhood physical abuse is associated with other-

directed violence in men, while a history of childhood sexual abuse is associ-
ated with self-directed violence in women (Waxman et al. 2013).
7. See Motz 2009a for an excellent recent collection of articles about self-harm,
particularly in relation to forensic contexts. See too Motz 2008, especially
chapter 6, and the NICE Guidelines 2011 for longer-term management of
self-harm. There are also an increasing number of patient self-reports avail-
able online and in medical textbooks and guidelines. Hawton et al. 2012 is
a comprehensive review of medical and social science studies of self-harm
in adolescents. See Klonsky 2007 for a review of the evidence outlining the
functions of self-harm.
8. For discussion, see Pickard 2013a and 2013b.
9. First-person report, quoted in Motz 2009a, 47.
10. Interestingly, the claim that self-harm is not morally wrong can be found
within the philosophical literature on ethics. Cf. Pritchard: ‘It may be noted
that if the badness of pain were the reason why we ought not to inflict pain
on another, it would equally be a reason why we ought not to inflict pain
on ourselves; and yet, though we should allow the wanton infliction of pain
on ourselves to be foolish, we should not think of describing it as wrong’
(1912 [1949], 5). Cf. too Slote: ‘ordinary moral thinking seems to involve an
asymmetry regarding what an agent is permitted to do to himself and what
he is permitted to do to others. If one can easily prevent someone else’s pain,
it is typically thought wrong not to do so, but not to avoid similar pain in
oneself ( ... or indeed, to inflict it we might add ... ) is only lazy, crazy, or sense-
less, not wrong’ (1984, 181). Note that, in addition to denying the immo-
rality of self-harm, both these philosophers also characterize it – in keeping
with its conception as pathological or sick – as foolish, crazy, and senseless.
11. For the classic statement of this liberal position, see Dworkin 1977 and 1985.
12. For a classic discussion of the principles of working effectively with self-
harm, see Tantum and Whittaker 1993. Lawday 2009 and Grocutt 2009 are
excellent discussions of self-harm cessation in secure settings, applicable to
non-secure settings too. The NICE Guidelines 2004 and 2011 as well as Wood
et al. 2014 also offer invaluable resources.
13. For discussion of the role of narrative in effective therapeutic processes, see
Pickard 2014.
14. For further discussion of the distinction between responsibility and blame,
in theory and in practice, alongside other themes of this section see Pickard
2011 and 2013b, and Lacey and Pickard 2013. The importance of psycho-
socio-economic context is also emphasized by feminist theories of relational
autonomy, which argue that in such conditions, autonomy is impaired. Stoljar
2014 offers an excellent survey of the extensive literature; see Benson 1994
and Govier 1993 for discussions particularly relevant to issues arising in rela-
tion to self-harm, because of their focus on how oppression impacts on self-
worth and self-trust, understood as a precondition of autonomy. However, to
grant that such conditions impair autonomy does not change the fact that,
from a pragmatic perspective, effective means of addressing self-harm need
to work with the self-harmer’s own rational agency as well as acknowledging
and addressing psycho-socio-economic context. For irrespective of the impact
of these conditions on autonomy, they do not nullify rational agency, which
88 Hanna Pickard
is therefore a powerful and essential resource for women who self-harm, as it

is for others who are subject to oppression of various forms.
15. Important non-clinical examples arguably include some forms of Restorative
Justice Congress as well as the South African Truth and Reconciliation
Commission. For discussion of the role of emotions in restorative justice
practices, see Rossner 2013.
16. The non-violent communication skills developed by Marshall Rosenberg
and used for conflict resolution, mediation and peacekeeping constitute an
internationally recognized example of such a practice. Rosenberg has written
many books describing the techniques and benefits of non-violent commu-
nication, but for an introduction which relates it in particular to the valida-
tion and toleration of anger, see his 2005.
17. I am grateful to Anna Motz, Ian Phillips and Amia Srinivasan for discussion
of the themes of this paper. This research is funded by the Wellcome Trust
[grant number 090768].
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5
Autonomy, Value and Violence:
Assessing Substantive Accounts
of Autonomy
Jules Holroyd
Introduction
In this chapter, I aim to consider the question of the autonomy of women

who perpetrate violence, in particular, women who have committed or
tried to commit suicide bombing attacks. My focus will be on Palestinian
women who have carried out such violence against Israeli targets. One
question we might have about the women’s choices is whether or not
they are autonomous. According to one account of autonomy, such
choices are not autonomous. I will argue that this does not do justice to
the diversity of circumstances under which women exercise agency in
perpetrating violence.
In doing so I also aim to articulate and assess the structure of substan-
tive accounts of autonomy. These accounts of autonomy place constraints
on what can be autonomously chosen: choices which are informed by
certain norms cannot be autonomous. These accounts stand in contrast
to content-neutral accounts which maintain that anything can, in prin-
ciple, be autonomously chosen – what matters is that certain procedural
conditions on choice are met. Feminist philosophers have argued that a
substantive account must be endorsed in order to make sense of intui-
tions concerning women’s compromised autonomy under conditions of
oppression (Stoljar 2000. See also Hill Jnr 1991, Baron 1985).
By drawing on and critically evaluating the analysis of these women’s
choices advanced by Friedman (2008), Ness (2008), Schweitzer (2008) and
Berko and Erez (2008), I will assess whether substantive accounts are defen-
sible. In so doing, the aim is also to bring to light the complexity of the
conditions in which these women’s choices are made, and the difficulties
91
92 Jules Holroyd
of coming to an adequate understanding of them. I will conclude that

substantive accounts have problematic implications; they do not posit
defensible conditions for autonomy, and may serve to reinforce the prob-
lematic view that women who perpetrate violence lack agency.
Palestinian women perpetrating terror attacks
In this section, I set out some of the recent findings, including from
interviews, about the conditions in and motivations with which some
Palestinian women have chosen to commit terrorist attacks.
The terror attacks undertaken by Palestinian women against Israeli
civilian targets have taken place in the context of ongoing and violent
disputes over the territorial rights of the state of Israel and the Palestinian
peoples. Viewing the Israeli presence as an unjustified occupation, some
Palestinian groups have employed strategies of terrorism in furtherance
of various ends: to end the perceived occupation; to establish a self-
determining Palestinian state; to exact vengeance upon Israeli citizens;
to draw national and international attention to their cause (Friedman
2008, 47; Schweitzer 2008, 138) to defend against existential threat; to
prompt Israeli citizens to question the policies of the Israeli government
(Kapitan 2008, 26–27).
Both fundamentalist religious groups (such as Hamas) and secular
groups (such as Al-Aqsua Martyr’s Brigade) have orchestrated terror attacks
against Israeli citizens (Friedman 2008, 48–49, Berko and Erez 2008, 153).
The conservative norms surrounding gender in Palestinian society in
general, and in some fundamentalist political groups involved in terror
attacks, have shaped women’s participation in political activities and in
terrorist activities. Women have often been involved in supporting roles,
rather than orchestration of or participation in political activity (Ness
2008, 26).1 This also means that women who have sought to become
involved in terrorist activities have often had to act contrary to prevailing
gender norms. Ness writes that ‘in cultures where gender roles are tradi-
tional, it is that much more incumbent on women and girls to improvise
techniques by which they can carry out their missions’ (p. 15).
In Palestine, the norms surrounding women’s participation in polit-
ical campaigns and terrorist missions somewhat changed in 2002, when
Yasser Arafat (then leader of the political group Fatah) emphasized the
equality of women and men in the Palestinian struggle, calling up an
‘army of roses that will crush Israeli tanks’ (Victor 2003, 19). On that
same day, Wafa Idris, on behalf of Al-Aqsa Martyr’s Brigade, became the
first successful woman to execute a suicide bombing, killing one and
Autonomy, Value and Violence 93
injuring many Israeli civilians in the city of Jerusalem (Victor 2003, 19;
Friedman 2008, 50). Although commentators focused on this attack as
pivotal in women’s participation in such acts of violence, in fact prior to
that date, women had participated in terrorist activities. Ness writes that
‘women had been used by Palestinian terrorist organisations during the
Second Intifada to support suicide attacks by men’ (p. 26). Nonetheless,
since 2002 women’s participation in terror attacks, including as suicide
bombers, has increased (Ness 2008, 26).
In writings about these women’s choices to participate in these attacks,
scholars have emphasized the difficulties that women face as women in a
society strongly structured around gender hierarchy. In some instances,
authors have identified cases in which women seemed clearly to be
coerced by others into undertaking suicide attacks. Norms concerning
obedience to the male authority figures in one’s family, and the lack of
opportunities for self-sufficiency for women in Palestinian society make
some women particularly vulnerable to coercion. Berko and Erez (2008)
highlight the case of one woman who was unsuccessful in her suicide
bombing mission, and who in subsequent interviews reported that ‘she
felt they [her family] pushed her to become a suicide bomber (the explo-
sive belt was placed on her body in her parents’ presence at the family’s
home)’ (p. 152).
In other cases, despite the absence of overt coercion, authors have
emphasized the prevalence of oppressive gender norms: norms which
restrict women’s movements, the contact they have with each other
and with other men, and limit opportunities for self-sufficiency. These
daily restrictions, women’s relative powerlessness, their recruitment
and training by male activists, combined with the traumatic events
that sometimes precede women’s engagement with radical groups, have
been identified as considerations that prompt doubt over whether such
choices are made autonomously (see especially Friedman 2008, 57, and
Victor 2003, 41). For example, Friedman draws on testimony to the
effect that Wafa Idris ‘“had no future” and was “the ultimate shahida
[martyr]”: “a talented young woman, married and divorced because
she was sterile, desperate because she knew perfectly well there was no
future for her in any aspect of the Palestinian society”’ (Friedman, 52,
drawing on an interview reported in Victor).
However, in other cases still, there is reason to suppose that women
exercised a considerable degree of agency in deciding to undertake
suicide bombing missions, and did so voluntarily. Further interviews
with women who have embarked upon suicide missions but failed in
them (either due to a change of heart or detection and arrest) suggest
94 Jules Holroyd
that there is in fact a wide range of circumstances that precede women’s

engagement in such missions. In at least some cases, duress and coercion
did not seem to play a role in the choices, at least according to the first-
personal accounts given of the reasons for so acting. Rather, significant
voluntary agency appears to have been exercised in pursuing actions
regarded as expressive of authentic values (and recall Ness’s point that,
in contexts of gendered and traditional norms, women have to be quite
innovative in embarking on and completing their missions).
For example, Berko and Erez (2008) write of four women who were
active in seeking out participation in suicide missions:
the women who volunteered first expressed their interest to a friend

or an acquaintance, requesting that they find ways to make contact
with organizations that engage in suicide bombing. Once the connec-
tion was made, the women tried to convince the organization’s repre-
sentatives that they were committed to the cause and should be taken
seriously. In three cases, the representatives first refused or hesitated
to accept the volunteering women; the initial decline of the offer was
because they did not want a female ... or due to the woman’s young
age. (p. 155)
They also report on one woman who explained,
I reached the decision to become a suicide bomber on my own. Had I

told it to anyone [in the family] they would have prevented me from
doing it. This is why I preferred not to tell anyone. (p. 157)
Summing up, Berko and Erez (2008) note that ‘by and large, the inter-
viewees who volunteered to become suicide bombers were pleased with
their decision to become martyrs’ (p. 157).
We can see, then, that according to self-reports on the reasons for
engaging in such missions, there are considerable differences in the
deliberative processes and reasons for so acting, the extent to which the
women endorsed their choices, and in the degree of voluntariness the
women had with respect to their actions. What might we say about the
autonomy of these choices?
Ground clearing
In this section, I clarify the notion of autonomy at issue, and what is

at stake in the claim that an individual’s choice is or is not autono-
mous. Firstly, the focus is on a particular choice, rather than the person
as a whole (whether she is an autonomous agent). An individual can

be an autonomous agent but on occasion make non-autonomous
choices. Second, it is worth noting that the term ‘autonomy’ is here
concerned with personal autonomy. This is in contrast to a notion of
political autonomy, which is concerned with agency relevant to public
participation or citizenship, and the extent to which agents’ choices
and conceptions of the good should be respected and protected from
interference.
There are two reasons for this focus. Firstly, it is clear that, given the
lethal intent of individuals choosing suicide terror attacks, it is legiti-
mate to interfere with and thwart those choices. So our focus must rather
be on the question of whether such choices could ever be regarded as
autonomous in the personal autonomy, or authenticity, sense, that is,
in the sense of whether the choice is really ‘the agent’s own’. Secondly,
in the context of evaluating substantive accounts, our focus should be
on personal autonomy. Christman (2004) has argued that it is inappro-
priate to posit substantive conditions for autonomous choice for polit-
ical autonomy. This is because, he claims, in restricting the scope of
autonomous choices to those that are informed by a particular value,
political procedures and decisions that should, in a liberal democracy, be
value neutral are in fact constrained by a set of values.
I think Christman’s concern is a legitimate one. But it will not trouble
those proponents of substantive accounts who aim to articulate condi-
tions for personal autonomy, in the sense of non-alienation or authen-
ticity. For example, Marina Oshana writes that
it is not personal autonomy that is the subject of the liberal’s concern

as Christman presents it, but autonomy of some other (political)
variety ... But accounts of political autonomy are generally too thin to
illuminate a full account of self- determination. Personal autonomy
is a marker of one of a wider range of lifestyles political liberalism
accommodates, but there may be politically autonomous agents who
fail to be personally autonomous. (Oshana 2006, p. 102)
By focusing on personal autonomy (which articulates a fuller account

of self-determination), it is possible to maintain that the incorporation
of values into the account of autonomy is not problematic for the polit-
ical reasons that Christman articulates.
That such accounts are not primarily concerned with political
autonomy does not mean they are politically irrelevant. The diagnosis
of certain choices as non-autonomous could have political implications,
in terms of the kinds of resources directed towards helping individuals
96 Jules Holroyd
make autonomous choices (especially if we think personal autonomy

an important component of welfare, or something that states ought
to promote). And as mentioned, it will be important in understanding
more adequately the context in which choices are made – a matter of
great importance in the case of the choices made by the Palestinian
women who choose to undertake lethal terror attacks.
Content-neutral versus substantive conditions

for autonomy
In this section, I set out and consider the applicability of content-neu-

tral, and then substantive, accounts of autonomous choice to these
women’s choices.
Content-neutral conditions
In at least one of the cases described above – the case in which the
woman reports being coerced by her family to undertake the suicide
mission – it is quite clear that such coercive conditions undermine
personal autonomy: they seem paradigmatic of the kinds of circum-
stances or causes that leave an individual feeling manipulated or trapped
or alienated from her choice.
These kinds of autonomy-hindering factors are well captured by
content-neutral (or ‘procedural’) accounts of autonomy, which place
conditions on the way in which choices are made. Some of these accounts
incorporate ‘historical’ conditions, which demand that the deliberation
was carried out in a certain way, or that the agent’s preferences were
formed in a certain way. For example, they might require procedural
independence in deliberation (Dworkin 1988), or that the agent’s pref-
erences are formed in a way that she would endorse (Christman 1991).
Other sorts of content-neutral accounts are ‘structural’, requiring that
the agent’s choice fits into her overall motivational structure in a certain
way. For example, such conditions might require that she wholeheart-
edly endorses the choice (Frankfurt 1988) or that it coheres with her
values (Watson 1975).
On either of these kinds of content-neutral accounts, anything could
in principle be chosen, so long as the content-neutral conditions speci-
fied are met. In cases such as the one described above, in which the
woman was coerced into undertaking a suicide bombing mission, we are
in a position to diagnose such choices as non-autonomous. Conditions
pertaining to procedural independence, or endorsement of choice, are
not met.
Substantive conditions
What of the second case I described, of Wafa Idris, in which, according
to analyses, her choice was guided by restrictive norms, although there
is no mention of explicit coercion (indeed, some reports suggest that
Idris undertook the attack under her own initiative; she had been
recruited only to convey the device to another individual (Schweitzer
2008, 135)?2 Would such content-neutral conditions identify Wafa Idris’
choice as non-autonomous? We might notice that the description of the
conditions under which her choice was made are at least structurally
similar to those discussed by Natalie Stoljar, and which motivate her to
endorse a substantive account of autonomy. So let us consider in more
detail the case that Stoljar makes for endorsing a substantive condition
for autonomy, and then consider whether similar claims might apply to
the case in hand.
Stoljar’s case for substantive conditions3

Stoljar (2000) focuses on contexts in which oppressive norms alter the
costs of certain options. Her discussion is concerned with choices about
contraceptive risks taken by women interviewed at an abortion clinic in
California in the 1970s. Their choices to take contraceptive risks were
made in the context of norms such as ‘women ought not to be sexually
active’; ‘women ought not plan for and initiate sex’; ‘women’s value
is dependent upon their reproductive capacities’ (paraphrased from
Stoljar 2000, 99). Stoljar identifies these norms as ‘false and oppressive’
(p. 99). They are clearly oppressive, aiming to shape women’s behaviour
by perpetuating false and denigratory views about the value of their
personhood. Stoljar’s claim is that, given these problematic norms and
the attendant social costs of accessing contraception, a woman who
decides not to seek contraceptive advice or access such services, and
rather chooses to take contraceptive risks, may well be making a choice
that is in fact rational.
As she describes it, the women’s choices to take risks meet content-
neutral conditions for autonomy: their deliberation is conducted with
procedural independence; they endorse their choices; they endorse the
processes by which their preferences are formed (which are not dissim-
ilar from the way that other preferences or choices are formed, namely,
normal processes of socialization). If we think that the choices are
problematic (if we share Stoljar’s ‘feminist intuition’), then we should
conclude that this is because the choice is informed by norms that are
false and oppressive. If we are troubled by such choices, then, Stoljar
claims, ‘we need to endorse a substantive rather than a procedural
98 Jules Holroyd
account of autonomy’.4 Substantive accounts of autonomy require that

the agent’s choice is guided by ‘relevant normative considerations’, and
not by ‘false or misguided norms’ (Stoljar 2000, 94). Thus the positing of
substantive conditions for autonomy is deemed the only way of making
sense of intuitions about autonomy.5
Wafa Idris’ choice and substantive conditions

We can see the structural similarity of Stoljar’s description of these
women’s choices with the descriptions of the conditions in which Wafa
Idris made her choice to become a suicide bomber. Given the circum-
stances in which she found herself, her options were structured by
oppressive gender norms, such as ‘women ought not to dishonor their
families’, ‘women’s value is dependent upon their reproductive capaci-
ties’, and ‘domestic roles are proper for women’. We have seen the claim
that, in circumstances in which she had no future given the oppressive
norms governing women’s options, Idris made ‘the ultimate shahida’
(ibid.).
If the analyses of Idris’ choice which emphasize these norms are correct,
then it would appear that this case is structurally similar to that identi-
fied by Stoljar as motivating the substantive condition for autonomy.
Certain oppressive norms are in play, which affect the costs of certain
options. Taking into account these costs in making one’s decision seems
perfectly rational. If Idris deliberated soundly, and the evidence really
did suggest that ‘there was no future for her in any aspect of Palestinian
society’ (ibid.), then perhaps the self-sacrificial aspect of her choice was
rational. From what has been reported about her situation, one might
think that her choice to sacrifice herself is the outcome of a rational
cost-benefit analysis (there is, of course, the further question of whether
the choice to kill and maim others could be the outcome of a rational
cost-benefit analysis. I return to this point shortly). Her choice may well
have met other content-neutral conditions: procedural independence
in deliberation; endorsement of the way in which her preferences were
formed; wholehearted endorsement of her decision.6
However, if we shared Stoljar’s worry about choices that are informed
by and perpetuate false and oppressive norms, then we might conclude
that Idris’ choice is non-autonomous. Her choice too is informed by
misguided norms.
The structure of substantive accounts

Structurally, substantive accounts of autonomy require that choices
meet a condition such as this:
(S) a necessary condition for autonomous choice is that the agent’s

choice is informed by the relevant normative standards.
For Stoljar, this is articulated as follows:
(S1) a necessary condition for autonomous choice is that the agent’s

choice is not informed by false and oppressive norms.
Other theorists, such as Hill Jnr (1991) and Baron (1985), have posited
different substantive conditions: they have argued that choices must be
in accordance with the value of self-respect:
(S2) a necessary condition for autonomous choice is that the agent’s

choice is informed by and gives proper weight to the value of respect
and self- respect.
This condition (S2) has been argued for in the context of choices
for deferential roles, which it is argued are not consistent with self-
respect, and so not autonomous even if content-neutral conditions
for autonomy are met. More recently, Bagnoli (2009) has argued for
a similar condition as constraining autonomous choice, which places
emphasis on the importance of respect and recognition of others as a
constraint on choice (p. 187). These articulations of the substantive
condition help us to see what is meant by ‘relevant normative stand-
ards’: those which should inform deliberation (such as concern for the
moral status of oneself and others), and not those which should not
(false and oppressive ones). There may be other ways of articulating
the relevant normative standards that one might seek to incorporate
into a substantive account of autonomy. My main focus here is on the
idea that autonomy of choice is dependent upon choice being guided
by the relevant normative standards, although I take it that the critical
concerns I raise for substantive accounts, below, will generalize to other
versions of substantive accounts.
Extending the substantive condition

So far I have focused on the idea that the substantive conditions for
autonomy may determine as non-autonomous those choices that are
informed by misguided norms. However, the problematic norms that
have been identified are concerned with oppressive gender norms. Such
a choice, if guided by false and oppressive norms, may not be consistent
with true and non-oppressive values, or with the value of self-respect.
100 Jules Holroyd
But what of the fact that these women were choosing not simply suicide,
but suicide bomb attacks? To focus only on the self-sacrificing aspect of
their choices, and the ways in which that may have been rational given
hierarchical and oppressive norms, is to ignore the violent aspects of
these women’s choices. Moreover, it is not clear that oppressive gender
norms were in play in the choices of all of the women interviewed. For
example, one woman was interviewed in 2006 about an attack on Israeli
government offices in Jerusalem, in which she participated in 1987. She
is described as having ‘asserted that what drove her to embrace such a
mission was a blazing religious faith. Back then, she believed that it was
the right path toward fulfilling her religious and nationalistic duties’
(Schweitzer 2008, 138). From the first-personal perspective, then, it was
not gender norms but religious fervour that motivated her participation
in the mission.
Further, it is worth emphasizing that women’s active pursuit of such
missions was itself contrary to widely held norms concerning women’s
role in political and fundamentalist activism. So those women who
actively pursued their mission, undertaking to persuade others of their
ability to do so, were clearly not mindful of at least some oppressive
gender norms. Some of the Palestinian women’s choices to commit terror
attacks, then, are not obviously informed by the kinds of misguided
gender norms that Stoljar (2000) identified as undermining of autono-
mous choice. Should we suppose, then, that the substantive account
would diagnose Idris’ choice (insofar as the description above accurately
captures her motives) as non-autonomous, but not the choices of those
women who chose voluntarily, on the basis of the values to which they
were fervently committed (according to the accounts based on inter-
views with women who failed in their missions)?
We can easily see how some might take the general substantive condi-
tion (S) not to be met by these women. The problem with the choices
which are in accordance with false or oppressive values, Stoljar (2000)
claims, is that they are not informed by ‘relevant normative standards’
(p. 107).7 Here are some claims that might be made about the choices of
the Palestinian women who pursue terror attacks. The choices at issue
here are choices to perpetrate violence against innocent individuals,
and as such they do not value appropriately the lives of those intended
targets of the attack, but treat them as mere means (for worries about
the instrumentalization of victims of terrorist attacks, see, for example,
Primoratz 1997).8 One might argue that such a choice is informed by
misguided normative standards because the choice is not consistent
with affording proper respect to the targets. The choice to participate in
suicide bomb attacks may not be guided by a proper appreciation of the

targeted individuals’ moral status. So, such choices, one might argue, are
not guided by the relevant normative standards.
These claims most naturally fall out of the interpretation of the
substantive condition recently offered by Bagnoli (2009). Bagnoli argues
for a Kantian substantive account which requires that autonomous
choice is consistent with respect for others. This specification of the
substantive condition would be well placed to diagnose these choices to
undertake suicide missions as non-autonomous, insofar as the choices
are not informed by the relevant normative standards (namely, respect
for others) and so do not cohere with the value of respect.
Settling the question of the autonomy of these choices, then, requires
settling whether their choices were guided by the relevant normative
standards, and what these standards are. But, I now argue, this is a
problematic approach to questions of autonomy. In what follows, I will
argue that these accounts do not provide us with useful tools for under-
standing the choices made by these women, and should not be endorsed
as an account of autonomy.
Worries for substantive conditions for autonomy
In this section, I argue that, when considered in light of these women’s

choices, problems emerge for the substantive conditions on autono-
mous choice. These are problems for accounts concerned with personal
(rather than political) autonomy.
Contested choices
I have suggested that if one is concerned, as the substantive theorist is,
with autonomous choices being those which are guided by the relevant
normative standards, then we can at least see why one might think
that even such voluntary, deliberatively endorsed choices to perpetrate
violence are non-autonomous. But this matter will in fact be settled
by whether the norms that guided such choices were misguided or
otherwise.
This is hotly contested. In evaluating the voluntariness of the choices
of the Palestinian women, Friedman 2005, suggests that it is possible that
reason stands on the side of these women’s choices. That is to say, one
might think that in some circumstances terrorism is justified, and that
the scenario in which they acted is one such case.9 Indeed, philosoph-
ical discourse contains much debate about whether and when terrorism
might be justified. Where one stands in such debates will inform one’s
102 Jules Holroyd
view on whether an individual’s choice was informed by the relevant

normative standards.
For example, if one thinks that terrorism is never, or almost never
justified (see, for example, the views of Nathanson 2010; Primoratz
1997), then one might think that a choice to commit terrorism is very
likely to be informed by incorrect or mistaken normative standards,
namely, ones which do not give enough weight to the standing of the
potential victims of the attack. Conversely, if one thinks that terrorism
can be justified, then one will not take it that the agents who so choose
have prima facie utilized misguided normative standards in delibera-
tion. Nonetheless, there are quite different accounts of what considera-
tions might justify terrorism in certain circumstances: compare Nielsen’s
(1981) consequentialist justification with Held’s (2008) attention to the
limitation (and equalization) of rights violations suffered by any one
group in society. These rationales might in any one case reach different
conclusions regarding the justifiability of a terrorist attack. Accordingly,
there may be disagreements over whether in this particular instance the
agent was guided by the relevant normative standards.
Entrenched disagreement is reflected in discourses specifically about
the terrorist attacks by Palestinians against Israel. Some philosophers
have argued that such terror attacks could be justified (Honderich 2006;
Kapitan 2008). Kapitan (2008) also writes of an open letter signed by
some Palestinian intellectuals condemning and calling for an end to the
terror attacks against Israel (Kapitan 2008, 28).10 There are legitimate
disagreements both over whether terrorism could ever be justified in
principle, and whether specific uses of terrorist attacks, such as those
conducted by Palestinians, are justified.11
Thus, whether or not a certain choice is in fact guided by the relevant
normative standards is, in cases such as this, not going to be a matter
that is readily ascertained. Some may argue that the choices are guided
by the relevant normative standards: that proper respect is being given
to the humanity of the intended targets, but that this is consistent with
the perpetration of violence (either because the potential victims’ claims
are outweighed by the need to respond to the oppressive and humili-
ating conditions to which one is subjected, or perhaps because such
actions are considered legitimate forms of self-defence). Others may
argue that such choices could never, or almost never, be informed by
the relevant normative standards. These are obviously hotly contested
questions, and ones for which there are no ready answers.
But this means that, if one endorses a substantive account of
autonomy, an individual’s autonomy becomes the locus of sustained
(and sometimes seemingly intractable) disagreement about what norms

are appropriate, and what choices are, in light of these, justified. I think
there are considerable concerns about this move. One is that, in at least
some cases, it is plausible that there is room for legitimate and reason-
able disagreement over what norms are the appropriate ones, or whether
certain actions are justified by those normative standards. But for the
proponent of the substantive account, this disagreement becomes not
simply a disagreement about what is justified, but about whether indi-
viduals’ choices are autonomous. I think we should be troubled by this
shift of focus to questions of the autonomy of choice, for the following
further reasons.
Judgments about autonomy

Setting aside cases of reasonable and irresolvable disagreement, and
supposing that there are cases which are hard but in principle resolvable,
we then face a further odd consequence with respect to determinations
of autonomy by the substantive account. This is that the dependence
of an individuals’ autonomy upon the propriety of certain normative
standards means that when making third-personal assessments of an
individual’s autonomy, the proponent of the substantive condition has
two options. First, she might adopt a position of epistemic humility, in
which she concludes that we cannot yet say what the relevant norma-
tive standards are. This would entail that we simply do not yet know
whether an individual’s choice is autonomous. Second, she might think
we have a clear view on what conclusions are defensible, and what the
relevant and irrelevant normative standards accordingly are (and what
choices are consistent with these) – so we are able to determine which
agents are autonomous in their choices. Either stance seems to me to
have problematic implications.12
The first stance (of epistemic humility) has implications for the kind
of judgments that can be made about such choices. It seems that some
such choices bear the hallmarks of considered, deliberatively endorsed,
authentic choices: on contentious matters parties to each side of the
issue have often thought carefully and in a considered manner about
what considerations support their position. Sometimes these considera-
tions can be articulated with more force and clarity than is the case for
run-of-the-mill choices. This can be a function of the contested nature
of the issue.
Indeed, in developing her content-neutral account of autonomy,
Friedman 2003, incorporates the idea that holding on to a particular
value or commitment in the face of opposition provides more evidence
104 Jules Holroyd
of that individual’s autonomy. Autonomy requires ‘making choices and

undertaking actions that mirror these commitments, and doing the latter
with some resilience in the fact of at least minimal obstacles ... someone
is more autonomous the more she can succeed in pursuing her concerns
despite resistance’ (Friedman 2003, 13). Andrea Westlund (2003) likewise
places emphasis in her account of autonomy on an individual’s ability
to answer for her commitments and actions. She writes that ‘whether or
not one’s endorsements are explicitly forged through a process of crit-
ical reflection to begin with, openness to critical dialogue about them is
crucial to their status as fully one’s own’ (p. 494).
These thoughts impress upon us the idea that, where an individual’s
pursuits are contested, and she is called upon to justify them, we have
more evidence of her autonomy (in fact, Westlund 2003 and Friedman
2003 each advance these claims as necessary conditions for autonomy,
but I do not want to make that strong claim here). For example, if
a woman is voluntarily embarking on activism that involves taking
on a role contrary to the prescribed gender roles in her society, or
engaging in activity that those around her have challenged, we might
have more evidence of her autonomy. The interviews with Palestinian
women to which I have referred above indicate that sometimes, the
women were acting contrary to the wishes of their families or of other
political activists. And as has been remarked, there are many respects
in which their actions were contrary to gendered expectations, and
were consistent with fervently held commitments. Perhaps we could
be more confident that the individual is not manipulated or alienated
from her choice in these cases than in those in which the individual
is not acting contrary to entrenched norms and is not called upon to
defend her actions.
But in such contested cases, in which matters of the relevant norma-
tive standards are not settled, the substantive account of autonomy can
only say that we cannot presently determine whether such individuals’
choices are autonomous, because we do not know whether their choices
were guided by and consistent with the relevant normative standards
(these accounts could, of course, identify the choices that are coerced as
non-autonomous, insofar as they fail to meet necessary content-neutral
conditions for autonomy).
These considerations are not decisive, and I think it is difficult to have
clear intuitions about these cases. But it seems to me that we should
feel more confident than usual in identifying such choices as autono-
mous (that is, concerned with choices from which an individual is not
alienated, does not feel manipulated or trapped). This is not a judgment
substantive accounts can make, at least until we have settled the ques-
tion of the relevant normative standards.
Consider, next, the implications of taking up the second stance –
having adjudged some set of normative standards to be the most defen-
sible and hence relevant to the decision in hand, we would have to
conclude that one party to the disagreement was, in fact, non-autono-
mous – because their choice was not guided by the relevant normative
standards. Were it informed by the relevant normative standards, she
would not have so chosen. Why is this problematic? Because the non-
autonomy of the agent’s choice is not something we could detect from
the epistemic states or causal history of the agent prior to the settling of
that value question – factors which are surely most pertinent to assessing
the authenticity of her choice. Indeed, the agent may continue to profess
commitment to those values or norms as ones to which she is authenti-
cally committed, and (in her view) expressive of personal autonomy.
In sum, there are three concerns here: firstly, that questions about
the autonomy of an individual’s choice become the locus of legitimate
disagreements about value. This is problematic given that there is room
for reasonable disagreement; we should not suppose that one party to
the disagreement must be alienated from or inauthentic in her choice.
This directly bears on the second concern, namely that the substan-
tive account can only say of unresolved contested choices (with respect
to which we take up a stance of epistemic humility) that their status
as autonomous cannot presently be determined. This is despite these
choices, in some cases, meeting conditions that usually provide consid-
erable evidence for their being autonomous. Finally, upon the resolu-
tion of questions of value and justification, determinations are made of
whether an individual’s choice was autonomous. These adjudications
about matters of value, rather than facts about the agent’s causal history
or epistemic states settle, post hoc, whether an individual’s choice was
one that expressed personal autonomy. These considerations, I think,
counsel against the endorsement of a substantive account of autono-
mous choice.
Finally, we might also think that a concern raised by Andrea Westlund
(2009) is of particular relevance here. In the context of discussion of
the choices that women might make for roles considered deferential or
subservient, Westlund articulates the worry that substantive conditions
tend to obscure the differences in agency exercised by different individ-
uals in so choosing. There might be a range of reasons for making such
choices. An account which makes a blanket determination of individ-
uals who choose subordinate roles is problematic. Rather ‘we need to be
106 Jules Holroyd
more attentive to possible differences between self-subordinating char-

acters. We should not assume that all individuals who willingly embrace
subordinate roles will be psychologically similar to one other’ (p. 29).
A similar concern is apparent in the context of the choices made by
some Palestinian women to commit terror attacks. As we have seen,
there are considerable differences in the degree of agency, voluntari-
ness and authenticity manifested in the choices made by these women.
The substantive account risks obscuring these significant differences.
For example, suppose the outcome of normative inquiry were that such
choices could not be justified when the relevant information is consid-
ered in light of the relevant normative standards. All such choices would
be deemed non-autonomous by the substantive account (for they are
not informed by the relevant normative standards). But that determina-
tion, while not making it impossible to attend to such differences, does
tend to obscure them. Moreover, to suppose that choices for violence
could never be authentic seems to hinder rather than help in advancing
an understanding of the conditions in which these choices are made
and deemed expressive of strongly held commitments.
Conclusions
In the course of this discussion, I hope to have done the following

things: firstly, shown that analyses of Palestinian women’s choices to
participate in terror attacks which emphasize the oppressive norms,
restricted options and lack of self-sufficiency of these women do not
always chime with the women’s first-personal accounts of what moti-
vated their actions. There we see that, while in some cases the choices
were made under duress and most likely do not express the authentic
values of the women, in other cases there is reason to suppose that these
choices were not ones which left the women feeling manipulated or
trapped, and not choices from which the women were alienated.
I then suggested that considering what a substantive account might
say about the choices of these Palestinian women in particular could
help us to evaluate such accounts. I argued that there were troubling
aspects to making autonomy depend on substantive matters of value,
which emerged when we considered contested choices such as those
concerning when terrorism is justified, and by what. There are dissatisfac-
tory consequences of making autonomy the locus of disagreement about
the correct normative standards. Doing so obscures women’s agency,
and the fact that individuals might come to authentically identify with
choices to perpetrate violence and die for the sake of their cause.
Notes
1. This is in contrast to the role of women in radical left groups, such as the
Red Army Faction, in which women played a prominent role in both orches-
trating and participating in violent terror attacks (Ness 2008, p. 13).
2. Schweitzer writes that ‘among many of the still-imprisoned Fatah members
whom I spoke with, the accepted opinion is that Wafa Idris was not dispatched
for a suicide mission but rather to just place an explosive device’ (p. 135). He
even suggests that it is unclear whether the detonation was accidental or
intended, but I shall work under the widely endorsed assumption that it was
intended (for my points to hold, we need only imagine that there is some
instance in which this is the case).
3. In the literature there is a distinction between strong and weak substantive
accounts. Strong substantive accounts (e.g. Stoljar 2000) constrain what can
be autonomously chosen. Weak substantive accounts (e.g. Benson 2005) place
normative constraints on autonomous choice, not by constraining what can
be chosen, but by requiring that the agent hold certain evaluative attitudes
or commitments. I actually think it is difficult to make precise the distinc-
tion between the two kinds of account, but in any case my focus in this
chapter is on Stoljar’s account, which falls squarely in the ‘strong’ substan-
tive camp.
4. Ibid, p. 95.
5. It is worth noting that, while such choices are undoubtedly troubling, it is
not clear that the intuition that they are nonautonomous is widely shared.
Indeed, Benson (2005) has argued that he does not, himself, share that
intuition.
6. I say ‘may’ meet those conditions, because the messy reality is such that
we will not be able to accurately ascertain whether this is the case. Reports
surrounding Idris’ circumstances are contested, and there are competing
interests in having different stories told.
7. Stoljar takes this notion from Benson, who in his early work (1987,
1991) endorsed a strong substantive view.
8. Might the claims concerning the relevant normative standards be restricted
to gender or other oppressive norms? It is not clear that there are any nonar-
bitrary reasons for doing so.
9. It is not quite clear whether Friedman (2008) is talking about instrumental
rationality or substantive rationality at this point, but her claim that this
depends on our answer to the question about ‘the conditions that might
or might not justify terrorism’ (p. 56) suggests that she is considering the
substantive, all things considered rationality of engaging in such attacks.
10. The letter was originally published in Al Quds newspaper on 20 June 2002. It
can be read online at http://www.bitterlemons.org/docs/suicide.html.
11. I do not here even attempt to address this question. What is important for
my point is that there is sustained disagreement between well-informed
individuals about it. If the reader thinks it is obvious that in this instance
the use of violence for political ends is not justified, then there are perhaps
other cases that highlight the possibility: the African National Congress’
(ANC’s) plans for armed resistance against the regime of apartheid, for
example.
108 Jules Holroyd
12. Might not there be a third option: to claim that, given disagreement, an
agent who uses any of those normative standards argued by parties to the
dispute to be relevant, and reaches choices regarded as defensible by parties
to the dispute, chooses autonomously? There are two problems with this
strategy: firstly, it does not enable the substantive theorist to capture the
intuitions that motivate the positing of a substantive condition (namely, that
certain choices that conflict with certain norms are not fully autonomous).
Secondly, this strategy still faces the further concern that I set out shortly: that
it supposes that if disagreement is resolved, we can then adjudge one party to
the dispute to have been, after all, nonautonomous in her decisions.
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6
Female Suicide Bombers and
Autonomy
Herjeet Marway
Introduction
My aim in this chapter is to consider which theoretical understand-

ings of autonomy are useful and appropriate for interpreting real-life
violent women and for attributing them with autonomy where this
might be fitting. I focus on the example of female suicide bombers
because such women are often denied agency, as I will show. And –
insofar as our goal in this collection is to recognize agency – if they
and their actions can be better illuminated on certain philosophical
frameworks, then such approaches, I argue, are to be preferred. To
explore this, I first briefly illustrate the tendency to distort the agency
of the bombers. I second examine which theoretical models of rela-
tional autonomy, procedural or substantive, might more fully repre-
sent their autonomy. I argue that common understandings of female
bombers are problematic because they are based on societal (patri-
archal, oppressive) norms about what women should be or can do,
and that procedural theories of autonomy less satisfactorily capture
the social self and degrees of autonomy than substantive notions.
Thus, if better representations of the autonomy of violent women are
being sought, substantive relational theories of autonomy should be
preferred over procedural ones.
Female suicide bombers
To start, I briefly present some examples of bombers from differing

regions, conflicts and organizations, and I draw attention to how they
are portrayed, concentrating on some (I do not claim they are the only)
depictions in the West to illustrate dominant trends.
110
Female Suicide Bombers and Autonomy 111
Three examples
The first example is Muriel Degauque, a 38-year-old Muslim convert
originally from Charleroi, Belgium. On 9 November 2005, she deto-
nated a bomb close to American troops and Iraqi police in Baqubah,
Iraq. Degauque died in the attack, and one American soldier sustained
minor injuries. She was the first known Caucasian female suicide bomber
claimed by al-Qaeda and her instructions were believed to be from
Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (Eager 2008, 171; Skaine 2006,
55–56; Cunningham 2008, 95; Zedalis 2008, 59; Browne and Watson
2005; Smith 2005). The second example is the double suicide bombing
attack in central Moscow on 29 March 2010. One attack was by Marium
Sharipova, a 28-year-old schoolteacher from Balakhani, Dagestan, who
detonated her bomb on a commuter train at Lubyanka station at 7:56
am and killed 27 people in total. The other was by Dzhennet Abdullaeva,
a 17-year-old, also from Dagestan, who activated her suicide belt at Park
Kultury station 40 minutes later and killed 13 people. In addition to
the fatalities, more than 100 people were injured in both attacks. Doku
Umarov, leader of Dagestan’s militant Islamist rebels, the Caucasus
Emirate, claimed responsibility for these attacks soon after.1 This was the
first attack after the formally declared end to Russia’s counterterrorist
operation in Chechnya in April 2009 (Harding 2010; BBC News 2010;
Dzutsev 2010; Frost 2010). Finally, there was an unnamed female suicide
bomber who detonated her bomb outside the World Food Programme’s
distribution centre in Khar, Pakistan, on 26 December 2010. When
stopped for routine security checks just outside the centre, she threw
two hand grenades into a crowd of 300 people queuing for aid before
activating her suicide belt.2 She killed between 43 and 45 people, and
wounded 80 to 102 others. She was the first confirmed female bomber
claimed by Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (Dawn 2010a, 2010b; Guardian
2010; Jerusalem Post 2010).3
Prevalent portrayals
For reasons discussed elsewhere (Sjoberg and Gentry 2007), female
bombers are often cast as victims, of either of an oppressive enemy,
a ruthless terrorist regime or an ‘uncivilized’ culture (Marway 2011).4
Here, I take these explanations for the supposed victimhood of these
women and explain how they misrepresent their agency.
There are details in numerous reports that intimate that it is the
actions of ‘the enemy’ that are the explanation or catalyst for the
women’s acts. For instance, that Degauque’s ‘husband [... was] shot dead
in Iraq by US troops’ (BBC 2005) while preparing for an attack himself,
112 Herjeet Marway
or that Abdullaeva’s ‘husband ... a leading militant in the Russian region

of Dagestan ... was killed in a shoot-out with police on New Year’s Eve’
(Shuster 2010). Here the actions of opposing forces (the United States
or Russia) caused the women’s acts. Likewise, as Azam Tariq, spokesman
for the Pakistani Taliban, claimed of women like the unnamed bomber,
they are moved to combat hostile ‘anti-Taliban forces’ (in Khan 2010),
or, as in the Iraq case, that outside groups bear the responsibility for
deaths of those who are ‘killed or detained by US forces’ (Haynes
2008). Those against the Taliban or the United States are blameworthy.
Differently, the proposition is that, in Dagestan, internal security forces
fail to protect the people and instead allow ‘corruption and lawlessness’
(Harding 2010, 32) and so themselves become the enemy. Together, these
response suggest a reaction to occupying forces or to those in power.
In other reports, the women are thought to have become bombers
because of actions of ‘their side’. For example, it was reported that a
Pakistani girl was ‘kidnapped, strapped with explosives and sent to
blow [herself] up’5 (Doherty 2011) by the Taliban, who are ostensibly
fighting against an occupying force for the Afghan people. In other
organizations, it is suggested that a common tactic is for ‘a member of
al-Qaeda to marry a woman and then dishonour her in some way, such
as letting someone else rape her’ (Haynes 2008) so that she is shamed
into ‘end[ing] her life’ as a bomber (ibid.). Other reports suggest that
the women became accidentally embroiled in the world of terrorism
through their manipulative partners. That there were ‘secret marriages
between rebel commanders and Islamically minded women’ (Harding
2010, 35) that led to their becoming radicalized was suggested in the
case of Sharipova, or that a woman was ‘a lost soul led astray’ (Smith
2005, 1) was the view in the case of Degauque and her involvement
with her second husband. These women are portrayed as being tricked
into becoming bombers. Collectively, then, the idea here is that it is the
callousness of insurgents themselves that explains the situation.
A final set of reports suggests these women are victims of ‘their socie-
ties’. The bomber is portrayed as a ‘wom[a]n in a position of permanent
servitude’6 (Dearing 2010, 1) and unlikely to be able to decide anything
for herself in the case of the Taliban. Alternatively, she is deemed a
misfit in her society. Degauque is ‘a runaway who dabbled in drugs’
(BBC 2005) after her brother’s death and was failed by the support
structures around her. Differently, the Dagestani women are presented
as ‘widows of insurgent leaders’ (Dzutsev 2010) who, like the Chechen
‘black widows’, are presumed to have limited worth after the deaths
of their husbands (Groskop 2004).7 In these examples, the women are
presented as subordinates or outcasts, and their societies drive them to

their acts.
While not the only portrayals, the female bombers are presented as
‘victims’ – whether at the hands of enemy forces, ruthless insurgents or
repressive cultures. As victims, however, there is an assumption that they
do not have a choice in what they do, and this effectively denies them
agency (Marway 2011). Either the women are non-choosers of violence
and forced into the act (Sjoberg and Gentry 2007, 50–51; West 2004,
7) or are considered to be acting for personal reasons alone (West 2004,
7; Skaine 2006), for instance. There is the sense that no real choices
were made – because they are not actors but merely unwilling reactors
to enemies, insurgents or societies. As victims, the women’s agency is
virtually non-existent.
Yet it is unclear that their agency is as stark as the binary of victim/
non-victim suggests. This is so for at least two connected reasons. First,
male bombers are regarded as engaging in such practices for a variety
of reasons ranging from personal to political (although in some cases
their agency is denied too – Atran 2004), and it is not farfetched to
suppose that female bombers would hold comparable motives. I suggest
that possible evidence of agency is swept aside too quickly. Second, and
linked, the severe contexts in which these women are immersed seem to
lead to the conclusion that they have no agency. To avoid this conclu-
sion – which many theorists who wish to recognize agency may want
to do – the instinctive reaction is to say they have agency regardless of
the context. I suggest, however, that contexts cannot wholly eliminate
agency, and decision-making cannot wholly disregard context. Whether
there is a choice or not, then, does not seem to be the right question
or sole indicator of agency; rather, it is more pertinent to ask about the
quality of the decisions being made. The women’s agency must be repre-
sented in light of broader contextual aspects (since decision-making
cannot exist outside of these settings), and in terms of the mechanics
of the decision-making (since women are capable deciders), without any
of this being reduced to the duality of victim/non-victim. In ignoring
this combination of factors, I argue that these representations deny the
bombers proper agency for their actions and that better ways in which
to conceptualize their agency are required.
Autonomy
Discussions about agency in various disciplines are similar to those of

autonomy in philosophy (Madhok, Phillips and Wilson 2013). Whether
114 Herjeet Marway
someone is autonomous – or self-ruling – revolves around the issue

of whether the individual does what she genuinely wants. Relational
models of autonomy are those that endorse a social self and consider
decision-making within social constraints (Mackenzie and Stoljar 2000),
and it is these that I discuss here. In particular, I consider which types
of autonomy – procedural or substantive – allow us to meet the aim of
properly representing the bomber’s autonomy in two ways: first, with
regards to reflecting the situation, context or structures of the women’s
decisions, and second, for reflecting degrees of autonomy. Following
those with more substantive leanings, I argue that, for my example of the
female bombers, procedural views are less able to factor in social features
that frame and infuse decision-making, while substantive accounts are
better at capturing these. Further, I contend that substantive rather than
procedural theories are better at plotting the degree of autonomy that
might be evident for these women. Thus, substantive theories are to be
preferred over procedural ones for reflecting how the bombers choose
and the extent of autonomy they might have.
As sometimes little is known about the bombers, when I apply theory
to practice in this section of the chapter, I will propose possible inter-
pretations of the women by using what we do know, or what we could
imagine, about them. Although there could be other readings, I suggest
these are at least plausible ways to understand them. Moreover, the
specifics are less important for the task at hand, which is to illustrate
how the general philosophical approaches work and the sorts of things
they can illuminate. The particulars could be changed, which would
offer different details, but the broad models and the kinds of things they
reveal would remain the same.
Decision-making
Relational models of autonomy all start with a relational agent – an
agent that is socially embedded, formed within social relationships and
shaped by a complex set of intersecting determinants (Mackenzie and
Stoljar 2000, 4) – but can be separated into two camps about decision-
making: either procedural or substantive.
The procedural approaches take the agent to be autonomous if she
reflects in the right kinds of ways. Diana Meyers argues, ‘what makes the
difference between autonomous and heteronomous decisions is the way
in which people arrive at them – the procedures they follow or fail to
follow’ (1989, 52). Marilyn Friedman contends an agent ‘might still be
choosing autonomously even if she chooses subservience to others for
its own sake, so long as she made her choice in the right way’ (2003, 19).
Andrea Westlund favours a method that is ‘formal rather than substan-

tive in nature [which] carries with it no specific value commitments’
(2009, 28). Although there are different ways in which to assess autono-
mous decision-making (such as requirements of competence, integra-
tion or answerability respectively), the common theme is that such
theories focus on procedures and do not stipulate substantive choices
that qualify as autonomous.
Substantive theories, on the other hand, go beyond the decision-
making process alone. In particular, such models appeal to the content
of the desire and/or are pinned to external factors to some extent. A
strong substantive account, for instance, could focus on the agent’s
ability to identify and reason according to the correct standards and
norms – or whether they track ‘the True and the Good’ (Wolf 1990, 71).
If the content of their desires falls short of this cognitive and norma-
tive benchmark, then, despite passing the procedural test, they are not
good candidates for being autonomous. Alternatively, a strong theory
could advocate that certain external conditions, or socio-relational
properties, exist before an agent can exercise her autonomy (Oshana
1998). Although anything can be chosen in theory, the individual
must be in a society that allows her to pursue her goals in social and
psychological security, for instance (ibid., 94–95). Such conditions are
relevant in allowing de facto rather than simply de jure autonomy, and
in what is (or can be) actually chosen (ibid.). There is some interroga-
tion, then, of the substance of the decision and/or a consideration of
the external factors in which the agent is immersed. In effect, strong
accounts filter out desires based on the wrong norms or those formed in
autonomy-inhibiting circumstances (Stoljar 2000, 95), ruling them out
as non-autonomous.
Weaker versions of substantivism advocate that if the agent possesses
certain traits, the content of the desire itself is not automatically limited.
This position is very much linked to the external, since holding various
traits – such as self-worth, self-esteem or self-respect (Benson 1994;
Meyers 2008; Hill 1991) – is deeply connected to social forces and rela-
tionships, and much more so than the ‘self’ in each of these attitudes
implies. Paul Benson, for instance, proposes a normative-competence
account (2008, 136). Here it is the agent’s view towards herself, as contin-
gent on her relational experiences (such as whether others engender a
sense of self-worth in her and whether she holds a position of self-worth
too), which is key for autonomy (rather than following certain norms
or particular conditions transpiring).8 The content is still interrogated
as an indicator of a stance towards herself and the external matters in
116 Herjeet Marway
that it is a strong enabler of such stances, but certain decisions can pass
as autonomous despite their content. Whether strong or weak, these are
substantive views of autonomy.
Application
Having sketched the broad approaches, the question with which I am
now concerned is how well do these theories track features relevant to
the female suicide bomber’s decision-making? I argue that substantive
accounts fare better than procedural ones because they more effectively
trace factors like context, relationships and structures in decision-
making.
To start, there are some clear benefits to procedural theories if we are
interested in representing the women as having autonomy. Since the
desire itself is not something that is limited (in principle anything can
be chosen) and authentic decision-making revolves around what one
really wants (whatever that happens to be), it seems that procedural
approaches are likely to increase the chances of attributing autonomy to
the bombers. And this indeed is our goal.
Further, as procedural accounts embrace the fundamentally social (not
atomistic or individualistic) self, the importance of the social for agent
and autonomy is not discounted. Degauque, Sharipova and the unnamed
bomber are acknowledged as social selves that cannot be understood as
standing apart from their present and historical relationships (with her
brother and husbands in Degauque’s case) and contexts (of conflict and
poverty in the examples of Sharipova and the unnamed bomber). This
is the agent as relational. In addition, procedural accounts identify that
autonomy (the process of self-reflection) is itself socially immersed too,
and that social forces are not absent from decision-making. Degauque’s
decision is linked to her contexts such that the desire to bomb emerges
from the conflict in Iraq, among other factors. This is autonomy as
relational.
But, after these understandings of relationality, proceduralism focuses
not on Degauque, Sharipova or the unnamed bomber’s desire to bomb
(content or conditions underpinning it), but on self-reflection, endorse-
ment of desires or autonomy skills (procedures). The unnamed bomber
could be considered to have certain competencies of ‘self-discovery, self-
definition, and self-direction’ (Meyers 1989, 20), for instance, that enable
her to reflect on the decision to bomb and accept it as hers despite diffi-
cult circumstances. Or Sharipova might hold a disposition to answer for
herself, and so the preference to bomb could be regarded as hers, even if
she is within a subordinating relationship (Westlund 2009). Differently,
Degauque’s lower-order desires and higher-order principles might show

a discrepancy or lack of integration – perhaps owing to oppressive
forces – which indicates the desire is not hers (Friedman 1986). All of
these involve some investigation into whether the desire is the bomber’s
(via the reflective procedure), but the bombing itself (the content) is not
assessed, so it remains a viable autonomous choice.
However, two related points can be raised here. First, regarding our
aim of mapping relevant features in the bomber’s decision-making, it is
likely that the social – the difficult context, subordinating relationship
or oppressive structures above – does play a significant role in what these
women do. The bombers act partly because of these things as opposed
to in spite of them, and when the focus is to recognize relevant aspects
of how they decide, this should be part of the discussion. While rela-
tional procedural accounts can do some of this, substantive ones do it
better. Second, allowing any desire to be autonomous without properly
considering how the external affects the substance of decisions – which
is the more procedural approach – limits our understanding of just how
pervasive social factors, and critically just how relational agents, are in
their decision-making. Substantive approaches, again, can recognize
this better.
Taking these in turn, others have made a similar argument regarding
the first issue about the social – notably in relation to contraception and
abortion decisions (Stoljar 2000), gaslighting (Benson 1994), voluntary
slaves (Oshana 2006) and desperate choices (Widdows 2013). In these
discussions, the thought was – roughly – that procedural views omitted
a proper consideration of relationships or contexts and their impact on
what is chosen. Here I wish to illustrate this using the bombers.
If we imagine Sharipova within a situation of political conflict (in
Dagestan, between insurgents and the Russian authorities) and in an
oppressive environment that limits what she is expected to become as
a woman (imagine an expectation to be a carer or teacher, for instance),
then it is not difficult to suggest that these circumstances do frame her
decisions. It is less the case that she can opt to be a banker or a doctor,
which she may do in a less oppressive setting, or to be a pacifist, which she
may do in more stable conditions. Even though Sharipova may go against
the grain and do things that are unexpected of her – like becoming a
bomber – the broader aspects are significant to what she selects, as various
theorists have argued about persons in general.9 Thinking about what is
chosen and the context, relationships or structures in which it is chosen as
a whole (a substantive view) is more likely to accurately reflect how deci-
sions are made than sidelining the content altogether (a procedural view).
118 Herjeet Marway
Although it may seem that procedural accounts are a plausible under-

standing of how agents decide, and may seem to bestow women with
agency whatever they choose, it is less helpful in tracking all the elements
relevant to their decision-making once considered a little deeper.
The second and connected issue is the extensiveness of the social.
While procedural theorists accept the social self, that social factors
govern the autonomy process, and even that decisions emerge from
social contexts (as noted above), they do not wish to extend the assess-
ment of autonomy to the content of decisions which themselves are
not immune to the social. I contend that, to not recognize how the
substance of those choices is profoundly affected by one’s sociality –
such that it requires some role in autonomy – is ultimately to down-
play the relational self. To ignore the substance underestimates how
far the social nature of the self goes and so how much the content of
decision-making is contingent on the external. The sort of self that is
relational ‘all the way down’ (Code 2000, 196) implies that the content
of and reasons behind decisions themselves are likely to play a part in
deciphering whether the desires are the agent’s own. Without factoring
this in, we might miss signs of oppression – that is, forms of interfer-
ence that are due to subordinating social structures – that affect what
is chosen.
The pull of proceduralism is that it preserves plural conceptions of the
good. Yet to exclude the content of the decision and thereby a clear look
at the interrelations between the content and (the potentially oppres-
sive) external contexts, relationships or structures misrepresents how
much the social is a part of agents and obscures factors affecting how
agents decide and importantly what they decide. On these two grounds,
procedural accounts track relevant features of decision-making less well
than they might.
That brings us to substantive theories. As with their procedural coun-
terparts, these theories start from the relational self – a social self – and
the acknowledgement that social factors contextualize autonomy. Unlike
proceduralists, however, substantivists wish to include the content of or
reasons behind those decisions as part of the assessment of autonomy,
as this stays truer to the thoroughly social selves the bombers are (as has
just been alluded to).
If we return to the bomber Sharipova, for instance, if it transpires that
she has damaged self-worth as those around her do not expect much
from her (a weak substantive focus – Benson 1994) and this causes her
to not bomb, then the content is considered suspect and possibly not
what she wants. Alternatively, if Sharipova has very few meaningful
options (a strong substantive view – Oshana 1998), then the content of

her desire to bomb might be more problematic.10 There is recognition,
then, that some decisions may be more precarious given the context or
relationships or structures – where oppressive settings lead to a reduced
self-worth or an absence of meaningful options. Yet factoring in these
features does capture how Sharipova decides and affects what she
chooses. Damaged self-worth derived in part from oppressive structures
impacts whether autonomy-inhibiting decisions are made. In other
words, what is decided and why, in conjunction with the contexts, rela-
tionships and structures in which it occurs, plays a role in reflecting the
overall character of decision-making.
While taking all this into account may result in not labelling people
as autonomous as swiftly as procedural views might allow, which at first
glance seems counterproductive to our goal of recognizing the bomber’s
agency, the social and the content of decisions is so significant for how
persons decide in substantive models that it must be captured in that it
must be captured in conceptions of autonomy. This is not to imply that
these externalities make the bombers non-autonomous. Indeed, clari-
fying this issue is the aim of the next section of the chapter.
Amounts of autonomy
All relational theories wish to move away from conceptualizing
autonomy as solely an either/or capacity – that either one has it or does
not – and towards the idea of a spectrum of autonomy – that one can
be more or less autonomous. Here I explore how well the theories might
recognize the extent of autonomy in these women’s decisions.
In procedural accounts, persons must pass a threshold, after which
they attain degrees of autonomy. On one theory, subservient decisions
are less autonomous than non-subservient ones but they are autono-
mous nonetheless, for example (Friedman 2003). On another theory, a
degree-based approach could be pinned to how well someone exercises
autonomy competency (skills of self-discovery, self-definition and self-
direction) (Meyers 1989). Here minimal, medial and full autonomy is
distinguished, and it is likely that full self-governance is rare, medial
achievable by many, and minimal by most (ibid.).11 These views attempt
to move away from autonomy being there or not (the focus on compe-
tence or capacity alone) to considering the extent to which autonomy is
exerted (the focus on exercise).
Although not all explicitly state this, substantive positions also lean
towards a degree-based approach. Stronger accounts tend to emphasize
that social norms are significant and can limit the amount of autonomy
120 Herjeet Marway
attainable because they come to impress false ideals on the agent. Wolf’s
case of JoJo – the dictator who believes that ruling well is to rule cruelly
(1990) – is an instance in which the agent is less (although arguably,
as I shall discuss, there is an implication that they are un-) able to be
autonomous. Autonomy is limited when one endorses a desire that
involves incorrect (different to ‘the True and the Good’) values and
fails to critically challenge them. The content of what is chosen, then,
indicates the sorts of values held and so the amount of autonomy that
might exist.
Weaker substantive accounts focus on the extent to which oppressive
norms affect one’s self-worth or self-esteem. Negative external circum-
stances – like those of the gaslighted woman, whose husband manipu-
lates her to doubt her sanity to cheat her out of money – can lead to
a diminished self-worth and autonomy (Benson 1994). The situation
erodes her self-worth to the extent that her competence to question her
desires and values (say, to hand over her inheritance to her husband)
are reduced, even if she appears to readily endorse them (ibid.). The
degree of autonomy she enjoys is less than if she had a strong self-worth
owing to a more conducive social setting. The content here is useful as
a barometer of the extent of self-worth – and so the degree of autonomy
that – the agent has.
Application
Having set out that relational accounts favour a degree-based notion of
autonomy, the question now is how useful are the different interpreta-
tions for recognizing how much autonomy the female bombers may
have. I argue that when we want to make a judgment on the extent of
autonomy, it is better to include several variables and build up a detailed
picture of the women’s situations and decisions. Extending the earlier
discussion, I propose that substantive theories (that factor in the content
as well as broader contexts, while paying homage to the relational nature
of the agent) are more apt at this task than procedural ones.
When applying the procedural account, a minimal threshold (compe-
tence) and then degree (exercise) of autonomy can be considered. If
Degauque is someone who, for instance, has the brute ability for self-
reflection, then the extent to which she exercises her self-discovery,
self-definition and self-direction skills is key in judging how much
autonomy she has in her decision to bomb (Meyers 1989). One formula-
tion is that if we imagine Degauque to resist, question and then agree
with her former husband’s wish to join al-Qaeda, then she exercises her
self-direction skill a great deal more than if she just ‘goes along’ with it
(ibid., 83). This attributes some agency to Degauque even if we suppose

she is in difficult circumstances.
While a useful conception of degrees, the worry with procedural
theories is that – following the discussions above – by de-emphasizing
substantive elements (such as content or attitudes towards the self), they
are less able to account for just how social agents’ choices and decision-
making are, and further just how social persons are. Without factoring
in more substantive features, there are fewer tools for determining how
much autonomy the bombers have. Since the focus for analysis in proce-
dural accounts is the process of decision-making and not the substance
of the decision itself, the full picture of the extent of autonomy is less
easily mapped and perhaps even obscured in content-neutral theories.
Moreover, by limiting what is assessed as part of autonomy, there is less
of an appreciation of how social agents, including their autonomous
abilities, are.
To substantiate some of this, let us take four instances of Sharipova
(none of which involve direct interference with the decision-making
process) in which she is part of a society that
(1) does not advocate bombing, and she decides to bomb;

(2) does not advocate bombing, and she decides not to bomb;
(3) does advocate bombing, and she decides to bomb; and
(4) does advocate bombing, and she decides not to bomb.
This combination of broader societal factors, the decision-making

and the content of the decision might each tell us something slightly
different about Sharipova’s autonomy. Instances (1) and (3) involve
the content of bombing, while (2) and (4) involve the content of
not bombing. Instances (3) and (4) involve a society that encourages
bombing, whereas (1) and (2) a society that discourages it. Without
going into each combination and prescribing what is most autonomous
(this is not my focus), I propose that it is when the content, context,
relationships and structures, and decision-making from the relational
self are considered together that a better understanding of the degree
of Sharipova’s autonomy is facilitated. In other words, by drawing on
these different elements, substantive views offer an additional (and so
potentially richer) and more accurate (owing to properly recognizing
the social self as well as more variables in autonomy) way in which to
measure degrees of autonomy than procedural theories.
How well do strong substantive theories fare? In the example of
Sharipova, it might be the case that, following a Wolfian account, there
122 Herjeet Marway
has been an accurate tracking of ‘the True and the Good’. We can imagine
that Sharipova recognizes the complexities of the conflict in Dagestan,
her role as a teacher and daughter, and what is expected of her. In this
scenario, she is able to cognitively see the world as it is. Further, she
might have the relevant kind of moral understanding that allows her to
avoid erroneous judgments. She is able to decipher normative cues in
the appropriate kinds of ways. Here, on top of minimal capacities and
the internal procedures of decision-making, how well Sharipova aligns
herself to cognitive and normative factors about the world (as seen by
what she endorses) is an additional resource that helps us recognize the
amount of her autonomy.
A problem here might be that a strong view does not enable some
desires to be recorded as autonomous to some extent because they are
the wrong sorts. As Benson has argued, strong theories can be charged
with being about right-rule rather than self-rule (2008). They can be
criticized for letting nothing (or not very much) pass as autonomous
because agents have to pick the right thing. Where we are concerned
to identify subtleties in autonomy rather than a crude autonomous-
or-not view, as is our purpose, this is worrying. There might be a reply
here: the focus of strong accounts is less about choosing rightly than
about there being more appropriate choices (itself a matter of degree).
As Wolf (1990) has argued, the normative component of her view does
not require knowing what the good is but recognizing there are better
or worse ways to be.12 In a parallel way, ideas about false norms could
identify not the true norm but better or worse norms for agents. In this
regard, what is captured on the spectrum with nuance is how far agents
decide according to (or how far the content of their decisions are aligned
to) better or worse norms. This might not satisfy some for whom it is
still taking autonomy into the realm of right-rule, but this may be a way
out of the worry that strong theories do not allow for a spectrum.
How apt are weak substantive theories for measuring degrees of the
female bombers’ autonomy? On a self-worth account, the extent of
autonomy can be indicated through responsibility for self (Benson
2000). We could imagine that Sharipova lives in a context in which
expectations to answer for herself were in place (she is in a position of
authority as a schoolteacher and has a good deal of self-worth from it,
both towards herself and from others). Alternatively, we can suppose
that Degagague, who was encouraged to be answerable when growing
up, might have a reduced self-worth because of her subsequent experi-
ences (from personal grief or similar) that leave her with little faith in
herself. Although both women might be competent and self-reflective
and may formally endorse bombing, on this picture, Degagague has less
self-worth to answer appropriately, which affects her reflection. These
distinctions allow us to decipher the degree of autonomy she exercises.
It also evades the problem of right-rule since the content is a useful
resource for more fully gauging attitudes towards the self and the quality
of reflection this enables, and is not about picking the right thing.
One could counter at least one of two things here. First, a spectrum is
not the point of autonomy at all. What matters is whether Degagaque,
Sharipova, or the unnamed bomber meet the minimum requirement of
competence and that they satisfy a theory-dependent form of reflection,
in other words, that we know whether they are autonomous or not.
Second, procedural views could include all the additional elements of
the context or relationships or structures after this judgment about being
autonomous or not is made. Rather than conflate being autonomous
and degrees of autonomy, they can be distinguished. In both regards
procedural theories would be best since – although these would not deny
the importance of a spectrum – autonomy and degrees of autonomy are
more easily separable, and degrees can be deduced without reference to
substantive content or attitudes. However, if the concern is genuinely to
represent the autonomy of the women, as it is for this chapter and book
(and for relational theories in general), then the more relevant question
does concern degrees and to decipher degrees satisfactorily. In order to
do this, recognizing the depths of one’s sociality and how this extends
to content and attitudes is important for framing how autonomous one
is. Likewise, expanding what is considered as part of the assessment of
autonomy to include content and attitudes is key. Limiting these compo-
nents would be too austere, while broadening them would be better for
a more comprehensive picture of the amount of autonomy overall. As
has been argued, substantive theories recognize this sociality and come
equipped to examine substantive factors that may be more useful for
measuring and thus representing nuances in the bombers’ autonomy
than procedural theories that do not go as far on either of these counts.
Further, a strength of the weaker over the stronger substantive view (if
my suggested reply above is not accepted) is that it evades some of the
worries about right-rule (Benson 2008) and so opens up what might be
considered partly autonomous. This is likely to be more useful for the
bombers since it treads the difficult ground of recognizing the way in
which individuals are thoroughly social (so how the external permeates
decision-making), while also leaving room for plurality of decisions (so
that bombing might be decided upon by them and some autonomy
attributable).
124 Herjeet Marway
Thus, the weak substantive view is well suited to representing the

extent of the bombers’ autonomy while recognizing the depths of their
sociality. It can discern a more thorough and accurate picture of the
degree of autonomy that exists for the female suicide bombers than
procedural views. In this regard, substantive theories should be preferred
over procedural ones when accounting for the autonomy of the bombers
and to avoid the victim-agent binary.
Notes
1. There is, however, some discrepancy over whether it was the Caucasus Emirate
which authorized the attacks: Shamsudin Batukaev, spokesman for the North
Caucasus Emirate, for instance, claimed on 31 March, that they were not
involved. A different ‘representative’ on the same day suggested on television
channel First Caucasus that it was the Russian security forces instead, while
footage of Doku Umarov’s claim of responsibility was shown on the Kavkaz
Center website, although some suggested it appeared dubious (Dzutsev 2010).
2. Other reports claim she threw her grenades at police and military personnel.
3. There were at least two other cases of suspected female bombers in Pakistan
before this, but these were not confirmed or claimed by the Pakistani Taliban.
The group claimed this attack, but the female nature was not commented on
explicitly. An attack on 26 June 2011 involving a husband and wife team in
Kolachi, Pakistan was claimed by them and the sex of the bombers were also
highlighted, with Pakistani Taliban spokesman, Ahsanullah Ahsan, claiming
that the use of a woman ‘shows how much we hate Pakistani security institu-
tions’ (Ahsan in Mahsud, 2011).
4. Elsewhere I have discussed different women and these – as well as other – sorts
of explanations for their limited agency (see Marway 2011).
5. About a young girl reportedly kidnapped by the Pakistani Taliban to become a
bomber (Doherty 2011).
6. About female bombers utilized by the Taliban in Afghanistan (Dearing 2010).
7. Viv Groskop’s piece is about the Chechen bombers and culture.
8. This is similar to Westlund’s (2009) later account of answerability and respon-
sibility for the self, but Benson states his is a weak substantive notion of self-
worth, whereas Westlund argues hers is a procedural account since the agent
‘may even manifest a lack of self-respect’ (37), yet still be able to answer for
herself.
9. A broad range of theorists – not just autonomy theorists – have argued that
the context and content are important for decision-making. There has been
much discussion, for instance, about adaptive preferences and how one’s pref-
erences can change depending on what one can expect to get or to be in
one’s circumstances (Nussbaum 2000). Others have criticized that – in relation
to forced marriages – there is a failure to distinguish formal and substantive
‘exit rights’ (Okin 2002). Procedural theorists in the relational camp would
certainly wish to acknowledge the importance of these contextual aspects, but
substantive theorists want to go further and include this in the assessment of
autonomy, as I will go on to show.
10. Oshana’s four sufficiency conditions for autonomy are (1) critical reflection
(to determine authenticity in a similar way to most ‘internalists’, such as
Gerald Dworkin or John Christman); (2) procedural independence (where
this requires non-coercion or non-manipulation, but also demands certain
substantive standards to actually meet the formality stipulation); (3) access
to a range of relevant options (the condition is not met by having an endless
supply of non-autonomous options or where the options only satisfy brute
desires); (4) social-relational properties (the individual must be in a society
that allows her to pursue her goals in social and psychological security)
(1998, 94–95).
11. Meyers’ characterization of the levels of autonomy are the following: ‘I
shall say someone is minimally autonomous when this person possesses at
least some disposition to consult his or her self and at least some ability to
act on his or her own beliefs, desires, and so forth, but when this person
lacks some of the other skills from the repertory of autonomy skills, when
the autonomy skills the person possesses are poorly developed and poorly
coordinated, and when this person possesses few independent competen-
cies that could promote the exercise of available autonomy skills. I shall
say that someone is fully autonomous when this person possesses a compete
repertory of well developed and well coordinated autonomy skills coupled
with many and varied independent competencies. Medially autonomous
people range along a spectrum between these two poles’ (Meyers 1989,
170). Meyers’s framework relates to her notions of ‘episodic’, ‘program-
matic’ and ‘narrowly programmatic’ autonomy (1989, 48). She illustrates
that in oppressive situations (such as feminine socialization), high degrees
of episodic autonomy can be achieved (doing what one most wants in
a particular situation), and narrowly programmatic autonomy can be
achieved (decisions on a life partner for instance), but programmatic
autonomy (whether to marry at all or whether to be a mother) are compro-
mised (Mackenzie and Stoljar 2000).
12. Responsibility on Wolf’s account depends on the freedom to appreciate the
True and the Good, to discern cognitive beliefs and moral values about the
world. While she accepts this commits us to objectivity (it ‘implies the exist-
ence of nonarbitrary standards of correctness’ – 1990, 124), she denies that
this is as onerous as we might initially think, claiming there is no privi-
leged position to determine freedom, no guarantee that we can or will see
things aright, but equally no reason to doubt that the ‘powers [to do so,
including those of logic, but also imagination and perception] are at least
partly open to us’ (2008, 273). Thus, her position is not that there needs to
be an optimal and complete set of values or that they be knowable from a
culture-independent view, but that ‘the agent be capable of forming better
values rather than worse ones, good value judgements rather than bad ones,
just insofar as there are better and worse choices and judgments to be made.’
And she goes on to say that ‘According to the Reason View, the responsible
agent must be in a position that allows the reasons she has for a choice to
be governed by the reasons there are. But if the reasons there are fail to
determine a uniquely right or best choice, the agent is no less responsible
[or, to extend it for purposes of this chapter, autonomous] an agent for that.’
(1990, 125)
126 Herjeet Marway
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7
Women Raping Men
Iain Law
Consider the following scenario: Jo and Sam are acquaintances. They

have met on several occasions through mutual friends and got along
perfectly fine, but they do not know each other well. Sam moved to
London a few months ago and now by coincidence Jo is doing the same
thing. Jo does not know anyone else in London any better than Sam, and
so Jo asks Sam – via e-mail or Facebook, or something like that – whether
it would be OK to stay for a few days while looking for a flat to rent. Sam
replies that it will be no problem, adding that if Jo would like to, they
can both sleep in Sam’s bed, since the alternative is that Jo will have to
sleep on the floor. Jo replies that the floor will be fine. When Jo arrives
in London, Sam again tries to hint at the possibility of their having sex.
Every time this happens, Jo tries to make it clear that this is not going
to happen. Sam’s overtures are of the kind that can almost plausibly be
written off when they fail as only joking, just banter between friends.
Jo’s lack of interest, however, should be perfectly clear. Jo finds a flat, but
cannot move in until a few days later. To celebrate, Sam persuades Jo to
go out to dinner. Sam buys drinks for Jo throughout the evening, and
when they get home once again suggests that they have sex. Jo is not so
drunk as to have had a change of mind, and goes to sleep on the floor.
Later in the night, Jo wakes up to find that Sam is also on the floor and
has commenced having penetrative, penis-in-vagina sex with Jo.
Here we have a case in which penetrative sex is forced on Jo, and Jo
does not consent (and has indeed expressed lack of consent clearly).
The question I would like to raise about this case is this: do the genders
of Sam and Jo matter in any morally relevant way? Further, should
their genders make any legal difference? I am going to argue that the
answer to both questions is ‘no’. I will go on to argue that the kinds of
reasons that typically get offered for thinking that the answer to these
129
130 Iain Law
questions is ‘yes’ exemplify assumptions about gender and about male

and female sexuality that are damaging to women as well as to men. I
will also consider some philosophical arguments concerning how we
should understand what rape is, and critically evaluate them in light
of my view that rape should be a gender-neutral concept. I should say
at the outset that while I want to argue that it is possible for a man
to be raped by a woman, and that this does in fact happen, I do not
want to assert that the raping of men by women is as widespread or as
serious a problem as the raping of women by men. The available data,
of which more later, show clearly that it is not. That rape is usually
thought of as a crime perpetrated against women by men is no surprise
given that the overwhelming majority of cases of rape are of this kind.
Furthermore, rape of women by men can be thought of as exemplifying
and contributing to some varieties of gender inequality: it reflects struc-
tural power imbalances that make violence against women both easier
and more socially accepted, and it can be used (against men by men,
notably) as means of demeaning and weakening by feminizing them.
None of these features belong to cases of rape of men by women, and
I acknowledge this. All I want to argue for in this paper is that rape
as an ethical and legal category can and should include sex forced on
men by women without their consent. As a society we should accept
the possibility and reality of women raping men, and our legal systems
should also recognize this. As I will be arguing, that it is not (at least
in many jurisdictions and in the minds of most people) has bad conse-
quences for women as well as men. Notably for the concerns of this
volume, I will argue that the attitudes and cultural beliefs that make it
hard for people to accept that women can rape men go hand in hand
with denial of female agency, and with other sexist stereotypes that are
harmful both to men and women.
If you ask people whether they think it is possible for a woman to
rape a man,1 typical responses include puzzlement or outright denial.
Someone may try to think of a way in which a woman can penetrate
a man, using an object, perhaps, and say that they suppose that some-
thing like that could be thought of as rape. The vast majority, when
they admit that men can be raped at all, think of men being raped
by other men. If encouraged to think of possible scenarios in which a
woman has penetrative sex with a man against his will and without his
consent, much the most common response (in my experience at least) is
to deny – often with a distinct air of finding the suggestion funny – that
such a thing is possible. Usually two reasons are given for thinking that
this is so: that rape requires force or strength, and men are stronger than
Women Raping Men 131
women, and that to effect penetrative sex the man must have an erec-
tion, and if he has an erection, he must be willing to have sex.2
It is not difficult to see the flaws in these reasons. Considering the
first, even though it is true that on the whole men tend to be stronger
than women, it is not true that all men are stronger than all women.
But often physical strength is of little relevance: threats of force can
be effective against the strong as well as the weak, depending more on
the perceived willingness and ability of the person issuing the threats
to actually cause damage than anything else. It is perfectly possible for
weaker person A to dominate and abuse stronger person B physically
simply because A is willing to actually use force against B in a way that
B is not willing to do. Further, not all cases of rape involve force or
threats of violence at all. (Beyond the violence inherent in rape, that is
to say. I have in mind here cases of the kind discussed in Conly 2004,
which I talk about in more detail below.) Sam does not use force or
threats against Jo in my opening scenario, and at least when Sam is
portrayed as male and Jo as female no one has any difficulty in iden-
tifying what Sam does as rape. Considering the second, it is not the
case that consent and arousal always go hand in hand. David Archard
stresses the fact that consenting is something we do – an action, rather
than a desire or an emotion: ‘the giving of consent is accomplished in
and by an intentional act. Consent is an act rather than a state of mind.
I do not consent to p by wishing that p, or by believing that p should be
permitted. I consent to p by some deliberate act’ (Archard 1997, 275).
This helps us see that even if a man has an erection, and even if, as a
matter of fact, he is willing to have sex, unless he has acted in such a
way as to communicate this willingness to his would-be partner, he has
not consented. Some may respond by saying that so long as he is in fact
willing, the fact that he has not expressed his consent does not matter
all that much. I disagree, but at this point I want to discuss another
common belief that is relevant here: that if the man in question has an
erection, it is safe to assume that he is willing to have sex (even if he
has not performed an action of consenting). Leaving aside the question
of whether it is morally permissible to proceed on the basis of this sort
of ‘willingness’ rather than requiring consent as a necessary condition
for morally permissible sex, it is simply not true that physical arousal
always indicates willingness to have sex. Unwanted arousal is some-
thing that both genders can experience, and for both genders the fact
that their body is in some sense ‘willing’ to have sex does not mean –
and must not be taken to mean – that they themselves are willing to
have sex.
132 Iain Law
The myth that arousal means willingness to have sex is one that is
damaging to both men and women. In the past – and perhaps to some
extent even today – women have suffered because of the combination
of this myth and another: that if a woman got pregnant, she must have
had an orgasm. Put together, these false beliefs led to women and girls
who became pregnant as a result of being raped – traumatizing enough
in itself – being accused of not having been raped at all. If you got preg-
nant, you must have had an orgasm, and if you had an orgasm, you
must have enjoyed it and been aroused, and if you enjoyed it and were
aroused, then you were not really raped. Echoes of mistaken views like
these are detectable even today, for example, in the comments of the
Republican politician Todd Akin, which became justly notorious when
he was standing for re-election to the US Congress in 2012: ‘If it’s a
legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing
[i.e. pregnancy] down’.3 Once again, the implication is that if a woman
does get pregnant, she cannot have been ‘legitimately’ raped. Even apart
from its damaging effects when combined with false beliefs concerning
how women get pregnant, the association between arousal and willing-
ness to have sex creates distress, confusion and self-directed disgust and
blame in women who experience arousal against their will when they
are raped. They can believe that because they felt this arousal, they must
in some way have wanted what happened, and attribute responsibility
to themselves as well as or even instead of to their rapist. If we could
as a society learn that arousal can be involuntary and unwanted, the
product of mere physiology, it would be better for both men and women
who have sex forced on them without their consent. Women would be
relieved of a burden of guilt and shame that they should not feel, and
the wrong done to men would be more easily acknowledged.
Another common reaction to the suggestion that a man could be
raped by a woman is a straightforward assumption that men cannot
be raped because they are always willing to have sex. This reaction is
not universal, of course, but it is not uncommon, and I will argue that
it reflects another cultural belief that is very commonly held: that men
are, by default, seekers of sex (the implication being that women are not
active seekers of sex but rather guardians and gatekeepers of their own
sexuality). Try the following experiment: look for a story concerning
a man or a boy who is made to have sex with a woman (or in the case
of the boy if he is under the age of consent, is persuaded to have sex
to which he cannot in law consent). Look for an online source for the
story that permits people to comment on the story, and which does
not moderate comments a great deal. I claim that if you find such a
story and some comments on it, it is extremely likely that among the
comments there will be some expressing the view that the man who
had sex forced on him was lucky, or that the boy who had sex to which
he could not consent is to be envied for his good fortune. Here is one
example. The news website RT.com/news reported in 2010 the case of a
man in Russia who broke into a hairdresser’s intending to rob it. Instead,
he was caught by the proprietor, ‘Olga’, who kept him captive for three
days, fed him Viagra and forced him to have sex with her. The would-be
burglar was released after three days and went to the police. Olga was
arrested and tried for sexual assault. On the website, there are several
comments. Many, to be fair, express the view that even burglars and
criminals do not deserve to be raped. One comment, by a Facebook user
named ‘Jo Erson’, takes a different view. It says ‘Jail time for this! Most
guys only dream about this happening to them. Some guys have all the
luck’. It is the most popular comment on the story.
Reactions like this, I suggest, are the product of a widespread cultural
assumption that men are, more or less, willing to have sex with anyone
at any time. Even scholarly papers on sexual consent can exemplify this
kind of assumption. Archard’s paper cited above throughout portrays
men as the ones who should seek consent, and women as the ones
who either give or withhold it. I doubt very much that Archard thinks
that men are always, or even usually, the ones who desire and pursue
sex, while women only decide whether to accede to men’s desires or
not, but that is the impression that his paper can give – if the reports
of the undergraduate students to whom I have assigned it as required
reading are anything to go by. Laurie Shrage claims that even if we do
not consciously or individually agree, as a society we have what she
calls ‘cultural beliefs’ concerning sex and gender roles (Shrage 1989,
351–352). Among these are the beliefs that men are naturally suited
to taking dominant roles and positions (Shrage 1989, 354–355), and
that human beings, particularly men, possess strong sex drives that are
both difficult and dangerous to repress (Shrage 1989, 352–353). Taken
together, these beliefs add up to imply that men are, in general, pursuers
of sex. They are the ones who try to get women to have sex with them,
and women are given the role of saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to their advances.
It would be better for both men and women if society could develop
in such a way that these ceased to be our cultural beliefs. Both genders
are misrepresented by them, and relations between them damaged as
a result. It is insulting to men to think of them as pursuing sex almost
indiscriminately, and as always being willing to have sex. It is a denial
of women’s sexuality and agency to allocate to them a largely passive
134 Iain Law
role in which their range of available actions is reduced to consenting or

withholding consent. Women, like men, can actively pursue sex. Men,
like women, can decline to have it when it is offered to them.
So it is possible for a woman to impose penetrative sex on a man
without his consent. Some studies have been done which aim to find
out how common this and other kinds of sexual assault are. The United
States Centre for Disease Control (CDC) conducted the ‘National
Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey’ in 2011. In a 2014 publica-
tion summarizing the findings of that survey, Breiding et al. report that
in the United States more than seven million men have at least once in
their life been ‘made to penetrate’ someone else (Breiding et al. 2014,
Table 1). ‘Made to penetrate’ is the CDC’s term for any circumstance in
which someone has to penetrate someone else without consenting to
doing so. It obviously includes the imposition of penetrative sex on a
man without his consent of the kind that I have been discussing. The
CDC includes statistics about people being ‘made to penetrate’ under
‘other sexual violence’ rather than as a form of rape. If it were reclas-
sified as a form of rape, the number of men in the United States who
are classified has having been raped at least once in their life would rise
considerably, from 1.7% of the population to 8.4%.
It is clear, then, that the sort of scenario I opened with can and does
happen. The way the CDC classifies such events raises a question,
though. Should we classify an act by a woman of imposing penetrative
sex on a man without his consent as rape? The law concerning rape and
other forms of sexual assault obviously varies from one jurisdiction to
another. In some jurisdictions, the definition of rape written into statute
law is gender neutral, for example, in Norway. Section 192 of Norway’s
penal code states that
Any person who
a) engages in sexual activity by means of violence or threats, or

b) engages in sexual activity with any person who is unconscious or
incapable for any other reason of resisting the act, or
c) by means of violence or threats compels any person to engage in
sexual activity with another person, or to carry out similar actions
with himself or herself,
Shall be guilty of rape (Norwegian Ministry of Justice 2006).

There are elements in this definition of rape that I might question, but
its gender neutrality strikes me as admirable. It is more common to find
that rape is defined in such a way that only a man (or any other person
with a penis) could possibly be a rapist, or failing that, defined in such

a way that only acts of penetration count as rape. This, for example, is
the definition of rape in the law of England and Wales at the time of
writing:
1 Rape
(1) A person (A) commits an offence if –
(a) he intentionally penetrates the vagina, anus or mouth of
another person (B) with his penis,
(b) B does not consent to the penetration, and
(c) A does not reasonably believe that B consents. (Sexual
Offences Act 2003, 1.1)
Similar definitions are used in the relevant statutes in Scotland and

Northern Ireland. While these definitions do make it possible for a man
to be a victim of rape, the rapist can only be another man. This defini-
tion is wider than some. New Zealand’s relevant statute stipulates that
rape is the non-consensual ‘penetration of person B’s genitalia by person
A’s penis’, excluding forced oral or anal sex from the category of rape.
Israel’s definition explicitly makes women the only possible victims of
rape. Other definitions, such as in French law, are wider still, allowing
that penetration that has not been consented to should count as rape,
even if it is not a penis that is used to penetrate. It is quite common for
statutes to reserve the word ‘rape’ for penetration with a penis, even if
other parts of the relevant statutes criminalize other forms of penetra-
tion without consent. In England and Wales, again, there is an offence
of ‘assault by penetration’, which, identically with rape, is punish-
able by imprisonment for life. We might think that so long as the law
treats these offences with equal seriousness, it does not much matter
what they are called. We could employ the word ‘rape’ only for using a
penis to penetrate someone who does not consent, and as long as other
offences which are morally equivalent are treated by the law as equally
deserving of prosecution and punishment, maybe there is no harm. But
the law of England and Wales does not at present do this. Although
‘assault by penetration’ can be punished as severely as rape, the kind
of non-consensual sex I described at the start would – if the person
who did not consent was a man – be describable in English law only as
‘causing a person to engage in sexual activity without consent’, while
if that person were a woman it would be classed as rape. It should be
clear from the argument given above why I find this state of affairs to be
unsatisfactory. At least so far as one morally and legally relevant factor is
136 Iain Law
concerned, namely the absence of consent, the two kinds of offence are
identical. Only if there is some other morally or legally relevant factor
in which they differ could there be any justification for classifying the
wrongdoing or the crime differently.
I will make a brief digression from my main focus here to briefly
discuss one possible candidate for such a factor: harm. Some ethicists
argue that consent (or the lack of it) is the only thing that matters to
the moral permissibility of sex (given certain background conditions).
Archard sums this view up in two principles. The principle of consen-
suality states that ‘a [sexual] practice, P, is morally permissible if all
those who are parties to P are competent to consent, give their valid
consent, and the interests of no other parties are significantly harmed’.
The principle of non-consensuality states that ‘a [sexual] practice, P,
is morally impermissible if at least one of those who are parties to P,
and who are competent to consent, does not give valid consent, even
if the interests of no other parties are significantly harmed’ (Archard
1998, 2).
Not everyone agrees, however, that sex which is harmful is made
permissible by consent. Within the bondage, discipline, sadomaso-
chism community there are two broad schools of thought on the issue.
Advocates of ‘risk-aware consensual kink’ argue that so long as consent
has been given by someone who is aware of the harm that they risk
being done to them or that will be done to them, sex which causes (or
risks causing) harm is morally permissible. Advocates of the rival ‘safe,
sane and consensual’ approach disagree, thinking that unsafe practices
are ones that we ought morally to avoid even if everyone participating
consents. We need not decide that dispute, however, to consider the
possibility that when consent is not given, harm done can be a separate
wrong-making factor. If person A does something to person B without
B’s consent, that may be wrong (depending on what the deed was),
but if A harms B in doing it, that seems to make A’s action worse. That
would provide one reason for separating into two different categories of
wrongdoing sexual assaults that involve penetration of the victim and
those that do not, if we thought that being penetrated is or occasions
greater harm than being forced to penetrate someone else. This may
not be an implausible suggestion. I suggest, however, that it is clearer
to have a single concept and word for sex that is imposed on someone
without their consent: rape. We could then consider the degree to which
particular acts or forms of rape included additional harm (harm in addi-
tion to the harm of having non-consensual sex imposed, that is) as
an additional wrong-making or aggravating factor, perhaps justifying

longer sentences and the like.
This digression concerning harm dealt with, I now turn to the question
of what a gender-neutral definition of rape should be. This might look
easy: ‘Person A rapes person B if person A has sex with person B without
person B’s consent’. But several problems remain. First, it is difficult to
pin down with any precision which activities should be counted as ‘sex’,
which may explain the prevalence in statute law of references to ‘pene-
tration’, which may be easier to define neatly. As well as that, there are
considerable difficulties in specifying what counts as ‘consent’. Different
accounts of these matters will yield different definitions of rape.
Two major contributions to debates over these issues are made in
papers by Sarah Conly and Michelle Anderson. Conly asks whether sex
procured via non-violent threats can count as rape, and if so, when and
how? Anderson asks what legal model of rape we should adopt that will
allow us to capture all types of rape within our model.
Conly is concerned with what Igor Primoratz treats not as rape but as
a kind of sexual harassment (Primoratz 1999, 163–164), in which one
person gets another to have sex with them by threatening the other
not with violence but with various forms of emotional harm. The issue
is, can it be rape even when not only is no force or violence used, but
there is no threat of force or violence (again, other than the violence
inherent in rape), and the person who is threatened decides to have sex
in response to what the person issuing the threats says? Conly thinks
that the answer is ‘yes’, but not in all such scenarios. Person A counts
as raping person B by pressuring them into having sex only if certain
conditions4 are met (Conly 2004, 104–110):
● A intends to pressure B into having sex.

● The threat must be one of some kind of significant harm. If B agrees to
sex with A after A threatens to bring about some trivially small harm
to B, A does not rape B.
● The threat must be an illegitimate one. There are some threats we are
allowed to make. Threatening to break up with someone if they will
not have sex with you is legitimate, at least in some relationships.
Getting someone to have sex by making such a threat is ‘less than
admirable’ but it is not rape. (Conly 2004, 108)
So getting sex by using pressure and threats of an emotional or other-

wise non-violent nature can, according to Conly, amount to rape, but
138 Iain Law
in quite constrained circumstances. Even if it does not count as rape,

though, it might still be immoral in less serious ways:
We need to expand our conceptual framework and our terminology

so that we can capture greater differences than we typically do. There
is a cultural tradition which has divided sexual intercourse into either
morally unacceptable rape or morally acceptable non rape. The truth
is that there are many finer distinctions which we need to recog-
nize and to which we need to develop a sensitivity. We do this in
other areas, where we recognize actions of deceit, hurtfulness, and
damage which are not the worst of transgressions and yet which are
not morally neutral. (Conly 2004, 120)
Anderson is concerned with what the law classifies as rape. She distin-
guishes four models that either have been or could be used:
1. ‘Common law’: both lack of consent from the victim and force (or
the threat of it) from the rapist are required for rape. (Anderson 2005,
1403)
2. The ‘no’ model: the victim is required to say ‘no’ for it to be rape (or
to demonstrate lack of consent by struggling, as in the common law
model). (Anderson 2005, 1404)
3. The ‘yes’ model: unless the victim says ‘Yes’, it is rape, unless the
alleged victim demonstrated consent non-verbally, i.e. ‘said “yes”’ via
body language. (Anderson 2005, 1405–1406)
4. The negotiation model: penetration is only permissible after negotia-
tion between the two parties, and except in the case of long-standing
relationships with well-understood non-verbal ‘negotiations’, this
negotiation must be verbal. (Anderson 2005, 1407)
Anderson argues that only the negotiation model will capture all
cases of rape, because of the psychological effects that often accom-
pany being raped, such as ‘peritraumatic paralysis’ and ‘peritraumatic
dissociation’(Anderson 2005, 1415–1416). These can result in the
inability to speak or actively resist. This clearly creates problems for
the ‘no’ model, and Anderson argues that it also creates them for the
‘yes’ model, because of its willingness to allow for the possibility of a
non-verbal ‘yes’. She quotes a sentence from one advocate of the ‘yes’
model, Stephen Schulhofer, several times: ‘If she doesn’t say “no”, and
if her silence is combined with passionate kissing, hugging, and sexual
touching, it is usually sensible to infer actual willingness’ (Schulhofer
1998, 272, quoted in Anderson 2005, 1405, 1406, 1413, 1420–1421, and
1431).
Anderson argues that this element in the ‘yes’ model means that it will
fail to categorize some rapes as rapes, because if the victim experiences
the kind of peritraumatic paralysis that she describes at the moment
when the encounter moves from ‘passionate kissing’ and so forth (to
which she consents) to attempts at penetration (to which she does not),
the ‘yes’ model as described by Schulhofer has to classify the encounter
as, if not consensual in fact, one in which the man was ‘sensible’ in
(mistakenly) inferring actual willingness. It seems to me that Anderson
is a little uncharitable to the ‘yes’ model. She allows a single sentence in
one book to damn the entire approach. Let us suppose that a defender
of the ‘yes’ model thought that Anderson has a good point, and that this
sentence should not be part of their view. They could simply revise that
part in such a way as to remove the implication that they want to avoid.
After all, Anderson’s own ‘negotiation’ model will have to acknowledge
that some ‘negotiations’ are briefer than others. There must presum-
ably be some minimum amount of negotiation on her view, and this
minimum is likely to be barely distinguishable from mutually seeking
and receiving a ‘yes’. That said, her model has the virtue of not implying
that a bare ‘yes’ is all that could be wished. More negotiation in order
to avoid ambiguity and misunderstanding is to be desired, and the ‘yes’
model may fail to include this element.
One feature of Anderson’s account that strikes me as notable is her focus
on penetration. She observes, correctly, that someone might consent to
sexual activity other than penetrative sex, but not consent to penetra-
tive sex; however, she couches her discussion of this point wholly in
terms of whether or not (in a heterosexual context) the woman consents
to be penetrated. (It is, perhaps, significant that there is not a readily
available active verb to describe the action of bringing about penetra-
tion on the part of the person being penetrated. Penetration is treated
by the English language as an action even if the person who does the
penetrating does it against their will or even while unconscious.) Her
‘negotiation’ model, although it places a requirement on both partners
to express clearly (usually verbally) what they want and are willing to do,
and despite the fact that she claims that it is gender neutral (Anderson
2005, 1424), places the moral burden entirely on the man, since it is
the act of penetration (not the gender-neutral act of bringing penetra-
tion about) that is made permissible by the giving of consent or left
impermissible by its absence. For this reason, I worry that her account
fails in its aim of capturing all cases of rape, because it risks omitting just
140 Iain Law
the kinds of cases with which I have been concerned in this paper. It
also will not include cases that do not involve penetration. If a woman
A imposes non-penetrative sex on a woman B to which B does not
consent, B has not been raped according to Anderson’s account. I think
that this is a flaw, but I do not have space here to decide the issue noted
above of what should count as ‘sex’ for the purpose of identifying what
should count as ‘non-consensual sex’. There are forms of sexual activity
which fall short (to use the popular but somewhat obscure metaphor of
distance to sex: one act counting as ‘going further’ than another etc.) of
actual sex, and which would not count as rape if imposed on someone
without their consent. Anderson, by implication at least, thinks that any
and all non-penetrative activities should fall on the not-rape side of this
division, while I disagree. I think that if it counts as sex, then imposing
it –whatever it is – on someone without their consent counts as rape.
And it seems odd to say that a lesbian whose sexual activities never
involve penetration has never had sex despite it seeming to her that she
has had quite a bit. But I cannot definitively settle this issue here, and
I suspect that there is no clear answer, and that it will be necessary to
draw a somewhat arbitrary line in the end.
My conclusion, incomplete though it therefore is, is that as a society,
and also in the relevant laws we should adopt an understanding of rape
that is gender neutral and which incorporates the best elements from
the suggestions of Conly and Anderson: sex is morally permissible only
after negotiation between all parties in which no party makes use of
illegitimate threats and after which all parties consent. A model like this
would acknowledge the reality of the fact that women can rape men, but
would serve the needs and interests of men and women alike.
Notes
1. In this paper I will speak of men and women, understanding those terms to
include transmen and transwomen. There are some reasons for thinking that
this is unsatisfactory, and some may criticize my usage. It could be argued
that I should speak instead of persons with penises and persons with vaginas.
I think –although I am not perfectly sure of this – that everything I say about
how men can be raped by women will include all persons with penises. If I am
mistaken, I apologize for my ignorance.
2. I should note, in justice to the people whom I have asked about this, that it is
quite common for them to realize that there is something wrong with these
assumptions as soon as they articulate them. Often the same people whose
immediate response was to deny the possibility of women raping men find
themselves reconsidering that response as soon as they bring their reasons for
thinking it out into the open and examine them.
3. This remark was widely reported. See, for example, the BBC’s report: http://
www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-19319240.
4. Conly includes ‘choice’ in her list of necessary conditions, but her discussion
under that heading makes it clear that this is a mistake on her part: her point
is that someone may have been raped even if they chose to have sex rather
than suffer the consequences of not doing so. So it is not that choosing to
have sex is a necessary condition for being raped; rather, it is that choosing to
have sex rather than face the threatened alternative can still count as being
raped.
References
Anderson, M. 2005. ‘Negotiating sex’, Southern California Law Review, 78,
1401–1438.
Archard, D.1997. ‘A nod’s as good as a wink: consent, convention and reasonable
belief’, Legal Theory, 3, 273–290.
Archard, D. 1998. Sexual Consent. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Breiding et al. 2014. ‘Prevalence and Characteristics of Sexual Violence, Stalking,
and Intimate Partner Violence Victimization – National Intimate Partner and
Sexual Violence Survey, United States, 2011’ Morbidity and Mortality Weekly
Report, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Available at: http://www.
cdc.gov/mmwr/, 63, 1018.
Conly, S. 2004. ‘Seduction, Rape and coercion’, Ethics, 115, 96–121.
Norwegian Ministry of Justice. 2006. The General Civil Penal Code, unofficial
translation into English. Available at: http://www.ub.uio.no/ujur/ulovdata/
lov-19020522-010-eng.pdf.
Primoratz, I. 1999. Ethics and Sex. Oxford: Routledge.
Sexual Offences Act 2003. http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/42/pdfs/
ukpga_20030042_en.pdf.
Shrage, L. 1989. ‘Should feminists oppose prostitution?’, Ethics 99, 347–361.
Part III
Governance, Violence and
Agency
8
Andrea Dworkin’s Pornography: Men
Possessing Women – A Reassessment
Bob Brecher
Introduction
Published in 1981, Dworkin’s Pornography: Men Possessing Women appeared

to have changed the intellectual landscape – as well as changing many
people’s lives. Pornography, she argued, not only constitutes violence
against women but it constitutes the main conduit for such violence,
of which rape is at once the prime example and the central image. In,
literally, re-presenting violence as sex, pornography at once instanti-
ates and encourages the misogynist violence on which patriarchy relies
and which it expresses. It is thus patriarchy’s most powerful weapon.
Feminists’ single most important task, therefore, is to deal with pornog-
raphy. After the initial furore, however, the skirmishes – even battles –
the book initiated both within and about feminism soon died down. By
the early 1990s, it was generally seen, at best, as a diversion. Today, who
would argue that pornography is patriarchy’s central weapon? Indeed,
who would argue that pornography is a political issue at all? Or that the
relations between women and men are the central political issue?
The facts about any putative causal relationship of pornography to
rape have been endlessly disputed: the outcome is inconclusive. The
psychologists and sociologists have all had their similarly inconclu-
sive say. Censorship is out of the question. Dworkin and Catharine
McKinnon’s 1992 Model Antipornography Civil Rights Ordinance is a curio
of American second-wave feminism, as is Dworkin’s book. Pornography
is not a political issue. Nor indeed is feminism: equality has been more
or less achieved and the suggestion that patriarchy remains crucial is
best understood as nostalgia for a different age.
Or so it seemed until the recent and welcome resurgence of feminist
activism among young women.
145
146 Bob Brecher
I shall argue, then, that Dworkin has much to teach us in today’s neo-
liberal world. Her argument is not primarily a causal one, despite some-
times reading as if it were. The legal route she chose as the ground on
which to fight may well be a dead end, but that does nothing to under-
mine the force of her underlying analysis. It may even be that pornog-
raphy is less pivotal than she thought, but even then, the form of her
analysis and the substance of her argument, far from being rhetorical
and/or fallacious, are exactly what we need to counter the depredations of
neo-liberal ‘common sense’. That it was difficult for her to find a language
beyond that of liberalism to express her argument is no excuse either for
ignoring or misinterpreting it. In places her argument certainly remains
within liberal constraints. In others, however, it is profoundly anti-liberal,
but this internal tension does not detract from its pertinence.
What is immediately striking is how little attention has been paid to
Dworkin’s actual analysis. Take, for example, two representative collec-
tions, the first a committed anti-pornography text, the second a more
‘balanced’ one. Edited by a formidable campaigner, Catherine Itzin,
Pornography: Women, Violence and Civil Liberties: A Radical New View
(1992), contains 26 articles, only two of which (Kappeler; Cameron and
Frazer) engage with Dworkin’s analysis (and even then not in detail)
rather than with its perceived implications. Drucilla Cornell’s 2000 collec-
tion, Feminism and Pornography, while including two articles by Dworkin
herself, contains nothing about Pornography among its 39 articles. Alison
Assiter’s 1989 Pornography, Feminism and the Individual is an honourable
exception in its analysis of how pornography exemplifies sexism (for all
that it argues, like her later work [Assiter and Avedon, 1993], against both
censorship and Dworkin’s emphasis on pornography). A 2012 Google
search for ‘Andrea Dworkin pornography critique’ brings up some 3,640
items: none of the first hundred or so address what she herself identifies
as her argument. So what does she actually say?
Dworkin’s basic argument
Here is how Dworkin opens her book:
This is a book about the meaning of pornography and the system of

power in which pornography exists. Its particular theme is the power
of men in pornography. (Dworkin 1981, 9; my emphases)
And that power is of course the power of violence: both direct violence
against women – historically and geographically ubiquitous – and the
Andrea Dworkin’s Pornography 147
more indirect violence of silencing, constraining, manipulating and

shaping women’s lives – not just their sexual lives, of course, but their
lives tout court. The fifth short paragraph on that opening page reads,
With respect to both obscenity and the First Amendment: this is not
a book about what should or should not be shown; it is a book about
the meaning of what is being shown. (ibid.)
What could be clearer? The fact that Dworkin would later argue about
what should or should not be shown without legal redress does not
alter the fact that this text concerns the meaning of pornography. As
for the charge of essentialism – boys are culturally moulded into patri-
archy through pornography, an argument she certainly makes in the
book (pp. 48–69) – the final sentence of her Preface suggests at least a
tension between the essentialism suggested both here and elsewhere,
and her opening insistence that, quoting Christabel Pankhurst (1913),
‘Men have a simple remedy for this state of things. They can alter their
way of life’ (Dworkin 1981, 9). Dworkin’s topic, then, is exactly what her
title announces: men possessing women.1 That is at once the meaning
of pornography and (thus) what pornography is. Pornography is not
simply those artefacts (films, images, texts) in which ‘the graphic depic-
tion of whores’ (p. 10) takes place: it is also and at once the material
reality in which those artefacts consist and which they exemplify.
How should we understand this claim? Crucially, it is not the simple
causal claim that pornography causes sexual violence, and in particular
rape, although – as I shall go on to argue – some sort of causal claim is
involved. But it is a far more complex one. Nor is it a claim about the
conditions of production of visual pornography; about what is and what
is not pornographic; about whether or not, and if so how, pornography
should be censored; or even about what, if anything, is to be done about
pornography’s role in at once exemplifying and helping instantiate
male sexual violence. Dworkin has plenty of things to say in the book
about the first two of these – especially about the enculturation of boys
and the torture of women in the production of pornography – but that
is not its primary subject. She also had much to say elsewhere about the
last three (censorship, how feminists should use law and the prospects
for men’s changing). Certainly one might wish that she had been more
careful to separate out, both conceptually and textually, those sets of
claims from that about pornography’s function. Nonetheless, it is hardly
difficult to do so. Nor will it do to read this text through the prism of her
later writing, claims and campaigns.
148 Bob Brecher
Part of the apparent difficulty lies in Dworkin’s background liberal

assumptions. She does not articulate the details of her view about ‘the
meaning of what is being shown’ because, working within an overall
liberal framework as she does, she sees no need to do so. Three difficul-
ties thus tend to hobble her argument. First, the liberal model of harm
is one that cannot articulate harms that do not accrue to specified indi-
viduals: hence her stress on the conditions of production of pornog-
raphy. Second, it assumes a unilinear notion of causation in the social
world: hence the role of her psychological-sociological claims. Third,
there is a commitment, especially in American liberalism, to the remedy
of law and in particular to seeking such remedy in terms of the First
Amendment and ‘free speech’: hence her later work. But her insight in
this text transcends all these limitations.
To show how, I shall first say something about cause and effect and
then discuss an anti-liberal view of harm. Finally, I shall return to
Dworkin’s text.
Cause and effect

Already in 1992, Deborah Cameron and Elizabeth Frazer made it clear
‘what is wrong with framing the pornography issue in this way’, [i.e.
as an argument about cause and effect]: ‘feminists can move beyond
simplistic notions of cause and effect without conceding the argument
altogether’ (Cameron and Frazer 1982, 359). They argue, first – and
rightly – that causal accounts of action are self-contradictory: if what
you do were caused in the way that the events in the physical world
are, then you would not have acted at all, but merely behaved. Second,
direct and unilinear causal connections are not the only connections
between actions and events in the social world. Again, they are right.
Their suggestion that sexual sadists take on a culturally available role –
that theirs is a performance – is particularly apposite: and access to
that role is available in and through a set of meanings encapsulated in
pornography.
Let me clarify the sorts of connections they propose. One response
to the Holocaust has been to regard it as the apotheosis of the
Enlightenment. What might this mean? Clearly the claim is not that
the Enlightenment straightforwardly caused the Holocaust, in the same
sort of way that anti-Semitism was one of its causes. The latter claim
argues, first, that in the absence of anti-Semitism, the Holocaust would
not have taken place – anti-Semitism is a necessary condition of the
Holocaust, and, second, that anti-Semitism was enough – in the circum-
stances concerned – to bring about the Holocaust. Anti-Semitism is
a sufficient condition of the Holocaust. That is to say, the claim that

anti-Semitism caused the Holocaust is like the claim that a particular
earthquake caused such-and-such a tsunami, or that the beaker of water
turned blue because I added copper sulphate. In short, the claim about
anti-Semitism – a social scientific claim – approximates to the causal
claims of natural science (albeit in more complex form).
So how is the alleged connection between the Enlightenment and
the Holocaust to be understood? Certainly it is not a question of the
Enlightenment’s being a sufficient condition of the Holocaust. The claim
is not that, given the Enlightenment, the Holocaust had to happen (in
the absence of countervailing conditions). Is it then a question of the
Enlightenment’s being a necessary condition of the Holocaust, the claim
that the Holocaust would not have occurred had it not been for the
Enlightenment? Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer come close to
this position: ‘In the most general sense of progressive thought, the
Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and estab-
lishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster
triumphant’ (1973, p. 1). The problem, however, is that the notion of a
necessary condition is far less precise than that of a sufficient condition.
Consider again the copper sulphate’s turning the water blue. Its intro-
duction into the beaker of water is only one of the necessary conditions
of the water’s turning blue, and it is necessary only given the circum-
stances – someone could have poured blue ink into it. That is to say, those
conditions are picked out as necessary which in some way stand out from
all the other background conditions. Thus the Enlightenment is under-
stood as an intrusion: unlike the presence of oxygen, water and gravity,
the technology of industrialization, the formation of the Nazi Party, the
presence in Europe of Jewish people, the founding of Christianity and
an indefinite number of other necessary conditions of the Holocaust’s
taking place, the Enlightenment stands out in some way. But it is hard
to say exactly how. Berel Lang speaks of ‘affiliation’ (1990, 189–206).
As James Schmidt puts it, he argues that, ‘because it failed to transform
European society, the Enlightenment left in place a structure of religious
prejudices and intolerance that would, a century and a half later, result
in Nazi anti-Semitism ... ’ and that therefore ‘the Enlightenment ideal of
religious toleration ... paradoxically creates a “conceptual structure” that
has an “affiliation” with Nazi genocide’ (2000, 747). This is how Lang
himself elucidates the idea:
certain ideas prominent in the Enlightenment are recognizable in

the conceptual framework embodied in the Nazi genocide; and ... if
150 Bob Brecher
the relation between those two historical moments is not one of

direct cause and effect ... the Enlightenment establishes a ground of
historical possibility or causal evocation for the Nazi genocide. (1990,
168–169)
And having granted that that does not ‘demonstrate an historical

connection between the two’, he goes on to argue that
The ideational framework in which the act of the Nazi genocide was
set involved – required – a number of concepts that had been central
in enlightenment thought. (1990, 169)
Given the historical contingencies of the matter, certain Enlightenment

concepts were a necessary condition of the Holocaust. In principle,
other concepts might have been, but given the relevant history, it is
these (among others) that were necessary.
Two things need emphasizing. First, such an understanding of what
might be termed the contingencies of necessary conditions seems very
close to the sort of necessary condition I earlier characterized as the
‘standing out’ sort. Second, the Enlightenment serves as such a condi-
tion of the Holocaust because ‘it failed’ in some way. That is to say, it
is a negative necessary condition. Its being a necessary condition is the
outcome of something not done, or not achieved. Compare a mechanic’s
failure to check a car’s brake fluid. Given the circumstances, the failure
was a necessary condition of the brakes’ failing and the thus the car’s
crashing. It is not that this failure directly caused the crash, but still,
something not done played a part in the relevant causal story. This sort of
account can be given also of successes. Imagine the mechanic’s topping
up the brake fluid and the car’s then narrowly avoiding a crash. Had
the mechanic not checked and topped up the brake fluid, the car would
(very probably) have crashed. It is what the mechanic did that ‘stands
out’ in the explanatory story.
One might say, then, that what the Enlightenment achieved helped
make possible the eventual end of religious discrimination against Jews
and Roman Catholics in Europe, and at the same time argue, like Lang,
that something the Enlightenment failed to achieve – recognizing other
people as rational, autonomous beings unless they met certain condi-
tions – made possible the Holocaust. Thus Lang argues that Jews were
emancipated only if they rejected their identity as Jews and became
secular liberal individuals. The Enlightenment offered emancipation
only conditionally.
The harm done by the Enlightenment in failing to prevent the

Holocaust is thus not directly causal. The Holocaust could have occurred
without the Enlightenment, nor was the Enlightenment sufficient to
bring about the Holocaust. The connections are both more complex and
less direct. Nor, furthermore, is the harm done by the Enlightenment to
be understood in terms of this or that individual person’s being affected:
its harm is more diffuse than that.
Liberal harm
The classical liberal view of what constitutes harm is encapsulated in
John Stuart Mill’s claim that if an action does not cause ‘perceptible
hurt to any assignable individual except himself’, then it is not to be
prohibited. The harm has to be ‘perceptible’ (1989, 13), and it has to be
an identifiable person who is harmed. Harm is direct and measurable,
and what causes it is relatively straightforward: A hits B, and B hurts.
Interestingly, Mill himself sees the difficulty here, although he hardly
acknowledges its seriousness:
[H]ow (it may be asked) can any part of the conduct of a member
of society be a matter of indifference to the other members? No
person is an entirely isolated being; it is impossible for a person to
do anything seriously or permanently hurtful to himself, without
mischief reaching at least to his near connections, and often far
beyond them’. (p. 80; for discussion, see Brecher 1997, 151–154)
As Beverley Brown remarked in the context of discussions of pornog-

raphy in the wake of Pornography, ‘feminism is concerned with the
interests of a constituency of women for whom pornography will have
different effects on different individual women ... Consequently the
level of harm to such an interest is not amenable to liberalism’ (1981,
12). Some actions and practices, that is to say, whatever their direct and
identifiable consequences, affect also the attitudes (moral, political and
otherwise) of people neither directly affected nor readily individuated.
Consider for example the UK Sexual Offences Reform Act of 1967, which
led, however indirectly, to increasing acceptance of gay and lesbian sex
and so to more gay and lesbian sex; or the availability of mobile phones,
which has led to changes in public etiquette, the structures of social
arrangements and more; or the impact of television ‘reality’ shows on
political processes such as elections. It is not a matter just of unintended
consequences (although it is also that), but rather of effects on hereto-
fore quite unrelated attitudes, which in turn make other actions and
152 Bob Brecher
practices feasible, which in turn leads to the presence of such actions

and practices in society.
Dworkin’s central claim about pornography’s relation to what men
do – its relation to patriarchy – is just like that. Recall how the book
opens:

power in which pornography exists. Its particular theme is the power
of men in pornography. (1981, 9)
This statement clearly forms the backbone of her later campaigns. So, for
example, in a section on pornographers in ‘Against the Male Flood’, she
makes claims about ‘the real flesh-and-blood women in the pictures’; and
goes on to claim, concerning written pornography, that ‘the pornography
[the Marquis de Sade] wrote was an urgent part of the sexual abuse he
practised’ (Dworkin 1992, 524, 525). Both of these are straightforwardly
empirical claims. The relevant paragraph closes, however, with the quite
different sort of claim that ‘Pornography, even when it is written, is sex
because of the dynamism of the sexual hatred in it; and for pornogra-
phers, the sexual abuse of women as commonly understood and pornog-
raphy are both acts of sexual predation’ (1992, 525; my emphasis). As
Ludwig Wittgenstein observed of ordinary language, so Dworkin here
observes of the language of pornography: its meaning is constituted by
the use to which it is put. That is how it is possible for the empirical situ-
ations she discusses to arise at all. The use, furthermore, of pornography,
helps develop the language of pornography ... which in turn is put to
further use ... and so on. Thus one might, following Lang, speak of an
affiliation between pornography and patriarchy, or of what pornography
helps make possible in and about patriarchy.
Again, Cameron and Frazer argue in similar fashion: ‘Even if ... [pornog-
raphy] does not cause sexual violence it may be criticized of its role in
shaping certain forms of desire (and not others)’. Its ‘place in the culture
of transcendence/transgression’ is held ‘in virtue of several character-
istics: the narratives it constructs, the form in which it renders them
and the position it has in our culture as inherently a transgressive genre
(though at the same time a pervasive one)’ (1992, 376). Since 1992, our
culture has become increasingly sexualized, and pornography remains
central to the ‘construction of desire’ concerned: pornography ‘shape(s)
it in particular ways’ (ibid.). What Dworkin insists on – without using
the term – is that pornography constructs sexual desire in our culture at
least as much as it is itself constructed in response to that constructed
sexual desire, in short, that the relation between pornography and

sexual desire is dialectical. And so Susan Sontag’s extraordinary claim
that ‘(E)xperiences aren’t pornographic; only images and representa-
tions – structures of the imagination – are’ (1969, 49) is profoundly
mistaken. Pornography’s role in respect of sexual desire is the same as
that of, for example, the advertising of consumer goods in relation to the
desire for such goods. Just as the car advert offers a model – in an active
sense – of driving cars, so pornography offers ‘a model of how to do sex’
(Cameron and Frazer 1992, 377). There are two central claims here. First,
such a model’s appeal to an extent depends on, respectively, how cars
are driven and how sex is done in our culture, and at the same time the
model offered also affects precisely those practices. Second, ‘how cars are
driven’ and ‘how sex is done’ includes also how they are not driven and
how it is not done, and again in two ways. The first concerns the attrac-
tion of transgression, of how cars are not supposed to be driven and of
how sex is not supposed to be done, and the second what is ruled out (if
anything) by the model because it is transgressive.
This second point, about what we rule out because it is transgressive,
is as important as it is rarely noticed. Consider not speeding because
you might hurt someone; consider not doing sex violently for the same
reason. As Giorgio Agamben has recently said at a very general level:
There is, nevertheless, another and more insidious operation of power

that does not immediately affect what humans can do – their potenti-
ality – but rather their ‘impotentiality’, that is, what they cannot do,
or better, can not do. (2011, 43)
‘Today’s man’, Agamben says, ‘has become blind not to his capacities
but to his incapacities, not to what he can do but to what he cannot, or
can not, do’ (p. 44). I am tempted to dub this negative causality: obsta-
cles and barriers to doing something are removed, while obstacles and
barriers that in certain cases need to remain in place if we are not to do
things we ought not to do, remain in place. Consider President Barack
Obama’s commitment to the so-called war on terror blinding him to his
capacity to not order the assassination of Osama bin Laden. A practice
exists; it is ‘normal’. In light of the nature of that ‘normality’, another
practice is introduced. In turn, this new practice further entrenches that
‘normality’ ... and so on. This is surely all too familiar. So what stands in
the way of our understanding what Dworkin tells us about pornography?
Why might pornography be different from all these other aspects of our
everyday lives? For this is precisely what she claims about pornography:
154 Bob Brecher
it blinds men to things they can not do, to things they have the capacity
not to do. Pornography, she tells us, functions in this regard in just the
same way as other ideologies, or elements of ideology.
Dworkin’s text
With all that in place, we can now return to Dworkin’s text. Certainly
some of her fire is directed at the fact (then) that ‘real women are
required for the depiction’ (1981, 200) of women as ‘whores’ (p. 10).
And yet, although she insists on the centrality of ‘women in makeup
and costumes under hot lights’ (p. 147; and see p. 138ff.), on the real
women used to make visual pornography, she immediately, and admit-
tedly rather contradictorily, goes on to quote Suzanne Brøgger to the
effect that the ‘essence of rape (which is what she takes such photog-
raphy to be) [ ... ] lies not in the degree of psychological and physical
force ... but in the very attitude toward women that makes disguised or
undisguised rape possible’ (Dworkin 1981, 138). And so her claims that
‘pornography itself is objective and real and central to the male sexual
system’ (p. 200) and ‘[t]he force depicted in pornography is objective
and real because force is so used against women’, so that ‘[t]he debasing
of women depicted in pornography is objective and real because women
are so used’ (p. 201) might seem ambiguous. While she can be read as
simply making a set of empirical claims, however, notice that what she
claims is a connection from ‘the real world’ to pornography. Pornography,
she is telling us, exemplifies patriarchy – as well as helping to keep it in
place:
Pornography does not, as some claim, refute the idea that female
sexuality is dirty: instead, pornography embodies and exploits this
idea; pornography sells and promotes it. (ibid.)
Pornography at once reflects and requires sex as transgressive, and trans-

gressive in a particular way, namely as making use of women merely
as means to an end. So while it is the case, she maintains, that ‘[R]eal
women are tied up, stretched, hanged, fucked, gang-banged, whipped,
beaten’ (ibid.), an appalling effect of the pornography industry that
cannot be ignored, pornography’s meaning and function are to be found
not in that fact but in patriarchy. The realities she describes here are side
effects. What she is claiming is precisely that the role of pornography is
to construct male sexual desire, which in turn plays a pivotal patriarchal
function. The point is that pornography at once reflects, maintains and
promotes an understanding of women’s – and, I would add, men’s –

sexuality and sexual desire. This in turn itself reflects, maintains and
promotes the varieties of violence against women in which patriarchy
consists.
One might even describe Dworkin’s analysis as implicitly Kantian,
rather than either straightforwardly consequentialist or morally and
politically liberal:
The new pornography industry is a left-wing industry: promoted espe-

cially by the boys of the sixties as simple pleasure, lusty fun, public
sex, the whore brought out of the bourgeois [sic] home into the streets
for the democratic consumption of all men ... The dirty little secret
of the left-wing pornography industry is not sex but commerce ... Free
male sexuality wants, has a right to, produces and consumes pornog-
raphy because pornography is pleasure ... Capitalism is not wicked
or cruel when the commodity is the whore; profit is not wicked or
cruel when the alienated worker is a female piece of meat; corpo-
rate bloodsucking is not wicked or cruel when the corporations in
question, organized crime syndicates, sell cunt ... [V]iolence by the
powerful against the powerless is not wicked or cruel when it is called
sex; slavery is not wicked or cruel when the tormented are women,
whores, cunts. (1981, pp. 208, 209; my emphases)
It takes very little to make these sorts of argument against pornography

tout court, and not just against pornography on grounds of the condi-
tions of its production. Her objection is precisely to what Sontag cele-
brates in Story of O:
The ‘perfect submissiveness’ that her original lover and then Sir
Stephen demand of her echoes the extinction of the self explicitly
required of a Jesuit novice or Zen pupil [in both cases men, of course].
O is ‘that absent-minded person who has yielded up her will in order
to be totally remade’, to be made fit to serve a will far more powerful
and authoritative than her own. (1969, 68)
Quite so. Wickedness and cruelty can occur vicariously and are none-
theless wicked or cruel for that, not least in terms of what they do
to ‘the consumer’. Consider here the very different attitudes evinced
in proposals to prohibit the purchase, as opposed to the sale, of sex.
Dworkin is particularly clear about this in her discussion of women as,
historically, ‘chattel property’, in the context of considering gay sex:
156 Bob Brecher
‘A man must function as the human center of a chattel-oriented sensi-

bility, surrounded by objects to be used so that he can experience his
own power and presence’ (Dworkin 1981, 104). So, she argues, ‘it is
not surprising that men conspicuously view themselves as authentic
persons and the others clustered around them, especially their sexual
intimates, especially women and children, as objects’ (p. 103). True,
Dworkin appears not to appreciate the full force of her anti-capitalist,
anti-liberal arguments in respect of their implications for the men who
consume pornography. But that is unsurprising. Compare the desperate
contortions Mill has to make to justify not permitting the self-harm of
allowing oneself to be sold into slavery (1989, 102–103). Thus, while
Dworkin is right to castigate much of Lasch’s defence of de Sade, she
misses the important point he makes – and to which she might have
helped herself – when she criticizes his ‘peculiar’ interpretation of de
Sade as perceiving, ‘more clearly than the feminists, that all freedoms
under capitalism come in the end to the same thing, the same universal
obligation to enjoy and be enjoyed’ (Dworkin 1981, 99, quoting Lasch
1979, 133). On the other hand, she also gives voice to a profoundly anti-
liberal position in the concluding paragraphs of her discussion of what
‘men and boys’ are, and pornography’s function as at once expressing
and maintaining such a sort of masculinity:
Everything in life is part of it. Nothing is off in its own corner, isolated
from the rest. While on the surface this may seem self-evident, the
favorite conceit of male culture is that experience can be fractured,
literally its bones split, and that one can examine the splinters as if
they were not part of the bone, or the bone as if it were not part of
the body. This conceit replicates in its values and methodology the
sexual reductionism of the male and is derived from it ... So the scien-
tist can work on bomb or virus, the artist on poem, the photographer
on picture, with no appreciation of its meaning outside itself; and
even reduce each of these things to an abstract element and nothing
else – literally attribute meaning to or discover meaning in nothing
else. (Dworkin 1981, 67)
What is this if not a clear critique of the empiricism, both theoretical

and methodological, that historically underlies and makes possible the
liberalism that is its normative outcome (see Brecher 1997, 15–52)?
Two points are particularly important in her – at this point – anti-
liberal analysis. First, what she claims is independent of whether
you think sexual desire is ‘hardwired’ or constructed. If the former,
then her point is to be understood as one about its forms, and if the
latter, then as a point about sexual desire itself. Either way, it need
not depend on any essentialism. The biological-sounding claims she
makes in the text about boys, men and the role of the penis (Dworkin
1981, ch. 2, pp. 48–69) probably justify the description of at least this
passage as essentialist. But her general argument does not depend on
essentialism: it can as well be understood as social constructionist.
Indeed her active legal proposals for how we – or rather, people in the
United States of the 1980s – might set about at least starting to deal
with it sit extremely uneasily with any essentialism about male sexu-
ality. Second, what she claims is something that liberalism cannot
recognize, going as it does against its simplistic, cause/effect, unidi-
rectional and individualistic understanding of harm (and indeed of
benefit) and its parallel inability to grasp what ideology – not least its
own – is and how it functions.
Let me say more about this second point. Neither harm nor good
attach solely to identifiable individuals. To go back to my earlier exam-
ples, the impact of the Sexual Offences and Abortion Acts of 1967. One
way of generalizing from these is to suggest that harm and good can
be brought about not just directly but indirectly, through the effect of
something (an action; a practice; a belief) on the range of what comes
to enter the moral, political and other contexts, on what comes to be
regarded as within or beyond the possibly acceptable. That, in fact, is
how moral change tends to come about: think of women’s liberation
or slavery. The moral climate sets the parameters of moral possibility
(Brecher 1997, 147–159). That is what Dworkin has in mind when she
says things like these:

power in which pornography exists [the book’s opening sentence].
(1981, 9)
[Quoting Kate Millett]: Our self-contempt originates in this: in
knowing we are cunt. (p. 199)
He comes to the pornography a believer; he goes away from it a
missionary. (p. 202)
The metaphysics of male domination is that women are whores.
(p. 203)
So when she ends the book by saying that ‘We will know that we are free
when the pornography no longer exists’ (p. 204), she is not intending
158 Bob Brecher
to make the causal claim that getting rid of pornography will liberate
women; rather, we shall know that women have been liberated only
when pornography has disappeared. For pornography is – whatever else
it also is – at once a symptom of oppression as well as one of its vehicles.
Of course, this is hard to express in liberal language, because liberalism
cannot recognize the complex interplay between the social and the indi-
vidual, or the place of the moral climate in making things possible or
impossible, more or less likely.
Conclusion: Dworkin’s anti-liberalism
The standard objections to Dworkin’s central argument fall, as

Cameron and Frazer showed long ago. It is not a simple matter of
pornography’s causal impact. We can be indirectly harmed, as when
someone insults the person at the supermarket checkout. Although
the insult is not aimed at me, I am insulted by its being directed at
a person who is not in a position to answer back. In the same way,
their having to take a menial job because they feel, rightly, that it is
one they cannot refuse, is an offence to me – and it is an offence to
me whether or not they themselves perceive it as offensive to them.
Compare marriage, the family, charity, or the experience of shame one
might have at someone else’s action, as when British troops torture a
man to death in Iraq. Nor is consent relevant, for, far from people’s
wants justifying their acts, the question at issue is the moral justifica-
tion of their wants and – therefore – the moral climate within which
such wants come to be had. Nor will it do to claim of pornography
that it is a game, for while as a genre it has similarities to a game
(rules, moves and the like), it is also – and again as a genre – closely
connected with ‘real life’. To put it crudely, it is not just a game. Those
who deny the seriousness of pornography in maintaining patriarchy
cannot rely on the figure of pornography as ‘playful sex’ to do so, for
what ‘playful sex’ might be in another world and what this ‘playful’
sex is here, now, are quite different things.
Nor does pornography have directly to abuse those it depicts in
order to be abusive. As Dworkin herself puts it in a later discussion,
‘Pornography, even when written, is sex because of the dynamism of the
sexual hatred in it; and for pornographers, the sexual abuse of women as
commonly understood and pornography are both acts of sexual preda-
tion, which is how they live ... The pornographers are the secret police of
male supremacy: keeping women subordinate through intimidation and
assault’ (1992, 525). The form of her argument here is that of standard
anti-liberal analyses of all sorts of everyday phenomena, from the

buying and selling of body parts for transplants to working at the super-
market checkout. So, for instance, one might argue that ‘for free-market
employers, the economic exploitation of people as commonly under-
stood and standard employment contracts are both acts of (economic)
predation (and more), which is how they live’, or that ‘for charities,
the abuse of the poor as commonly understood and charitable work are
both acts of exploitation, which is how they live’. And in both cases,
they, with many others, ‘are the secret police of neo-liberal capitalism:
keeping people subordinate through intimidation and assault’. Whether
or not one agrees with (any of) these arguments, how they work and
what they claim is clear. The same is the case of Dworkin’s arguments
against pornography.
Finally, the phenomena of gay porn and of ‘women’s porn’ do
nothing to undermine her case. These genres are takes on, imitations
of, male porn that themselves reflect and maintain patriarchy no less
than does male porn. The ‘relations’ portrayed are no less about power
and domination; the realities at once reflected and furthered are no
different; and the underlying trope of domination is irredeemably
sexist. To put this another way, the liberation of women is about more
than the sex they themselves do or do not engage in, and it cannot take
place in the absence of a liberation of men from their patriarchal role
and function.
Dworkin wrote about the world in which she lived. What gay porn,
lesbian porn, women’s porn, whatever porn might be like in some other
world is all beside the point. In a non-patriarchal world, porn could not
be what porn (now) is. In a free world, or an equal world, it would not be
a mere use of people, whether of individual women (the models), indi-
vidual customers (the consumers) or of customers in general (liberalism
and capitalism). Whether it could then still be pornography is another
question. Transgressive sex, one might speculate, might include all sorts
of representations and actions – if the transgressive is sexually important
in just any conceivable social set-up. The issue is what it would trans-
gress in a society very different from ours, where that is the putative
taboo against violence, set aside in pornography and thus in reality – so
long as it is directed against women. For pornography requires to be
transgressive – whether acceptably or not – to constitute pornography.
Questions of a similar form could, of course, be asked about a range
of phenomena besides pornography. They should be asked, just as the
question Dworkin asks about the current pornographic structure of
sexuality needs to be asked.
160 Bob Brecher
Acknowledgements
My thanks to Vicky Margree for her comments on an earlier version of

this essay; to Mark Devenney for drawing Agamben’s essay to my atten-
tion; to colleagues at conferences at the Universities of Birmingham and
Ghent; and to an anonymous referee for putting me right on two impor-
tant points.
Notes
This chapter is dedicated to the memory of Soran Reader, an indefatigable femi-
nist and champion of Andrea Dworkin’s insights.
1. For discussion of women as chattel, see Dworkin 1981, pp. 101–102 and, stun-
ningly, Rhys 1969a, 1969b, 1971, 1973.
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9
Violence, Techno-Transcendence
and Feminism: Thinking about
Agency in the Digital Age
Gillian Youngs
Introduction
We live in a different world in the 21st century, and much of that differ-
ence is technologically mediated. It is not an overstatement to say that
many of our theories and concepts are far from up to speed with what
these changes mean. This is the case not only with how to understand
and analyse the world and different structures and processes within it
but also with inevitably how to critique them, identify negative impacts
and overcome them. The Internet and digital transformations that have
resulted from it, especially since the arrival of the World Wide Web in
the early 1990s, have heralded a new spatiality in human affairs yet to be
fully comprehended in philosophical, and many other, senses. This new
spatiality represents a complex approach to the social that incorporates
the Internet and its virtual processes as much as more familiar tradi-
tional physical settings and activities. The overall aim in this chapter is
to locate violence and women’s agency within this complex spatiality
to enhance our thinking about forms of gendered oppression and resist-
ance to them. Use of the Internet has expanded the social sphere and
identity and relational processes within it, so it is an integral part of
considerations of being and empowerment. This discussion draws on
the concept of ‘techno-transcendence’ to capture this expansion and to
recognize how the Internet has contributed to reducing temporal and
spatial constraints.
The chapter begins with a discussion of complex spatiality and tech-
no-transcendence. This section foregrounds an understanding that
gendered relations of power play out increasingly in contemporary
162
Violence, Techno-Transcendence and Feminism 163
times in the online world of the Internet as much as in offline settings.

We can assume this trend will feature prominently in the gender land-
scape of the future. Its challenges include attention to socio-technical
influences – in other words, the dynamic interplay between social
and technical forces. While such considerations are by no means new,
the growing role of online activity in daily life is prioritizing them in
contemporary interdisciplinary analysis. The chapter then moves on to
look at violence through the virtual looking glass, pointing to the inten-
sification through the multimedia interactive spaces of the Internet
of both violent processes and possibilities, and forms of empower-
ment and agency. Representational elements are noted here as a key
element of this intensification especially if we consider areas core to
feminist concerns such as pornography. The increased flows of imagery
in virtual relating have raised the spectre of ‘Self Generated Indecent
Imagery’ (SGII), which, thanks to the speed of online communication,
can rapidly turn an initially private expression of intimate agency or
bravado into a public object of voyeurism or worse. The final section
of the chapter returns to issues of women’s agency. This is discussed
in a macro context of historically embedded masculinist structures of
science and technology and their gendered implications, especially for
the limitations on women’s influence in shaping the digital world in
research and technical, as well as policy arenas.
Complex spatiality and ‘techno-transcendence’
Space and time are essential components of human existence (for a range
of perspectives on this area, see, for example, Harvey 1990; Featherstone
and Lash 1999; Hemmings 2002; Youngs 2007). They are the main
contexts for our lives as material and time-bound beings. Spatial trans-
formations are ontological in the ways in which they change what the
world is for us as human beings. They have epistemological implications
to the extent that such changes impact on where and how we look to
understand what the world is and what is happening within it.
In contemporary digital times, we have entered an era of dual spati-
ality combining virtual online spaces, processes and interactions, with
offline ones (see, for example, Shields 2003; Youngs 2007). The tech-
nological cutting edge of human life is the virtual online dimension.
Increasingly, the more familiar (traditional) offline dimension is being
extended and reshaped by it. In other words, the fastest and most effi-
cient areas of human activity in daily life are taking place increasingly
online rather than offline, and our sense of what that activity and daily
164 Gillian Youngs
life are, is being refashioned accordingly. Just to make this point clearer:
where and what we do in the world has direct or indirect impact on
what we understand the world to be as well as the identities we fashion
within it. The Internet and the virtual world do not float free from the
concrete physical world. They consist of myriad devices and networks,
hardware and software, that make the virtual sphere possible and acces-
sible. But as we are all aware to one degree or another, even if only
subliminally, online spatiality is distinct from offline spatiality in many
diverse ways. Being present virtually, whether we are talking about a
business or other organizations, a person or a relationship, information
or transaction, is distinct from being present physically in a traditional
manner. The more presence is defined and experienced virtually online
(rather than physically offline), the more the world can be considered
ontologically to be virtual rather than physical, or, perhaps to be more
precise, the more it is a combination of the virtual embedded as part of
the physical world.
These shifts, as a major feature of 21st-century life, are intrinsi-
cally about the relationship between time and space, and the ‘techno-
transcendence’ that this new combined reality of the virtual and the
physical represent and continue to develop through technological inno-
vation. They feature some continuity with technological developments
of the past (especially technologies of travel, such as the airplane and
car, but also communications technologies of telegraph and telephone)
in transcending constraints of time and space (Harvey 1990; Winston
1998; Urry 2007). But the virtual sphere of the Internet goes much
further in redefining the ontological nature of human time and space,
and capacities to transcend varied boundaries and limitations related to
them. Where access is possible, the Internet crosses physical bounda-
ries and temporal time zones and structures. Ontologically it posits a
world in which such boundaries, zones and structures have decreasing
significance, in principle if not always in practice. As with all things
human, the picture is not universal for various economic, political and
social reasons. Economic, educational and social inequalities across
and within states impact on digital developments and exclusion, and
some states work to severely restrict Internet access for political and/
or cultural reasons, one notable example being China’s governmental
efforts to keep out liberal democratic influences (Human Rights Watch
2012).
However uneven the global picture may be, the space-time tran-
scendent characteristics of the Internet remain a game changer in onto-
logical terms. This extends to many traditional time-space boundaries of
pre-digital times such as private and public, home and work, production
and consumption. It also extends to those of societal spheres such as
economy and polity, profit and non-profit, work and entertainment.
The seamless quality of the Internet as a series of spaces to be accessed in
rapid succession or multiply simultaneously disrupts traditional mean-
ings of the separation of different spheres and timeframes. The informa-
tional and data-based nature of virtual space represents a new form of
unifying the playing field for human and social presence and activity.
This is part of the essence of the techno-transcendence involved in
digital transformations. The technological mediation involved in online
activity translates aspects of human reality into data (multimedia) form,
and through its extended reach and speed of transmission, infuses it
with more accessibility and power in time-space terms.
We see a freeing-up or loosening of constraints in time-space senses
when we are dealing with digital change, and this impacts equally on
how we understand violence and forms of agency that seek to contest,
prevent or address it. The Internet is a medium through which violence
is expressed and enacted, as well as represented in multimedia form,
and also a sphere of social relations in which agency in various forms,
including in association with countering or contesting violence, is
expressed and enacted. This means that it is important to consider
techno-transcendence in relation to both violence and agency directed
against it.
Violence through the virtual looking glass
What happens to violence in a digital environment? This is the central

question addressed in this section, the starting point being that we need
to review the ways in which we view and consider the nature of violence
in circumstances in which increasing areas of social relations and activi-
ties are happening online as well as offline. The discussion will stay close
to the ontological and epistemological preoccupations of the chapter in
addressing some fundamental points and perspectives. It is common-
place to accept that violence is physical and psychological, as well as
social, structural (indirect) and actual (direct), and shaped by the past
as much as the present. For feminists, this breadth of perspective on
violence has always been at the fore in the range of analysis and critique
that characterizes its scholarship as well as lobbying and activism (see,
for example, Pettman 1996; Marchand and Runyan 2011; Tower and
Walby 2012). Feminists have been as deeply concerned with structural
and embedded forms of gender violence that shape the full range of
166 Gillian Youngs
inequalities between men and women, male and female identities, as

they have been with actual resulting outbreaks of those inequalities in
areas such as predominant forms of male-on-female domestic violence,
gendered wage, promotional and other unequal opportunity structures
(Walby, 1990, 2009 and 2011). For feminists, women’s agency has to
be considered against a highly complex mix of historically constructed
gendered power differentiations, specific social circumstances of the
here and now, and individual conditions and possibilities within them.
This complexity is not new, but it would be fair to say that the growing
history and visibility of feminist analysis throughout the 20th and the
21st century in particular have made general awareness of it relatively
recent. While not yet as widespread as it could be, we can expect that
this awareness will continue to grow. It will likely continue to bring
contestation of different kinds, as has been the case throughout femi-
nism’s history. It can also be argued that as much as throwing up new
areas to consider in this regard, digital developments include effects of
embedding and making even more complex existing gendered patterns
of power.
Many of the new areas for attention have links to these patterns and
can only be fully understood in that context. Two points are worth
highlighting here which help to counter misplaced binary thinking
around online and offline phenomena. First, while technological inno-
vations and new behaviours and patterns of relations linked to them
emphasize the novelty of online developments, these occur within
historical circumstances which, while not determining them, are bound
to impact upon them in ways that may not always be immediately
obvious (Hawthorne and Klein 1999). Second, it will always be impor-
tant to look for continuity as well as discontinuity when assessing such
dramatic change as the shift from a predominantly offline social world
to one that is increasingly online as much as offline. Feminism in a
digital world takes account of such shifts and adjusts its critical lens
accordingly (see, for example, Harcourt 1999; Peterson 2003; Youngs
2007). At the time of writing, a substantial body of feminist work has
already built up at this cutting edge. It is bound to continue to grow
as we move further into the current century, which may well come to
be defined as the digital century, as the 20th century was the industrial
and post-industrial one. There is only space here to make some illus-
trative points about violence and agency from feminist perspectives,
but the aim is to do so in ways that signal how penetrating the digital
implications may be for the future orientation of movements focused
on gender equality.
When we look at violence through the virtual looking glass – in other

words, through a world experienced online and offline – a number of
things are striking. They all, at root, link to techno-transcendence. The
technologically mediated sphere of the Internet is increasingly perva-
sive. Where connectivity is possible, growing numbers of devices,
whether we are on the move or are static link us to it, thus make, for
example, its 24/7, round-the-clock flexible possibilities a growing part
of daily realities. In associated ways, the presence of asynchronous as
much as synchronous forms of communication becomes increasingly
pervasive. Asynchronicity has been a dramatic element of digital trans-
formation, firstly through e-mail, then through the World Wide Web
in a general fashion, and then more overtly in landmark social media
applications such as Facebook and Twitter. Asynchronicity in a 24/7
virtual environment gives social presence and relates new characteristics
of accessibility and flexibility that are arguably revolutionary and yet to
be fully analysed. Digital spheres enable asynchronous communication
by all parties involved to be able to choose when (and where) they place
and access information. Communication and social relating through
non-presence or not being dependent on co-presence (synchronicity)
becomes increasingly part of ontological and epistemological realities.
This is bound to impact on identities linked to that communication
and social relating, or at least this is an area likely to be demanding
more of our attention as the digital social environment develops further.
One focus relevant to this is the multimedia fabric of the online envi-
ronment. Digital settings (screen-based for the main part in contempo-
rary times) are intensely visual and visually rich, ranging across film,
photography and animation, for example, and open to diverse multi-
media constructions, including music and voice. The ontology of the
digital is inherently multimedia, and as it becomes further embedded in
growing aspects of daily life is bound to intensify multimedia senses of
what that daily life actually is. This is part of the techno-transcendence
of virtual imperatives alongside, embedded in or even over (in some
circumstances) familiar traditional imperatives of the offline world.
Part of this picture is the intensification of the role of representational
aspects of life, and these have always been central to feminist concerns,
as the objectification of women and the gendered positioning of them
has been framed, expressed and entrenched through representational
routes, including pornography. The explosion of the online pornog-
raphy business has been one of the defining characteristics of the digital
world. Debates will continue to rage about perspectives on drawing defi-
nite links between actual male-on-female violence and different forms
168 Gillian Youngs
of pornography. The late Andrea Dworkin remains an iconic figure artic-

ulating strong views about the issue:
... pornography is violence against women: the women used in pornog-

raphy. Not only is there a precise symmetry of values and behaviours
in pornography and in acts of forced sex and battery, but in a sex-
polarized society men also learn about women and sex from pornog-
raphy. The message is conveyed to men that women enjoy being
abused. Increasingly, research is proving that sex and violence – and
the perception that females take pleasure in being abused, which is
the heart of pornography – teach men both ambition and strategy.
... The refusal, especially among liberals, to believe that pornography
has any real relationship to sexual violence is astonishing. Liberals
have always believed in the value and importance of education. But
when it comes to pornography, we are asked to believe that nothing
pornographic, whether written or visual, has an educative effect on
anyone. A recognition that pornography must teach something does
not imply any inevitable conclusion: it does not per se countenance
censorship. It does, however, demand that we pay some attention to
the quality of life, to the content of pornography.
And it especially demands that when sexual violence against women
is epidemic, serious questions be asked about the function and value
of material that advocates such violence and makes it synonymous
with pleasure. (Dworkin 1981)
It is interesting to consider that Dworkin’s comments were based more

in an earlier offline context than the current online and offline one.
But the intensification and speed of flows of pornography as well as
the ease of access in the Internet era perhaps press home all the more,
the relevance of her points about ‘education’ and ‘quality of life’. The
expansion of digital forms of accessibility to pornography are as impor-
tant as the growth in the volume of it, with peer-to-peer dissemina-
tion, including across international boundaries, for example, being of
major concern in relation to child pornography and paedophilia rings.
In the United Kingdom, the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) acts as a
hotline for reporting criminal online content, including child sex abuse
content hosted anywhere in the world, and criminally obscene adult
content and non-photographic child sexual abuse images hosted in the
United Kingdom. A recent IWF report addressing the cross-border issues
around online child sex abuse content included recommendations such
as the harmonization of laws on such content as well as consistent

and comprehensive international procedures for taking it down (Wei
2011, 2). ‘Child sexual abuse related offences are facilitated by advanced
internet technology and child sexual abuse content can be disseminated
quickly over the borderless internet’ (Wei 2011, 67).
Techno-transcendence of time/space online has qualitative and quan-
titative impacts on the nature and reach of violence, including through
representational multimedia forms. These impacts are a rapidly moving
target, too, with the succession of innovation in Internet applica-
tions and communications hardware (most recently smartphones and
tablets) contributing to deepening online/offline integrated lifestyles
and relational and identity-linked processes. Here we are dealing with
agency and often unintended consequences, sometimes with serious
and even violent effects. The expanded role of photos in virtual relating
has resulted in what is termed ‘self-generated indecent imagery’ (SGII)
that, thanks to the speed of online communication, can rapidly turn an
initially private expression of intimacy or bravado into a public object
of voyeurism or worse. The continual blurring of lines between public
and private in the online environment raises new concerns about the
risks and unexpected outcomes of private communications, which can
instantly become public through online dissemination, and in some
circumstances be harnessed for abusive or criminal purposes. The UK’s
Child Exploitation and Online Protection (CEOP) Centre’s latest report
includes attention to self-generated indecent imagery (SGII).
SGII is taken for a variety of reasons within consensual relation-

ships between young people. These include a private image taken
for a boyfriend or girlfriend, or images taken to be used as online
profile pictures. Often these images are subsequently posted online
or distributed by the person for whom they were intended as a joke,
after an argument or once the relationship has ended. It cannot be
discounted, however, that the exchange of SGII, whilst it may have
been willingly produced by a young person, can indicate an under-
lying vulnerability or behavioural concern.
Almost 22% of reports received by CEOP from industry in 2011/12
related to the distribution of SGII. Whilst the majority of SGII is
produced by older teenagers, almost a third of SGII reported to CEOP
in 2011/12 related to children under the age of 15. Occasionally
SGII, particularly where it involves a subject under 15, can be the
product of serious criminal activity by a third party or may be used
170 Gillian Youngs
for such purposes subsequently. Therefore, whilst volumes generally

are increasing, it is important not to lose sight of the real and lasting
harm it can cause (CEOP 2012, 6–7).
The report demonstrates that we are dealing with both synchronous

and asynchronous patterns of communication across live online video
chat, instant messaging, files uploaded via e-mail or to public video
hosting or social networking websites, or as attachments during online
chat sessions (CEOP 2012, 6). While CEOP is a law enforcement agency,
it reflects the boundary-crossing nature of the Internet and the new
imperatives for advanced partnership approaches involving all sectors,
including corporate and charity ones, focused on mutual goals. It states,
‘the real lifeblood of the CEOP Centre is intelligence – how offenders
operate and think, how children and young people behave and how
technological advances are developing – all are integral to what we are
about and what we deliver’ (2012).
The digital landscape is extending the nature and reach of violence,
and thus, it can be argued, the ontological and epistemological param-
eters of vulnerability. As social relations and their multimediated forms
continue to increase in volume and speed online, and these develop-
ments contribute to the enhanced blurring of public and private lines,
the specificities of different forms of techno-transcendence and their
implications are likely to grow in significance. Grooming of young
people for sex, and cyberstalking are already two phenomena that have
directly demonstrated the violent impact of abuse of online and offline
connectivity, and the anonymity and identity manipulation the former
affords through what might be termed virtual violence as a route to
actual violence in the ‘real’ (offline) context. Tracking violent struc-
tures and processes through online/offline circumstances highlights the
extent to which understanding of the ontology of violence is shifting in
the digital environment and will continue to do so.
Agency and feminism in the digital world
If we follow the complex spatiality and techno-transcendence arguments

through to agency concerns, there are important macro dimensions to
be addressed. These relate to the masculinist nature of science and tech-
nology. This section includes major attention to this theme because of
its ontological and epistemological significance in understanding the
limitations of the scope of women’s agency in the creation and evolu-
tion of the new digital environment. It is clear that transformations
in agency and feminism in the digital world reflect expanded param-

eters of identity for individuals and organizations that harness the full
time/space potential of techno-transcendence in diverse ways. When
we think about agency and feminism, women’s potential to act and be
present, to create and organize for profit or non-profit, for political or
social change, the Internet and the expanded possibilities of online and
offline are all part of the picture. This does not mean adopting some
utopian perspective that makes assumptions about what has changed
for women because of the Internet, but it does mean recognizing the
new possibilities that have already contributed to change and can do
so further in the future. Part of this picture is the need to think about
agency and feminism in digital as much as other terms, including in rela-
tion to identity and opportunity. Among the most revolutionary aspects
of techno-transcendence for women in digital times are possibilities
related to overcoming constraints linked to divides between public and
private. Historical gender structures have tended to lock female identi-
ties and lives into the private more than the public, in which mascu-
linist identities and possibilities have tended to dominate (Phillips 1991;
Youngs 2000).
The Internet as a virtual sphere of social relations, presence and
activism has disrupted public/private divides, not least as a form of
communications that can be as present and accessible in the private
as much as the public. As many commentators have pointed out, this
does not overturn the historically entrenched masculinist dominance
of science and technology, knowledges and applications, as well as
the governmental and business structures and entities associated with
them, which have been characteristic of historical gender power divides
(see, for example, Harding 1998 and Hafkin and Huyer 2006). It can
even be argued that it makes the significance of these gendered hier-
archies and critical attention to them all the more pressing. In other
words, when considering equality and inclusion in a digital world, in
which technological mediation and innovation become increasingly
influential in all aspects of life, it could be argued that more atten-
tion needs to be given to feminist critiques of male dominance of
science and technology and their gendered implications. Where the
social world is coming to be increasingly shaped and defined by digital
developments, there is a very real risk of entrenched gendered imbal-
ances influencing them in becoming even more entrenched. At the
most fundamental levels this includes the engagement of women in
science and engineering. The long-term work of Women into Science
and Engineering (WISE) in the United Kingdom signals just how tough
172 Gillian Youngs
the gender challenges remain in the science, technology, engineering

and maths (STEM) areas:
there is still a lack of women in STEM careers across Europe, particu-

larly Western Europe. While a few (mainly ex-Soviet) countries have
around 20% women in STEM, Western European countries such
as France and Spain (17% each), Denmark (16%), Germany (15%),
Finland (15%), and UK (9% – the lowest) all bring the European
average down to 17%. (WISE 2012, 1)
The pervasive, structural and embedded nature of gendered realities in

science and technology come to the fore as a prime feminist concern
around agency in digital times, especially if we are thinking at ontolog-
ical and epistemological levels. If lives are going to be increasingly lived
through digital means, and the creation and fashioning of those means
remains highly gendered, then there are profound ways in which we
can consider that masculinist ontological realities will become further
entrenched, including in ways we may be far from aware of at present.
The potential for women to be creators and innovators risks remaining
low at least in the immediate future, particularly at the most blue skies
stages of research and application, but also through STEM processes as
a whole including in policy realms. It is notable that the problem areas
currently identified as preventing change align squarely with much
long-term feminist critique stressing how gendered identities inhibit
what girls and women actually think is possible or suitable for them.
The 2011 Girlguiding UK survey found that 43% of girls said they
were put off science and engineering careers because they did not
know enough about the kind of careers available. 60% said they
also were put off by a lack of female role models. While there are
a number of praiseworthy employers and initiatives showing what
careers are available, there are gaps in terms of number and range
of the jobs being promoted to girls, combined with a lack of female
role models in sufficiently senior positions to convince girls they are
welcome.
Girls are being turned away from STEM careers by a perception of
greater sexism in the workplace. For example, the 2011 Girlguiding
UK survey found that 30% of girls thought that worries about sexism
in the workplace put girls off a career in science or engineering. (WISE
2012, 1–2)
The gendered scenario in relation to STEM is probably one of the

strongest arguments for mainstream policy attention to feminist analysis
and insights if digital inclusion and empowerment represent a genuine
commitment. The statistics clarify that binaries associating men and
male identities (as opposed to women and female identities) with science
and technology remain as powerful as ever, and equally if not more
importantly, have an impact on the shaping of gendered identities such
that even as digital transformations are saturating the world around us,
girls are still seeing themselves as substantially separated from the exper-
tise and career trajectories positioning them as integral to shaping those
transformations. Without major change in this picture, the gendered
ontological and epistemological realities of the past threaten to become
even more definitive in the digital future.
While these most fundamental aspects of women’s agency need to be
highlighted, they do not of course represent the full spectrum of digital
change and identification steered by women. In areas of online/offline
activism, women and organizations focused on their interests have been
among the most active and inventive. Techno-transcendence has been a
major feature of contemporary feminism and networking, lobbying and
activism around the broadest range of women’s concerns. Campaigning
and activist organizations combating violence against women and
children have transformed their agency along digital lines to take full
advantage of the virtual potential to be present, network, inform and
reach out to their communities and individuals who need their assist-
ance. In general, this has contributed to bringing issues around violence
against women much more to the fore in the (global) public sphere, as
well as facilitating links among women for lobbying as well as support
purposes, making knowledge about violence against them more acces-
sible, and communicating their individual and collective agency in
combating that violence at different levels, including in relation to
policy. The digital environment has made violence against women a far
more public issue, and equally the agency of women to combat it more
public as well.
Women’s Aid in the UK has long been among the most prominent of
women’s organizations tackling domestic violence, including through
its provision of refuges and other services. Its website acts as a multi-
faceted information hub to reach out to those who may be suffering
domestic violence or need to find out about the different ways in which
it is manifested and can be addressed. The website’s downloads include
‘Digital stalking: a guide to technology risks for victims’ (Perry 2012).
174 Gillian Youngs
As Nicola Harwin, chief executive of Women’s Aid, points out at the

beginning of the guide:
for Women’s Aid, the continuing development of digital technology

itself is problematic: on the one hand there are more opportunities
for abusers to use technology to their advantage to continue to try to
control and terrorise; on the other there are more opportunities for
women trapped in abusive relationships to seek and receive support
online. Understanding the risks to personal safety inherent in all
aspects of digital technology is therefore no longer an option, it is a
necessity (Perry 2012, 5).
Digital settings for women’s agency are as rich in opportunities as they

are peppered with risks. Empowerment possibilities operate as deeply at
collective as individual levels as diverse areas of global women’s move-
ments and campaigns have demonstrated, not least those associated
with tackling all forms of violence against women and children. But it is
not an overstatement to say that this new digital world has largely not
been of women’s making and that this is an enduring problem. It drills
down to historically embedded gendered identity formations, steering
women away from science and technology to leave the field heavily
dominated by masculinist concerns and orientations. It is obvious that
women need to be creators as much as users of digital technologies in
order for the new digital world to be fully reflective of their interests
and priorities. As long as they continue to be concentrated too much
as users rather than the creators, the limitations on the deep impact of
their agency remain extreme.
Feminism and digital change: concluding thoughts
Digital agency is an intrinsic part of the world in which we now live

and will be more so in the years to come. As the online/offline settings
become ever more integrated in different structures and processes of
our everyday lives, the ontological and epistemological complexities
of what it means to talk about the real world will grow simultaneously.
There is an increasing seamlessness between the virtual and the physical
worlds, and social relations and identity processes are being woven in
and through them in ways that transcend constraints of time and space.
These developments are changing the nature of violence, risk and vulner-
ability in obvious and less obvious ways, and demanding new knowledge
to maintain agency and develop empowerment. All life is present online
as it is offline, or this is already substantially the case for those who are
connected and will be more so. Violence as a fact of life is inevitably a
fact of digital life. The techno-transcendence that is a feature of digital
developments is harnessed alike by those wishing to perpetrate, engage
in and represent violence, as it is those working to counter it. The latter
include organizations committed to stopping all forms of violence against
women and children, and championing their rights. Global activism
covers areas such as trafficking and prostitution, and sexual and repro-
ductive rights, as well as domestic and institutionalized forms of violence
(see, for example, Amnesty International campaigns and the United
Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women).
The multimedia and social networking dimensions of the Internet are
also being utilized by perpetrators of violence as well as those working
against it, heralding the need for new forms of digital literacy to reduce
vulnerability and risk and increase empowerment and agency.
There are also fundamental considerations about digital transforma-
tions and feminism and agency that have been highlighted here. They
focus on historically entrenched and continuing gendered realities of
science and technology, in which male and masculinist power and iden-
tifications dominate, and women and female influence remain limited.
This is part of the picture when we talk about digital inclusion and
empowerment. The ontological significance of digital developments in
shaping the fabric of social spaces and relationships of the future makes
a strong case for greater attention to the limited presence of women in
science and technology. If, as seems clear, digital transformations are
refashioning what our world actually is and the ways in which we navi-
gate, exist in and identify with it, then science and technology, which
are central to producing this reality, should be as inclusive as possible.
It can be argued that the growing pace of technological change presses
this imperative more intensely as the years go by. If we accept that the
past has been distorted by gendered inequalities in science and tech-
nology, then we can accept as things stand that the digital future risks
continuing this distortion or even expanding it.
Acknowledgements
This chapter is developed from work undertaken as part of the ESRC

research seminar series ‘Digital Policy: Connectivity, Creativity and
Rights’ 2011-13 RES-451-26-0849, led by the author with Tracy Simmons,
University of Leicester, William Dutton, Oxford Internet Institute and
Katharine Sarikakis, University of Vienna.
176 Gillian Youngs
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Routledge.
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Inequality. London: Routledge.
10
‘Not Just Victims ... But’: Toward a
Critical Theory of the Victim
Robin May Schott
Introduction
In October 2010, I participated in a conference entitled ‘Role of Women

in Global Security’ in Copenhagen, Denmark, organized by the US
Ambassador to Denmark, Laurie Fulton, and her staff in conjunction
with the Danish Foreign Ministry. The conference was outstanding in
many respects, including the ability of the organizers to engage partici-
pation of high-level politicians and diplomats. US secretary of state
Hillary Rodham Clinton, in an opening video address to the confer-
ence, spoke of the importance of viewing ‘women as agents and not just
victims of conflict’. Gitte Lillelund Bech, then the minister of defense in
Denmark, reminded the audience that women are ‘not just victims ... but
indispensable parts of the toolbox’. Raymond E. Mabus, US secretary
of the navy, argued for the need for more female engagement teams in
Afghanistan, noting that ‘women shouldn’t be characterized as victims’.
Judy Cheng-Hopkins, United Nations Assistant Secretary-General for
Peacebuilding Support, noted that it had taken the UN 50 years to make
the link between gender equality and peace and security. Now you can
say ‘rape’ in the Security Council. But, she added, it is still ‘business as
usual’, with continuing high levels of sexual violence in post-conflict
settings.
The conference was filled with many other kinds of stories as well,
both in the breakout sessions and in the hallways. One American
woman marine who had been stationed in Afghanistan spoke of the
dilemma the American soldiers faced when a young local woman sought
refuge at their base, claiming that she was falsely accused of violating
sexual mores and would be killed. The soldiers ultimately denied her
access, wary of risking the trust with the local community that it had
178
‘Not Just Victims ... But’ 179
taken them so long to build up. The marines found the body parts of
the young woman strewn nearby the next morning. Sanjar Sohail,
publisher of the leading daily newspaper in Afghanistan, reported that
57% of marriages in his country take place with girls under the legal age
of 16, with serious consequences for maternal mortality, that as 104 of
1,000 mothers die in childbirth. Lack of access to health care remains
a major issue for rural women in Uganda, where women give birth in
the bush tied to a tree, ending up with fistulas and the fate of being
one of ‘the smelly ones’, with no resources for surgical intervention.
And sexual violence in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) remains
high. As Anne-Marie Esper Larsen, Denmark’s ambassador for gender
equality, said, in DRC ‘there is no longer fighting, just rape of women,
so everyone is happy’.
This conference left me puzzled. On the one hand, both women and
men suffer from high levels of sexual violence in many countries of the
world; women often suffer from social and religious pressures requiring
underage marriage, from lack of health care, from high risks of maternal
mortality and from fistulas; and local nongovernmental organisations
(NGOs) often have too little funding to solve these problems. On the
other hand, many politicians, diplomats and NGO activists call for
speaking of women as ‘not just victims’ but in terms of agency, empow-
erment and resilience. What are the assumptions of a discourse that sets
up an opposition between being the target or bearer of serious bodily
harm and being a political agent ready to take up the challenges of
the future? Why is suffering assumed to be in opposition to political
agency?
On one level, this opposition is rooted in a set of assumptions about
the victim, as victims are typically portrayed as passive, pathetic and
backward looking.1 And such qualities would fit poorly with the quali-
ties of political agency, which presumes the ability to engage in future-
oriented collective activities. On another level, this opposition is rooted
in a set of assumptions about the relation of the viewer to victims.
Hannah Arendt addresses the issue of whether compassion, which she
describes as co-suffering, can play a role in political life. Since in her
view compassion can only comprehend the suffering of one person, it
is bound to the particular as opposed to the general (Arendt 1963/1990,
85). Compassion abolishes the ‘worldly space’ in which politics and
human affairs is located, and ‘it remains, politically speaking, irrelevant
and without consequence’ (Arendt 1963/1990, 86). From this point of
view, if victims arouse compassion, then they are placed entirely outside
the frame of political discourse.
180 Robin May Schott
In this chapter, I turn attention to the questions that frame debates

about victims in two fields: Anglo-American feminist anti-rape discourses
and contemporary security discourses. My hypothesis is that the concept
of victim becomes the site of contestation over political agendas in each
of these fields. Before we even enter into discussions about victims,
and claim that victims are ‘not just victims ... but’, our frames of refer-
ence have established the parameters for discussion which have little or
nothing to do with the facts that human beings have suffered the harms
of violence, or with their experience of these harms in the present, or
with its implications for the future. But why does the concept of victim
become the place in which such controversies are carried out?
Here I argue that taking a genealogical approach to the concept of the
victim shows the need to develop a critical theory of the victim, in which
the concept is understood as expressing historical or political contradic-
tions. With regard to the method of genealogy, Michel Foucault rumi-
nates over the meaning of ‘descent’ in Friedrich Nietzsche’s reflections:
‘it disturbs what was previously considered immobile; it fragments what
was thought unified; it shows the heterogeneity of what was imagined
consistent with itself’ (Foucault 1977, 147). A genealogical approach
also discloses that the concept of victim is heterogeneous. Sometimes
debates about the concept of the victim appear as a race towards iden-
tifying with the victim. At other times, interlocutors not only distance
themselves from the victim concept but eviscerate it entirely. In both
strategies, the debates about the concept of victim are rooted in contra-
dictions in the political frame, which form the background to the puzzle
raised by the conference on ‘Role of Women in Global Security’.
‘Victim’ controversies in feminist anti-rape discourses
Contemporary Anglo-American feminists may disagree about many

things – as in controversies between positions distinguished as radical,
liberal, socialist or poststructuralist – but they largely agree that the
concept of victim is ‘pathetic’, ‘essentialized’, ‘reified as pure object’
(Alcoff and Gray 1993, 271); that it serves to ‘re-objectify the female
body’ (Lamb 1999, 113); that it makes abuse appear as an ‘apolitical’
mental health issue rather than a social problem (Lamb 1999, 131). It
seems that Germaine Greer was right when she commented, ‘Talking
about victims these days is so un-PC’ (Atmore 1999, 204). As Carine
Mardorossian notes, ‘feminism is now irremediably associated with what
I call victimology’ (Mardorossian 2002, 767), with little awareness of the
genealogy of the term ‘victim’. Here I will indicate how the shifting
fate of the term victim in recent feminist discourse (Mardorossian 2002,

766) is embedded in debates about the relation of subjectivity and
violence (Haag 2001, 62).
‘Backlash’ authors like Katie Roiphe chastise feminists for presenting
an image of ‘women as victims, offended by a professor’s dirty joke,
verbally pressured into sex by peers ... her passivity, her wide-eyed inno-
cence ... her excessive need for protection’ (Roiphe 1994, 6). And yet,
feminists agree that we cannot let backlash authors set the agenda for
feminist discourse. Some contemporary feminist authors argue for the
need to ‘reconceptualize and reappropriate the word victimization and
its meaning (Mardorossian 2002, 771), to challenge the ‘disjunction
between victims and survivors’ (Nissim-Sabat 2009, 164), to understand
rape in terms of ‘embodied intersubjectivity’ (Cahill 2009, 24). But their
intervention is a response to the perceived fact that the depoliticized,
essentialized, reified, pathetic victim is a category of common currency
amongst feminists.
What is less clear, however, is which feminists identify with the
version of the category of victim that is so roundly criticized. Instead, it
appears that victim serves as the negative pole against which feminists
define themselves, a category that can be richly filled with the fruits
of feminist critiques of reification, objectification and depoliticization.
Victim becomes the category through which the contestation over femi-
nist politics can be worked out, a contestation that reflects deep-seated
controversies over the role of sexual difference in feminist discourses.
Is feminist politics oriented towards the ‘practice of sex differentiation’
(Haag 2001, 62) that is implicated in sexual violence? Or is feminist poli-
tics oriented towards the practice of freedom? And if the latter, should
women as well as other socially marked groups be wary of a discourse
of victimization that calls for legal protection, and that ‘discursively
entrenches the injury-identity connection it denounces’, as Wendy
Brown argues? (Brown 1995, 21).
Although it is common wisdom that feminism emerged in the 1960s
in the United States in part from anger at male leftists’ attitude that the
only position for women in the left was ‘on her back’, the connections
to leftist politics cuts more deeply. Violence in the 1960s was conceived
by civil rights protesters, black nationalists and anti-war protesters as
part of a ‘political universe or order’ that denoted a ‘plurality of system
or practices’ (Haag 2001, 25). The war in Vietnam, racism and resist-
ance to desegregation in the South, urban crime and capitalism, with
its endemic problems of unemployment and poverty, all were under-
stood as systems of violence. The insight that violence is part of the
social order with a multitude of manifestations remained important for

the emergence of feminism. It was not so much a question of whether
violence would occur, but how it would occur and impact the body or
subjectivity (Haag 2001, 25–26).
Radical feminists embraced this view that violence and alienation are
endemic to society, and it was reflected in their position on rape. The
New York Radical Feminists (NYRF) treated rape as ‘a means of analyzing
oppression’ (Haag 2001, 37). Their goal was not just the elimination
of rape but the elimination of oppression more generally, which could
only be achieved by a ‘revolutionary transformation’ (idem.) of society.
They viewed the egregiousness of rape not primarily as an attack on
female sexuality, but as an instance of violence and oppression. Haag
notes, ‘Because many of these feminists reasoned that female subjec-
tivity de facto entailed alienation and reification – both identified as
forms of violence – they viewed rape as in some respects a redundant
assault on the body’ (Haag 2001, 44). A 1968 NYRF caucus at New York
University Law School argued for treating rape as an assault ‘like any
other crime ... From any rational perspective, rape is not the worst thing
that can happen to a woman’ (Haag 2001, 40). In this respect, their
position was not so far from the position that Foucault was later to
defend amidst feminist controversy, that with respect to rape ‘when one
punishes rape one should be punishing physical violence and nothing
but that. And to say that it is nothing more than an act of aggression.
That there is no difference, in principle, between sticking one’s fist into
someone’s face or one’s penis into their sex’ (Foucault 1990, 200).2
Controversy about the term victim in feminist discourse emerged not
in relation to debates about sexual violence as an example of general-
ized social violence, or even as a metaphor for such generalized violence,
but as an act of violence that was unique. Susan Brownmiller, in Against
our Will, which became a landmark for second-wave feminism, defined
rape as ‘a sexual invasion of the body by force, an incursion into the
private, personal inner space without consent – in short, an internal
assault ... constitutes a deliberate violation of emotional, physical and
rational integrity’ (Brownmiller 1975/1982, 422). She describes the
unique dimensions of rape as a ‘taking’ of sex that is ‘both a blow to
the body and a blow to the mind’ (Brownmiller 1975/1982, 423–424).
Other writers, like Kate Millett, Marilyn Frye and Pamela Foe, concurred
with this view of the ‘special wrongness’ (Haag 2001, 52) of rape that
was linked to the idea that a woman’s sex organs are closer to the centre
of her identity than other parts of the body. It is this notion that rape
was a form of violence that attacks and potentially destroys women’s
subjectivity as no other form of violence does, that lies behind this

notion of the uniqueness of rape. Brownmiller acknowledges that male
rape has similar effects. She notes that men also ‘invade other men.
Who is to say that the sexual humiliation suffered through forced oral
or rectal penetration is lesser violation of the personal, private inner
space, a lesser injury to mind, spirit and sense of self?’ (Brownmiller
1975/1982, 425).
Although Brownmiller is widely castigated for ‘overdetermining
women as victims and only victims’ (Cahill 2001, 26), the term victim
has a more complex position in her analysis. On the one hand, ‘victim’
is a process of cultural becoming. On the other hand, feminist politics
became largely organized around opposing these processes of becoming
victim. One might well preface Brownmiller’s chapter on ‘Victims:
The Setting’ with Simone de Beauvoir’s observations on the process of
becoming woman in The Second Sex. Beauvoir writes, ‘the significance of
the verb to be must be rightly understood here: it is in bad faith to give it
a static value when it really has the dynamic Hegelian sense of “to have
become”’ (Beauvoir 1949/1974, xxviii). Brownmiller traces how ‘women
are trained to be rape victims’ (Brownmiller 1975, 343) through fairy
tales, male myths of rape, psychoanalytic theories of female masochism,
Christian notions of virgin martyrs, film icons of female vulnerability,
tabloid journalism and romance-confession magazines. These cultural
values fuel an ideology of rape (p. 437) that creates a psychic burden
(p. 370) for women, so that ‘the ultimate effect of rape upon woman’s
mental and emotional health has been accomplished even without the act’
(p. 449). That is, the rape victim concept functions like the act of rape
itself, in violating women’s ‘emotional, physical, and rational integrity’.
But the concept of victim is also the site of resistance and mobilization
for feminist politics, as evidenced in the claim that rape is ‘political’
(p. 446).
The focus on the ‘unique’ role of sexual violence in violating women’s
subjectivity contributed to a proliferation of feminist debates about
rape, sexual assault and incest in relation to patriarchal violence (Alcoff
and Gray 1993, 260). It was this proliferation and dissemination of what
Alcoff and Gray refer to as ‘survivor discourse’ on television talk shows,
talk radio, and in popular books and magazines, in which survivors
broke the silence about their trauma, that also contributed to the sensa-
tionalism and voyeurism related to and the exploitation of the survivors
of sexual violence (Alcoff and Gray 1993, 261). Feminists struggled with
the question whether this proliferation of victim or survivor discourse
had a ‘subversive effect on patriarchal violence’, or whether it became
‘recuperated and coopted’ (Alcoff and Gray 1993, 260) by the very forces
which feminists seemingly opposed. In this context, the concept of
victim in feminist discourse became a central site of contention.3
From a poststructuralist direction, Sharon Marcus’ work directly chal-
lenged the anti-rape discourse that led to an identity politics invested
in women’s violability. She criticized Brownmiller’s claims that women
are inherently rapable (Marcus 1992, 387), that rape is death (p. 395),
that female sexuality is an inner space which is invaded and violated
by rape and that ‘the entire female body comes to be symbolized by
the vagina’ (p. 398). Marcus argued against this approach that entails ‘a
complete identification of a vulnerable, sexualized body with the self’
(p. 394) and which excludes ‘women’s will, agency, and capacity for
violence’ (p. 395). Instead, rape should be understood as part of a ‘rape
script’ (p. 397), a ‘grammar of violence’ (p. 396), and she defines rape
as ‘a sexualized and gendered attack which imposes sexual difference
along the lines of violence’ (p. 397). She argues that for Brownmiller,
the concept of victim is opposed to will, agency and the capacity for
violence. Instead, one should understand ‘victim’ as a momentary role
(p. 391) carried out by an actress (p. 392), rather than referring to victim
as a preconstituted (p. 391) identity.
When Marcus describes rape as momentary, her description is part of
a general understanding of violence as made up of momentary acts. But
such an approach precludes understanding how violence is a process
and is repetitive and systematic. However, theorists of violence Bruce
Lawrence and Aisha Karim write that ‘violence is always and every-
where process. As process, violence is cumulative and boundless. It
always spills over. It creates and recreates new norms of collective self-
understanding’. (Lawrence and Karim 2007, 12). Ironically, in focusing
on rape strictly as a momentary act of violence, Marcus gives more and
not less weight to the act, since whatever harm occurs must be located
precisely in that momentary act and not in systemic violence, such as in
subsequent treatment by the police or judiciary. Moreover, Marcus treats
rape or any other act of violence as if it could pass through the body and
exit, without considering its subjective and embodied meaning. In this
respect, her approach to violence is at odds with testimonies of torture
victims who write of the indelible character of torture. Jean Améry, a
survivor of Auschwitz, writes, ‘Whoever was tortured, stays tortured’
(Améry 1980/1999, 34). And Améry and Susan Brison – a philosopher
who herself was the victim of brutal rape and attempted murder – both
compare torture with rape (Brison 2002, 46; Améry 1980/1999, 28), as
destroying one’s trust in the world.
Tracing the genealogy of the concept of victim in feminist debates

shows the emergence of the concept when the discourse shifted from
a critique of social and systematic violence to a critique of sexual
violence considered unique in destroying female subjectivity. In this
sense, the concept of victim became closely associated with the notion
of female vulnerability, even as the victim concept also provided femi-
nist politics with the rallying cry for resistance. The interventions by
poststructuralist theorists such as Marcus and Brown in turn treated
the concept of victim as the bone of contention for feminist politics,
viewing it as the anchor for a misguided identity politics in which
women became invested in their own wounded identities and in an
‘eternal repetition of ... pain’ (Brown 1995, 76), rather than becoming
empowered, as variously subjects of violence (Marcus 1992, 396) or as
participating in democratic ‘collective political invention’ that reopens
‘a desire for futurity’ (Brown 1995, 75). Both positions operate with
the oppositions between vulnerability versus power and pain versus
freedom that are echoed in the contemporary rhetoric about ‘not just
victims ... but’.
Security discourse of resilience and empowerment
The status of the term victim is debated in many other areas of political
violence, including post-Holocaust debates. Sociologist Jeffrey Alexander
characterizes US discourse about the Holocaust by the emergence in the
1970s of a narrative of a universal trauma-drama, in which ‘evil is inside
all of us in every society’ and ‘we are all the victims and all the perpetra-
tors’ (Alexander 2009, 35).4 And in former Eastern European countries,
many countries now vie for victim status as part of debates about the
crimes of Nazism and totalitarianism. While in recent post-Holocaust
debates one can observe a race towards identification with victim status,
in contemporary security discourses, the concept of the victim has virtu-
ally disappeared.5
Whereas the security discourse of the 1990s sought to justify the right
to intervene in the cause of global human rights victims, even at the
risk of undermining sovereignty claims (Chandler 2012, 222), the 2000s
have been characterized by a post-interventionist discourse framed by
the disappointments of the 1990s. Faced with the debacle of the image
of external humanitarian interveners protecting or saving non-Western
victims (Chandler 2012, 213), the post-interventionist debate embraces
the language of prevention, resilience and empowerment. An emphasis
on the bottom-up empowering of the vulnerable by strengthening their
capacities pre-crisis (Chandler 2012, p. 223) has replaced the liberal

internationalism of the 1990s that was characterized by top-down post-
crisis intervention to protect the rights of victims against coercion.
What are the implications of this retreat from the concept of the
victim in contemporary security discourse, given that very bad things
continue to happen to a great many people? This shift is connected with
a more general shift of a world-view about basic features of the human
condition, including the nature of time, subjectivity and crisis. Whereas
post-Holocaust discourses have been oriented towards the past – the
nature of past crimes, recovery after trauma, and the responsibility of
the present for acknowledging past wrongs in order to prevent future
atrocities – the discourse of resilience is a discourse of futurity. But this
future orientation is not a progressive vision of the overcoming of past
wrongs; rather, it is an imaginary of ‘increasingly uncertain and trau-
matic futures’ (O’Malley 2010, 488) with the aim of creating subjects
‘capable of adapting to, and exploiting to their advantage, situations of
radical uncertainty’ (O’Malley 2010, 492).
In this new security paradigm, the bad things that happen are not
necessarily catastrophes, but may be opportunities to develop flexibility
in adapting to new situations. This generalizability of the sense of future
risk not only puts a claim on the subject to adapt to new indetermi-
nate situations but it impacts the gravity of the risks as well. Since the
constant flow of time brings new uncertain possibilities, it makes little
sense to set too much store in one specific event or catastrophe, as it will
soon be superseded by others. In this new paradigm, not only would a
victim perspective like Jean Améry’s be outdated but the very concept of
victim seems to be an outdated ‘technology of thought’.6
Instead of thinking in terms of victims who need protection, this
new security paradigm thinks in terms of vulnerable subjects who need
to overcome their own obstacles, whether they be internal or ideolog-
ical restrictions or objective and material ones (Chandler 2012, 217).
Vulnerability must be overcome in order to become a resilient subject who
is ‘an active agent, capable of achieving self-transformation’ (Chandler
2012, 217). In this approach, vulnerability appears as a lack in the subject
due to insufficient training in resiliency (O’Malley 2012, 501). And as a
quality of the subject, whether individual or collective – for example,
marginal subjects, indigenous communities, or fragile states – vulnera-
bility becomes removed from specific interactions, such as interpersonal
relations, relations between minority and majority communities or
interstate relations, and vulnerability becomes removed from conflicts
over specific issues. An individual or group is not vulnerable in the face
of a specific other, in contestation over a specific issue, but is vulnerable

because of insufficient resiliency.
This approach to vulnerability as a negative quality which must be
overcome is not a new position in political theory, but reflects the
views of early liberal political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who held
that human beings are essentially needy, vulnerable and in a state of
insecurity, requiring an authoritarian government in order to maintain
peaceful life. This contemporary approach to vulnerability as a para-
digm for responding to conflict is problematic in several ways. First, in
focusing on vulnerability instead of on victims, such an approach makes
moot the discussion of those who have not survived the state of inse-
curity.7 Second, in focusing on adapting to the future, it assumes either
that there is no unfinished business from the past or that such busi-
ness puts no claims on the present. In this way, this attitude is similar
to the views held in Germany after World War II, before the process of
Vergangenheitsbearbeitung (Accounting for the past).8 Third, in the focus
on adaptability in this new security paradigm, there is no closer exami-
nation of the problems of adaptation: should people be able to adapt to
anything? When does a situation require adaptation, and when does it
require criticism, protest and opposition? And what happens when adap-
tation to situations of crisis encourages the development of patterns of
interaction that are dysfunctional in non-crisis situations?9 And fourth,
such a paradigm not only reduces all harms to passing opportunities
for self-development but forecloses the processes of social dialogue that
form a necessary part of adjudicating the gravity of such harms.
In this security paradigm, it is subjects who lack resilience who
become the object of criticism, rather than directing criticism against
specific events, agents, institutions or dynamics that are complicit in
mass violence. Although individuals or communities can never be fully
resilient, resilience becomes a normative concept, defining the goal of
training to ‘adapt to external problems or threats’ (Chandler 2012, 217).
Resilience involves training qualities such as courage, will power and
fortitude, which are resonant of mid-20th-century masculine military
ideals and which become skills appropriate to the governance of the self
(O’Malley 2012, 489).
The emphasis on empowerment, in this approach, marks a shift away
from the 1990s security paradigm of victims dependent on the help of
external saviours. But this notion of empowerment can be misleading,
and we would do well to recall Iris Marion Young’s comment:
‘Empowerment is like democracy: everyone is for it, but rarely do people
mean the same thing by it’ (Young 1997, 89). In the context of this
security paradigm, empowerment implies that power can be diffused

to individuals or groups, without a consideration of the way in which
power operates through institutions, norms and the very techniques of
the self in which the discourse of empowerment is inscribed. And this
use of empowerment overlooks the dis-empowerment that takes place
when subjects who have suffered harm can no longer articulate perspec-
tives that contribute to the recognition of injustice and the striving for
greater justice in the future.
Critical theory of the victim
Thus far I have traced how the concept of the victim has been framed
in Anglo-American feminist anti-rape debates and in recent security
debates. In both fields, though very different, one can trace the over-
arching negative assessment of the concept of victim, including its
occlusion in the face of contemporary social and political crises. And yet
the wide range of victim testimonies and literature makes evident that
victims are not responsible for the harms that befall them, and that they
are neither less nor more heroic than their fellow human beings. Should
one wish to develop a phenomenological analysis of victim testimonies,
as in Primo Levi’s and Jean Améry’s texts, one would discover quickly
that the ‘pathetic victim paradigm’ does not correspond to the lived
experiences of victims.
My goal here is not to argue that a theory of the concept of victim
should be identified with victim experiences. Joan Scott, in her pivotal
essay on ‘Experience’, argued compellingly against taking experience as
a foundational concept, as it is inscribed in an epistemology in which
knowledge is taken to be a ‘direct, unmediated apprehension of a world
of transparent objects’ (Scott 1992, 23). Instead, writing to historians
she argues that one needs to ‘take the emergence of concepts and iden-
tities as historical events in need of explanation’ (Scott 1992, 33). And
consequently, what counts as experience is ‘always contested, always
therefore political’ (Scott 1992, 37). Earlier, and in a Marxist frame of
reference, Max Horkheimer also contended that critical theory ‘runs
counter to prevailing habits of thought’ (Horkheimer 1972, 218). In his
classical essay “Traditional and Critical Theory,” he argues that the goal
of critical theory is to show the societal contradictions within historical
situations that are expressed in ideas, so that they can become ‘a force
within it to stimulate change’ (Horkheimer 1972, 215).
In pointing here to the genealogical transformations of the concept
of victim in these two arenas of discourse, I have problematized the
concept of victim not to eliminate it, but to show its meaning and posi-
tion in relation to political debates about the relation between violence
to freedom. In the genealogies of the concept of victim, one discerns
an increasing marginalization of the concept of victim, despite increas-
ingly high levels of civilian victims in contemporary conflicts.10 One
can interpret this apparent disconnect between politics and the concept
of victim as an expression of a contradiction within the political that
frames these debates about the concept of victim. This discourse of the
victim is framed by the contradiction between freedom as a universal
potential and violence as a systemic harm affecting particular subjects,
undermining their possibilities for freedom.
To develop a critical theory of the victim, one might recall Herbert
Marcuse’s discussion of the dialectical nature of concepts: ‘all categories
that describe the given form of existence as historically mutable become
“ironic”: they contain their own negation’ (Marcuse, 1969, 86). If the
concept of victim, as I have suggested, is also a category that reflects
historical forms of political existence, then what would it mean to think
about the negation of the concept of the victim? One might object that
the very discourses that I have criticized have achieved such a nega-
tion, through the displacement, marginalization and elimination of the
concept of victim. In other words, the concept of victim, unlike the
concept of essence on which Marcuse focuses, seems to have no posi-
tive potentiality. However, this form of negation puts the obligation
of negation on victims themselves as individuals to effect a transfor-
mation of situation, perspective and category, instead of negating and
transforming the political, social and economic structures which make
certain kinds of subjects into victims.
In response to the need to pursue a transformative potential of theory,
there has been a recent interest amongst feminist theorists in developing
an ethics of vulnerability. In this context, vulnerability is no longer
viewed as a negative quality, as in liberal political theory, but becomes
the basis for developing a collective solidarity, a resource ‘to oppose
violence’ (Butler 2004, xix). For example, Judith Butler writes of grief as
returning us ‘to a sense of human vulnerability, to our collective respon-
sibility for the physical lives of others ... To foreclose that vulnerability, to
banish it, to make ourselves secure at the expense of every other human
consideration is to eradicate one of the most important resources from
which we must take our bearings and find our way’ (Butler 2004, 30). But
acknowledging the condition of vulnerability is not the same as making
a normative claim based on it. As Ann Murphy has argued, ‘a sense of
one’s own dispossession, availability to others, and vulnerability may
incite violence just as readily as it does empathy, care, or tolerance ... from
the perspective of ethics, there is no normative or prescriptive force to be
mined from these experiences’ (Murphy 2009, 56).
Instead of turning to an ethics of vulnerability to address the trans-
formative potential of theory, I suggest retaining the concept of victim
and mining it for its critical resources. The concept of victim points to a
contradiction at the heart of the political, a contradiction between the
potentiality of freedom and the harms of systemic violence. As a crit-
ical concept, it poses the question whether the contradiction between
freedom and violence is constitutive of the political or whether the
contradiction is contingent. Given the human conditions of finitude
and mortality, which Beauvoir highlights, and of natality and plurality,
which Arendt took as fundamental, one cannot eliminate human
vulnerability to loss or suffering due to illness, loss, accident or even
some instances of injustice. But it is decisive whether these forms of loss
are due to the contingency of events or to domination and systemic
violence. Walter Benjamin writes of the lawmaking character of violence
(Benjamin 1986, 300), and Arendt’s study of totalitarianism can be read
as political phenomenology which explores violence at the heart of
the political. These studies of the deep connections between violence
and the political suggest the following question: is violence constitu-
tive of the political, or can critical thinking contribute to developing a
political field that is not embedded in violence? This is the transforma-
tive demand placed by the critical concept of the victim: to eliminate
systemic violence. To ignore this critical concept in the midst of mass
political violence, to eliminate it from our political vocabulary through
the mantra of empowerment, not only risks revictimizing victims but
overlooks the opportunity to use this concept as an inverted looking
glass that opens up the discursive fields in which the terms victim and
vulnerability are used.
Conclusion
The mantra ‘not just victims ... but’ that has become common currency
amongst diplomats and politicians in addressing issues of gender and
security reiterates many of the problematic assumptions about the
concept of the victim that I have illustrated above. The phrase assumes
that violence is not an ongoing process but is a moment or event that
can be overcome with no lasting formative consequences for the indi-
vidual or for the political community. It assumes that the future can
be written on like an empty slate, echoing the assumptions of a liberal
epistemology in which the mind is viewed as a tabula rasa, without

acknowledging the responsibility of the present for the past that post-
Holocaust debates have shown to be central for creating a sense of justice
in the future. This approach is neither adequate for understanding the
nature of violence nor for understanding the nature of political freedom,
nor for understanding the paradoxical connections between violence
and freedom that haunt both the political realm and politics today.
A genealogical reflection on the concept of the victim illustrates that
the concept is deeply implicated in feminist political debates about the
relation between sexual difference and political freedom, and in liberal
security debates about resilience and empowerment that operate with
a view of transformation as an endless repetition of newness without
probing the structures that reproduce systematic violence. As an alter-
native I have suggested that we retain the concept of the victim in a
critical key, as a critical theory of the victim can distinguish between
contingent and systemic harms. A critical theory of the victim sees the
potential negation of the concept not in its disappearance as concept
or perspective but in its demand to transform the historical forms of
political existence based on systemic violence into a form of political
existence in which violence, although ineradicable, is contingent rather
than constitutive.
Notes
1. Diana Meyers writes of two victim paradigms, the ‘pathetic victim paradigm’
and the ‘heroic victim paradigm’, and argues that the innocence criteria for
both paradigms ‘are at odds with normal human impurity of motivation’
(Meyers 2011, 267).
2. Ann J. Cahill notes that, although Foucault’s position was remarkably similar
to current feminist wisdom, feminists responded very negatively to his claims.
‘Whereas feminist thinkers were seeking to purge rape of its sexual content
in order to render moot the legal question of victim (i.e., female) culpability,
Foucault viewed the desexualization of rape as a liberating blow against the
disciplining discourse that constructed sexuality as a means of social and
political power’ (Cahill 2001, 144).
3. Alcoff and Gray themselves insist on using the term ‘survivor’ rather than
victim, as survivors are victims who are empowered ‘to act constructively on
their own behalf’ and as the term victim has become caught up in the psychi-
atric establishment’s arguments about the ‘victim personality’ (Alcoff and
Gray 1993, p. 261). But in this way they reiterate the view that the concept of
victim is identified with powerlessness and psychiatric disorder.
4. This universalization of victim status should be contrasted with the argu-
ments put forth by Jean Améry, who maintained a victim perspective to retain
the ‘moral truth’ (Améry 1980/1999, 70) that the only way to make history
moral is through the ‘desire that time be turned back’ so that Hitler would
be disowned and the ignominy of this history would be eradicated (Améry
1980/1999, 78).
5. Limitations of space preclude a discussion of these complex and competing
debates about the Holocaust here. But it is important to note that this identi-
fication only began to emerge decades after the end of World War II, and that
identifying with the victim often involves abstracting from concrete events,
which jeopardizes the victim perspectives it purportedly embraces.
6. I adapt this phrase from my colleague Dorte Marie Søndergaard’s notion of
‘thinking technology’ that she developed in connection with the research
project ‘Exploring Bullying in Schools’ (eXbus) (Schott and Søngergaard,
forthcoming 2013).
7. This objection is raised to the insistence on using the language of ‘survivors’
rather than ‘victims’: what of the victims who do not survive (Nissim-Sabat
2009, 164)?
8. This term refers to debates about collective processes of memory, guilt and
reconciliation that developed in West Germany decades after the end of World
War II. A pivotal moment in the development of this memory culture was
German president Richard von Weizsäcker’s speech on May 8, 1985, in which
he said that the anniversary of the Nazi capitulation should henceforth be
known as liberation day, and all those who had lived during the Nazi period
should consider their personal responsibility for this catastrophe. The focus
on collective memory, linked with issues of justice and reconciliation after
conflict in countries including South Africa, Rwanda and Northern Ireland,
contrasts with a politics of forgetting that has been common following war
and atrocities.
9. This question is raised by Art Spiegelman’s Maus (Spiegelman, Penguin,
1973/1987).
10. In 2011, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan reported
1,462 civilian deaths in a six-month period, a 15% increase over 2010 casu-
alties (Nichols 2011). The Iraq Body Count reports over 114,000 civilian
deaths from violence in the period 2003–2011. http://www.iraqbodycount.
org/ [Accessed 25 September 2012].
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Policy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Part IV
Theorizing Violence and Agency
11
Women’s Agency and the Fallacy of
Autonomy: The Example of Rape
and Sexual Consent
Paul Reynolds
Introduction
Concepts are more important for what they do than for what they
mean. Their value lies in the way in which they are able to provide a
purchase for critical thought upon particular problems of the present.
(Rose 1999, 9)
Whether demonized or diminished, one central contention on the nature

of women’s capacity and ability to choose in their sexual conduct is that
it is – or it should be – rooted in their individual, personal autonomy.
This is a relatively recent development in the context of historically
patriarchal and patrilineal descriptions of women. It is conceived as
being progressive because it involves recognition of women’s freedom
of choice and self-governance, dissembling patriarchal characterizations
of women as adjuncts or dependents – of ‘Adam’s rib’ – and respecting
women’s dignity and equality as individuals alongside men. Seeing
women ‘in their own right’ is a foundation to rejecting objectification
and oppression.
It creates a problem, however, in how we conceive women’s relation-
ships in contemporary society: to social and cultural structures, insti-
tutions, processes, orthodoxies, ideologies, contexts, conjunctures and
other – male and female – agents. If these social and cultural ensem-
bles are infused with heteropatriarchal or heteronormative discourses,
and so have lineages, tendencies and determinations that reinforce and
normalize male power and centrality in social and sexual life, to what
extent can women enjoy choice and self-governance and how can that
197
198 Paul Reynolds
be enhanced? Yet a focus on the limits and constraints to women’s choice

within social contexts can then lead to a diminishment of any apprecia-
tion of the choices women do exercise. This problem has been central
to feminist and post-feminist debates – balancing the political and ideo-
logical recognition of women’s empowerment against the continuing
impact of those constraining contexts.1
The problem is represented in the characterization of women as
autonomous – from the Greek auto nomos, or self-governance (the literal
translation is ‘self-rule’).2 What might apparently seem a semantic
consideration – whether autonomy or another characterization best
describes women’s self-governance and freedom to choose under heter-
opatriarchy – is significant in understanding the gendered nature of
modern and contemporary societies. What is at stake is represented in
two trends in the way sexual violence against women is seen. The first is
a demonization of women who are sexually expressive in dress, manner
or conduct, when they report rape and violence. Here, their autonomy
is regarded as being causal and responsible for the rape or violence they
suffer. Their conduct – however much its construction by the rapist is
untenable and incredible – becomes a central referent for understanding
the episode of violence.
The second is the woman as a passive creature who is unable to
protest clearly (which is often imagined only as physically fighting and
screaming) when a man forces himself upon her, violently or other-
wise. This produces a ‘victimology’ around her, seeing her as somehow
less than autonomous, providing succour for the defence of the perpe-
trator, with appeals to mens rea and claims of legitimate belief that she
consented in the absence of struggle (even if no credible explanation
for such belief is offered). Both characterizations, and their diminution
or exemplification of women’s choice, create a dichotomy of parody
that fails to accurately capture the power of contexts and the nature of
women’s agency within them.
This chapter argues that the concept of autonomy is at the root of a
misconception about self-governance and choice that underpins these
sorts of demonizations or victimologies. Autonomy is a ‘functional
fiction’ that individuates, abstracts and decontextualizes the real condi-
tions under which women are constrained in exercising free sexual
choice. This is not to deny women can exercise choice and govern
themselves, but it is to argue that there is a context and agent sensi-
tivity to the circumstances of their choice that is more complex than
any notion of autonomy allows. Whilst argued as a necessary means
of attribution of causation and responsibility for human action, the
Women’s Agency and the Fallacy of Autonomy 199
concept of autonomy – sliced ‘thick’ or ‘thin’ – is characterized by a

liberal individualism that eschews the complexity of women’s agency
for an atomistic abstractive notion of individual volition and (mascu-
line) reason.3 Attributions of victimhood or transgression are ‘inscribed’
onto women, so assessment of the scope and contexts for agency that
a women may have had are subverted by the assumption of autonomy
that she is adjudged to be able to exercise in a given situation. Hence the
conceptual roots of understanding individual choice in society become
the building blocks for a reinforcement of fundamental injustices.
This is not an original argument – feminist theorists have raised the
problem in a range of social and cultural contexts. What is perhaps
distinct about this particular articulation of the argument is the focus
on the intrinsic problem of the concept of autonomy. The persistence
of the use of autonomy in liberal societies and so the persistence of the
‘baggage’ of its ‘functional fiction’, its abstraction from context and its
misrepresentation of women’s experience impedes the intellectual work
that needs to press for social justice and equity. As such, the suggestion
is that it is replaced rather than qualified.
The discussion is essentially one of distinguishing autonomy and agency.
This is not a semantic discussion. Autonomy speaks to a notion of self-
governance borne of philosophical and political discourse, abstracted
as an essence of human conduct and progress in a rational society. The
autonomous subject begins with a sense of definite self-constitution
and retains that constitutive character in the contexts in which they are
located. The autonomous individual is prefigured, and by their qualities
they are able to negotiate their social and cultural worlds. This autono-
mous individual is fashioned upon men (and often a minority – bour-
geois or wealthy men).4 So, the very act of engaging with autonomy as
part of an attempt to describe or interpret a particular circumstance is
already alien to women and misrepresents their experience.
Agency speaks to the negotiation of heteropatriarchal contexts, in
which women choose and decide within circumstances that are context
and agent sensitive. The capacity to choose is sensitive to two different
factors: the capacities of the agents themselves – represented in factors
such as self-confidence, experience, education, social status – and the
character of contexts – represented by their cultural and institutional
discourses, forms, customs and practices.5
Agency contains within it the aspiration for the conditions for free
choice and self-governance described by autonomy, but recognizes the
particular contingencies and constraints of agent and context that mate-
rial conditions of social and cultural conjuncture bring. Agents are both
200 Paul Reynolds
self-constituting, but at the same time constituted by the context and

conjuncture within which they are set, and this contradictory duality
in ‘making’ and ‘remaking’ the agent creates a constant and continuous
tension between agent and context. There is no abstraction from context,
no prefiguration, and so no understanding outside of women in their
worlds. Rather, the political act of asserting agency over autonomy is a
politics of truth that aligns concepts with material experiences.
If the concept of autonomy were to be representative of the human
condition as it should be characterized and conceived, few would wish
to object to a position in which women were autonomous, because all
humans would be autonomous. However, the transposition of should
over what is, as with women’s autonomy today, is unhelpful. This
point might be extended to class, disability, ethnicity and other divi-
sions. It raises the question of whether autonomy is useful at all, beyond
presenting an abstracted ideal. Agency provides the grammar for analysis
and a politics or truth that recognizes that is never quite reaches ought.
Women and the construction of autonomy
The idea of women as sexually autonomous – as self-governing

subjects with rights and a freedom of choice over their bodies – is a
relatively recent phenomenon. Whilst historical evidence is unsys-
tematic and limited, the opening scene of Thomas Hardy’s (1994) The
Mayor of Casterbridge, in which Michael Henchard sells his wife and
baby daughter after a drunken row, is symbolically representative of
patrilineage, the institution of marriage and the patriarchal structure
of social and cultural life in the 19th century. Voices of dissent such
as Mary Wollstonecraft and Harriet Taylor, as forerunners to modern
feminism, were exceptions. Wollstonecraft’s prodigious work as a
writer and philosopher was overlooked until late 20th-century femi-
nist thinkers retrieved her from the posterity of a scandalously unor-
thodox 18th-century lifestyle, and belies her difficult life of struggles
and tribulations.6 Harriet Taylor, who was a collaborator in much of
Mill’s major work, was invisible in respect of public acknowledgement.7
It is indicative of the position of women in the 19th century that the
most successful writers – George Sand and George Eliot, and the Brontë
sisters – wrote under male pseudonyms. Women belonged to men and
held the status of property, if romantic ideologies gave a semblance of
love and natural order.
Women slowly accrued legal rights, changed social entitlements
and won political suffrage and recognition within liberal and social
democratic regimes throughout the 20th century because they had

growing political visibility through their struggles (and a groundswell of
male political support). There was a broad commitment towards egali-
tarianism in these societies after the Second World War, and as such
there was a greater political visibility of independent women in the
public sphere and greater independence of women’s living conditions
in the private sphere. This was, however, a long and difficult, unfinished
struggle. The idea of women’s autonomy appears first as desire, then
aspiration, then embodiment behind concrete political campaigns and
policy developments, its success or limitations often dependent upon
which feminist reading is being offered.
This historical trajectory has been a story of advances for women as
individuals within a liberal ideological construct. Women are accorded
the characteristic of autonomy and the capacity to make free choices.
This is essential to a liberal society, in which society is a sum of indi-
viduals, constituted through their participation in markets in which
contracts of exchange bring the sum of their wants and desires together
with their skills, labour and resources. Individuals must be free to choose
and able to make their own reasonable judgements in order to be held
responsible for what they do. Further, individuals’ decisions require
recognition by themselves and in society, hence the foundations of law
by contract, in which proposal, consent and agreement are the basis for
recognizing and recording choices. In the case of sexual relations, the
contract is abstractly one of individuals seeking their satisfaction in the
marketplace for sexual or life partners, although this sexual contract is
clearly both historically and politically unequal and does not approxi-
mate to women’s experience until the end of the 1960s.8
This notion of individual autonomy comes from Immanuel Kant
(1996), who posits enlightenment as founded on the imposition of
rationality over undue influence or irrationality in thinking and conduct.
For Kant, rationality is central to the ascription of autonomy. Focused on
the struggle to leave behind religious doctrine that specified metaphys-
ical determinations beyond human comprehension, and to grasp science
and rationality as the means of enlightenment by which humans take on
responsibility for themselves and their governance, Kant’s emphasis on
autonomy is understandable. The individual’s rationality is essentially
what allows for the development of an enlightened and reason-based
civil and political society founded on moral sentiments (Kant 1997).
The most prominent expression of the idea of the autonomous indi-
vidual within liberalism is in the work of Mill (1998), in which liberty
is both the most important characteristic of a liberal society and arises
202 Paul Reynolds
from the rational will and capacity to exercise that will free of interfer-
ence. As Gray (1983) observes,
human beings are understood to be engaged in recurrently revising

the forms of life and modes of experience which they have inherited,
and by which ‘human nature’ itself is constituted in any given time
and space. In this account of man as a creature engaged in an endless
process of self-transformation, what distinguishes human beings
from members of the other animal species is only their powers of
reflexive thought and deliberative choice. (p. 85)
Individual autonomy is a central building block to the composition of

liberal societies in their ideological representation – both in the concrete
‘is’ and the idealized ‘ought’. Liberalism is undermined by absences of
autonomy in any specific contexts or conjunctures, hence the importance
of autonomy as an aspirational characteristic in charting the emergence
of individuals’ – and individual women’s – equality. This association of
free individuals making choices in the market requires legal and moral
codification through the contract, which both evidences and represents
the exercise of autonomy through free choice. In a capitalist and market
society, it is the autonomous individual who is characterized as the
possessive individual whose life and liberty are expressed through their
acquisition of both the freedom to express their thoughts, and property
and assets as indicative of the fruits of their liberty.9
The problem with autonomy
Of course, there is a recognition within liberal thought that autonomy

is qualified. Lindley (1986, 63–70), for example, sets it against degrees of
heteronomy that restrict the desire, will or capacity to be autonomous.
Lindley sees autonomy as a matter of degrees, and criticizes the confla-
tion between being autonomous and exercising autonomy. This distinc-
tion lies in recognizing that humans are and can be autonomous, and
that they cannot always exercise that autonomy, such as when they are
coerced by others or when they are imprisoned by the state.
The relationship between autonomy and liberty is instructive.
Autonomy has a strong relationship to Berlin’s (1969) notion of a posi-
tive liberty – a freedom to do what a person chooses. The exercise of
liberty is indicative of the autonomy of the individual. Also, in a legal
and moral sense, autonomy and liberty have a strong relationship
with the idea of informed, or valid, consent. The act of consenting to a
proposed agreement or action is at the centre of the idea of free choice

expressed through a contract with another. This is represented in Rawls’
(1971: 515) claim that ‘acting autonomously is acting from principles
that we could consent to as free and equal rational beings’.
Yet Berlin identified two sets of liberties – positive and negative. As
important as the freedom to do something is, the freedom from those
things – coercion, threat, undue influence – that impede free choice is
as important. The concept of autonomy, notwithstanding a recognition
of constraints to its exercise, puts legal, moral and political emphasis
on being free. Autonomy is central to what it is to be an individual in
society. It is both a characteristic and an aspiration for both individuals
and the society in which they live. It therefore always concentrates on the
composition of being the autonomous individual, and warns against the
possible constraints to being autonomous, be they paternalism, authori-
tarian coercion and constraint, undue influence, manipulation or force.
The problem with this rational thinking lies with the constitution
of the autonomous individual. It makes the assumption that they
are static, unified, atomized and independent in a social terrain and
context which they navigate with varying success or failure. They are
represented abstractly, with no sense of particular identity characteris-
tics, and seeing contexts largely as an arena for manoeuvring to achieve
goals. What autonomy represents is fetishized – taken out of a complex
picture of human interaction within contexts and made the focus or
main route of explication of human conduct. It is also reified, insofar
as it is the root and starting point upon which each individual case of
judging human conduct rests. Any situation of social interaction has
two or more autonomous individuals, who may then be identified as
having constraints to exercising their autonomy. These constraints can
often be clearly identified, for example, someone’s being coercive, and
the role of law and political authorities is to act against it (and protect
either the autonomy of the individual or the ascribed rights accorded to
those who are not recognized as autonomous, such as severely mentally
impaired people).
Yet whilst people may be rational, both the cultural construction of
their rationality and the cultural construction of their life experience in
informing their rational judgement are questionable. Michel Foucault
points to the processes by which power circulates between individuals
in such a way as to not simply involve the recognition of power and
autonomy within and owned by particular abstract categories – such
as the individual or the state. Rather, power is within the discursive
construction of each situation within which people find themselves,
204 Paul Reynolds
unequally distributed and instantiated in institutions, orthodoxies, proc-

esses and authorities, but nevertheless characterized by the particular
social and cultural context within which social agents are located, hence
Foucault’s concern about ‘normalization’ and the way in which agents
self-regulate themselves by internalizing particular patterns of prejudice
and pathology as much as having them imposed from external forces.10
This criticism of the abstraction of autonomy and the individual
calls for a distinct vocabulary that better represents these complexities.
Discussing people as agents rather than individuals brings to the fore the
complexities of people as both self-constituting and constituted by their
context. Rather than seeing the individual as an atomized and closed
individual who operates within a context as an independent actor, the
constitutive complexities of the agent make space for biographical subjec-
tivities and fragmented selves, intersubjective relations and contextually
sensitive agents.11 This is neither a relativist proposition nor a surrender
of the capacity of the agent to formulate rational responses to situations
and phenomena. What it does is represent the complexity and context
sensitivity of social behaviour.
This is reflected in feminist critiques of liberalism, feminist standpoint
theory and intersectionality as a theoretical approach to identity and
difference.12 The idea that an agent and their actions cannot be removed
from their situatedness in social and cultural contexts is an important
corrective to the universal, one-dimensional rational ‘man’ of liberal
philosophy, whilst not falling into the trap of the postmodern subject,
which ironically revels in the relativist, fragmentary subject reading of
contexts with endless contingencies for negotiation. The corrective to
this is to recognize that contexts are material and historical in char-
acter. They require critical analysis and can be decoded, hence the crit-
ical fissure between postmodernists’ relativism that seeks to assert the
contingent possibilities in every circumstance, and feminist and mate-
rialist critiques, which locate their analysis in a changing, contextually
sensitive yet still materially unequal and oppressive world.
Autonomy, then, provides for a constitution of the individual that
predisposes to a focus on choice and contingency and to looking at
constraints and cultural and political exercises of power through struc-
ture and culture as impediments to autonomy. This formulates the
central constitutive features of the subject as static, unified, atomized
and independent. In contrast, when individuals are conceived as agents,
the contextual, conjunctural and intersubjective dimensions that bound
their agency are conceived not apart from but connected with them
(indeed, their individuality is brought into question). The agent is more
complex, balancing self-constitution with being constituted, subject to

forms of fluidity, plurality, plasticity and interdependence, dialectically,
with the agents, cultures, situatedness, customs and practices within
which they interrelate.
Of course, autonomy has been of importance in understanding the
individual in relation to society for two reasons. The first, traced here, is
a philosophical and historical conception that is criticized for its lack of
sensitivity in understanding agency, yet retains its power of aspiration.
We can still aspire to a society in which everyone is given the space to
exercise self-governance. The second is more political. Liberalism by its
nature, in its ideas of toleration, equality, rights and justice, is precon-
ceived by the idea of society as the sum of individuals. If individuals
are not free, rational, autonomous agents, the market and its constitu-
tion in the law, with its judicial process of accountability and respon-
sibility, cannot be sustained. Put simply, there is a ‘functional fiction’
to autonomy. Unless the functional fiction is that individuals are free,
reasonable and therefore responsible for their actions, it is impossible to
credit them alone for their conduct or hold them responsible for it. The
more their agency is conceived as being complex and interconnected with
structures, cultures and contexts/conjunctures, the more notions of indi-
viduated credit, achievement and responsibility become questionable.
Of course, in any form of society there is a definite need to hold agents
responsible for their agency. This ‘functional fiction’ needs to be retained
to have some sense of accountability and sanction against criminal acts.
There is a difference, however, between starting from the point of view
of autonomy and its individualized frame of reference, and starting
with agency as a complex construct of constitutive and self-constitu-
tive factors. The latter sees judgements of individual responsibility as
pragmatic responses to social and political problems that require longer-
term and more structurally constituted cultural and political responses,
whilst the former sees it as a logical and correspondent consequence of
the individual’s choices. The latter recognizes that however far agents
make their own judgements and actions, they do so within powerful
and power-infused discourses and relations that shape and sometimes
determine agent’s conduct.
Autonomy, agency and the case of rape and sexual

violence13
Rape law provides a credible and serious illustration of how conceptual

presumption and incoherence articulates within law and politics, with
206 Paul Reynolds
results that are damaging to women and to the idea of justice.14 Rape law
has been an area of continual concern since the 1970s as women’s and
victim’s activism began to assert a case not represented adequately in
official statistics, that women were the victims of an unchecked epidemic
of male sexual violence. A number of high profile cases, notably R versus
Morgan fuelled a growing sense of public outrage that rape victims
find the judicial system focusing its investigation and deliberations
on the credibility of the victim rather than the offence of the male.15
The legal system invoked a ‘double jeopardy’ in which the victim of
rape was scrutinized for the veracity of her story, partly divined by the
women’s perceived character, evidenced by her sexual history, mode of
dress, social attitudes and prior communications, which were seen as
contextual to the offence. This approach to ‘proving’ the women’s case
gave rise to prejudicial judgements of credibility in questioning by the
police (at a time when specialist rape services and experienced officers
in rape cases were marginal and rare) and in the court, in which the
woman was the focus for defence council scrutiny, often at distressing
length and in distressing detail. At the same time, the male account
was subject to two defences. The first was the defence that the rape was
consenting. Since the law prior to the 2003 Act contained no defini-
tion of what consent might be, it created difficulties that played to the
idea of a ‘reasonable doubt’. This notion was often crudely applied.
Women who did not have substantial physical injury might have it
implied that they do not refuse sex, or it might be claimed that they
failed to adequately communicate their refusal if they had previously
been acquaintances or friends, or even had what might be regarded as
having had a ‘romantic’ assignation. Above that, men could reason-
ably claim mens rea, that they had a reasonable belief that the woman
consented. This ‘reasonable belief’, in the context of a heterosexual and
patriarchal sexual culture with sexual roles of masculine assertiveness/
initiative and feminine passivity/modesty, was almost always a high
standard to break down for prosecutors. The case of Morgan, in which a
group of men raped Morgan’s wife on his word that she would desire it,
and regardless of her protests, is instructive: whilst legal appeals against
a guilty verdict (rightly) failed, the defence of mens rea was specifically
supported as a credible one.
The Sexual Offences Act 2003 substantially rewrote British rape law
along the lines of the principle of ‘free agreement’ as an antidote to
this inbuilt bias (section 74). The intention of this legal change was to
reorient judicial judgement away from double jeopardy and towards a
more balanced consideration of both narratives presented. As such, there
would be less focus on the woman’s sexual history, dress and conduct,
and more focus on the man’s explanation for how such a ‘miscommu-
nication’ took place, what he did to safeguard against such a ‘miscom-
munication’. Effectively, mens rea was required to explain why it was
that women could feel they had been raped if the terms of consent were
so evident to the man. This at least was the aspiration for the Act. To
that end, free agreement was central to the concept of consent in the
law (section 75–6).
Further, the evidential and conclusive presumptions to judging free
agreement were supposed to close some of the more offensive excep-
tions that had resulted in men’s successfully claiming they had presumed
consent from the situation of the sex act, which included violence or the
threat of violence to the victim or a third party (such as their child);
detainment; unconsciousness; lack of capacity (expressed as physical
disability); stupefaction (such as drink or drugs); deception; and imper-
sonation.16 In this respect, the law appeared to reinforce the feminist
criticism that the cultural constitution of gendered and sexual relations
placed constraints on women’s agency, if this was only partly recognized
by identifying common means by which men sought to legitimate or
excuse their abuse of women. The broader cultural factors of gendered
and sexual language, discourse, ideology and pathology and interper-
sonal and cultural contexts were beyond the cataloguing of coercive
factors because they were embedded within the practices of sexual
conduct recognized as between consenting and autonomous adults. In
the decade since the 2003 Act, the overwhelming body of research on
rape suggests that, however progressive in relation to what it replaced,
the law has not achieved its goal of diminishing rape and deterring
sexual violence.
There are a number of underlying causes for the failure of this change
in law to be effective, notwithstanding intrinsic problems such as the
failure of the legislation to be adequately operationalized in judicial
policy and guidelines. The legal change in the 2003 Act has not been
accompanied by effective or adequate attempts to use policy or discourse
to press for cultural change. Notwithstanding some ‘strong’ recent tele-
vision advertisements, such as a series showing a young man watching
in distress his own raping of a girlfriend, there have been insufficient
coordinated attempts to deconstruct traditional masculine constructs of
women as both contesting subjects to be acquired, seduced, ‘consented’
and won, and sex objects seen as an ensemble of parts rather than a
responsive agent who needs to be respected and negotiated with inter-
subjectively rather than moved from aim to consumption.
208 Paul Reynolds
Part of the problem lies with the nebulous notion of consent, which
is often presented as a process of free agreement, but which in cultural
contexts in which heteropatriarchal values prevail, is more assent or
acquiescence. The medico-moral discourses that have inhibited free and
careful verbal reflection and discourse between agents and replaced it
with euphemism, indistinct body language, self-conscious doubt as to
sexual norms and fetishized public discourse such as porn in which
women always want sex and can be degraded in that pursuit rob women
of power.17 Worse, as Foucault observes, normalization means that this
cultural imprint of femininity and the ‘normality’ of male sexual power
and women’s lesser power or choice, particularly in intimate contexts,
means that women will internalize their response in respect of giving
‘consent’ on perception of expectation, proper male assumption or
demand. This is not, in the cases in which consent is given, rape, but it
is hardly the basis for empowered, democratic and equal sexual relations.
Hence, consent is elastic and lacks a sense of distinct meaning, and is in
any case undermined by the constitutive power of discourses of heteropa-
triarchy, heteronormativity and gendered (masculine)-normativities.18
These are reflected in many of the feminist critiques of sexual consent
in heteropatriarchal societies and on the failures of rape law. At one end
of the spectrum of positions is MacKinnon’s (1989, 172–174) argument
that the sexual contract misrepresents women’s subjection to systematic
inequality, subjection and brutalization, with the result that rape is the
dominant use of women by men and that sexual consent in hetero-
sexual relationships is largely an extension of rape, as the choice implied
in consent is never freely available. Forced sex is a ‘normal’ part of sexu-
ality, rape is ‘indigenous, not exceptional, to women’s social condition’,
and the line between forced and unforced sex is increasingly difficult to
discern. In that context, MacKinnon argues that women’s eroticization
of what is their sexual subjection is unsurprising – ‘it beats being forced’
(ibid., 177). Shelia Jeffreys (1990) refines this analysis to see female
sexuality as socialized into a passivity to male desire with a masochistic
character, or as Mackinnon would have it, a desire of violation. Andrea
Dworkin (1981) echoes this concern in regarding heterosexual penetra-
tion as an act of possession. In these radical feminist accounts the idea
of women’s autonomy is a fiction perpetrated by and for the benefit of
men and as part of a vocabulary by which women’s sexual use can be
rationalized and normalized, or minimized and made exceptional in its
more violent manifestations.
There are problems with this position, such as the absence of recog-
nition of meaningful women’s agency and the denial of an agency in
which women do desire heterosexual sex, the overemphasis of male

power and potency, and the grievance many rape victims would take
to their violation’s being characterized as related to their consenting
sexual activity.19 Where it is stronger, however, is in providing potent
critical arguments that reject the easy attribution of autonomy. Whilst
autonomy is rejected, women’s agency in these articulations is prescribed
and diminished by a determinant critique of male power.
At the other end of the spectrum is Kate Roiphe (1993, 53–68), who
rejects the feminist discourse on rape and the characterization of the
‘rape crisis movement’ as a form of moral panic. Roiphe suggests rape
is often the poor management of unwanted encounters, from which
women should either exercise decisive choice or accept culpability for
not recognising and articulating choice. Women thereby take responsi-
bility for their sexual agency, and feminist critiques sacrifice women’s
agency for political rhetoric. This position is clearly predicated upon
liberal individualist assumptions about women as autonomous agents
who are free to make a meaningful choice and have responsibility
for their sexual conduct. Persuasive and coercive techniques short
of violence are reduced to being an apologia for feminist defences of
women as ‘victims’ – mentally and emotionally weak and infantilized.
The problems with this position are its lack of empirical substance,
denial of a wealth of evidence from women who have been raped
and reported rape (if acknowledging the few who do not find rape a
devastating experience), and more conceptually a complete disregard
for gendered discourses of power in society. For Roiphe, the woman
is an autonomous agent, which might be regarded as ironic given her
post-feminist credentials. The subtleties of a notion of women’s agency
are unnecessary, since such contextual concerns are secondary to the
capacity for free choice. Both this and the previous model represent
extremes – or one-dimensional notions – of the characterization of
autonomy and agency. One denies autonomy and diminishes agency,
the other diminishes agency by arguing from substantial autonomy.
Between these two positions, there are attempts to grapple with the
problem of agency that are more contextually sensitive. For example,
Lois Pineau (1996) has argued for the necessity of context sensitivity in
looking at rape by insisting on a verbal standard for eliciting consent
amongst heterosexuals that she acknowledges may not be equally neces-
sary for lesbian relationships.20 The particularity of heteropatriarchy in
forming both the context and agent inequalities of power point towards
notions of differing standards for ethical sexual conduct. Taking this
further, I have argued that – notwithstanding the criticality of acting
210 Paul Reynolds
against the epidemic of rape and sexual violence in contemporary

society – the lack of context and agent sensitivity to sexual scripts has
an impact even where consent is given, to the point that the quality of
consent in many sexual relations is open to question (Reynolds 2004).
In both these questions the assumption of autonomy at the expense of
an appreciation of agency is a central underlying problem to judging the
terms of sexual violence, coercion and rape.
Certainly, a central problem with the 2003 Sexual Offences Act’s amend-
ment to the rape law to replace double jeopardy with ‘free agreement’ is
that ‘free agreement’ is constituted with the assumption that a judicial
process can weight two autonomous voices rather than have to grasp the
sensitivities of context and agency that two unequal agents bring in setting
out the conjuncture within which an offence may have taken place. If
the functional fiction of autonomy is useful to a liberal law that requires
individual accountability, responsibility and justice, the price is that that
functional fiction leaves sex crimes as one category in which the func-
tionality of the fiction of autonomy is questionable. Whilst the problem
of reconciling individual and social justice is always intractable, a more
agency-centred approach to sex law might approach law as the Greeks
did, as Nomos – governance in which law and culture are conjoined. In
that respect, judicial processes would seek to aspire to context and agent
sensitivities in developing their modes of judgement on individual cases,
and considerably more effort would be spent on cultural change to deprive
the most common defences claimed by those who reject charges of sexual
violence. This should be done through programmes that made sexual
knowledge and discourse more open, in order to lessen, for example, the
levels of ‘miscommunication’ that are so often offered in rape trials.
Some concluding reflections: autonomy, agency

and women
John Hoffman (2001, 6–9 and 23–26) has used the idea of a ‘momentum
concept’ to explain how some key concepts, equality, emancipation,
freedom and agency, are subject to constant reworking – or more
precisely remaking – and development as society develops culturally,
politically and materially. A concept like agency is dialectically consti-
tuted in its context – its particular historical and cultural articulation –
and in its transcontextual, conceptual ascriptions, which are abstract
in a general description and also trace the genealogy of the concept,
if it does not always expose that genealogy. Hence, often, the user of a
concept is confronted by its abstract usage as a building block of analysis
and does not question how its underlying presumptions and genealogy
impregnate its contemporary meanings and uses. Such is autonomy,
which composes an understanding of the individual as being constituted
by the individual in society, with an eternal and universal abstraction
compromised by different and changing contexts in each conjuncture.
There is no momentum to autonomy.
Agency has momentum. Its core of a dialectic of constitutive and self-
constitutive processes requires that agency is considered in situ – context,
conjuncture and situatedness – and conditionally, so that agency is always
understood as interconnected with the conditions within which it is
conceived. Its abstraction is a signifier of this complexity, not a descriptor
of its quality and causality. The idea of the momentum of a concept in its
application to social subjects has two important benefits. It allows for the
complexity of changing social contexts, so that changes in law or domi-
nant discourse – as in rape law – are not presumed to change substantive
and experienced agency or to have the logical or reasoned approach that
might be mapped out for it. Second, it situates concepts in context, so
that they are never far from being returned to what they are purported
to describe and remade with social change. Hence, conceptually agents
will always be interrogated, and autonomous individuals are presupposed
before interrogation to have base qualities. As such, the latter have a life
beyond their situation. Autonomy is too embedded within the conceptual
language of philosophy and the social sciences not to signify important
meanings that have developed over time, but that conceptual constitution
will always be inferior to the notion of agency. This underlines the value
of Rose’s observation in the first quotation that opens this discussion.
The meanings of concepts are conditional upon their use and purchase.
The constitutive nature of agency meets this concern, whilst autonomy
retains a sense of impressing meaning beyond use or purchase.
The example of rape and sexual violence illustrates the bankruptcy
of a concept of autonomy that cannot relinquish a free rationality that
reflects the presence of men and the conditional absence of women.
The functional fiction of autonomy underpins conceptually the agonies
by which legal and judicial processes juggle their notion of individual
responsibility in such a way as to let dual pathologies or demonization
and diminution impact upon women. It is only with an agent sensi-
tive notion of rape and sexual violence that a viable understanding of
this problem is conceived. This would comprise: a pragmatic and inher-
ently political approach to how rape cases should be judicially managed,
beyond the failed ‘impartiality’ of law, to solve the epidemic of brutality;
the urgent need for social and cultural change to strike at the root of
212 Paul Reynolds
sexual violence and make changes to the constitutive moments in

sexual violence as a strong discourse in contemporary societies; a more
sophisticated understanding of the impact of culture, discursive regimes
and structural relations in understanding the macrocosm of gendered
and sexual relations and the microcosm of intersubjective relations and
conduct.
What is at stake in this conceptual ‘ground clearing’ is under-
standing and decoding narratives of rape, sexual miscommunication or
consenting sex beyond the volition and free choice of individuals and
within contexts, conjunctures and stations in which a woman’s agency
might be lesser or greater mediated by both individually experienced
and socially contextualizing factors: knowledge (and education); experi-
ence; anxiety; internalized norms; social class; age; ethnicity; sexuality;
private/public space; situation; time and intersubjective circumstances.
A more sensitive notion of agency is able to comprehend and express
the complex weaves of social situations considerably more usefully than
the illusion of autonomy.
When Lewis Carroll’s Alice, perhaps with frustration, questions
Humpty Dumpty’s claim to make words mean what he wants, his reply
is to ask who is master – the word or the user. Where rape and sexual
violence are concerned, men, indirectly through the constitutive and
discursive culture of a gendered and sexualized society rooted in oppres-
sive discourses, and directly through male agency exploiting that advan-
tage, have been masters of words. Words mean what men have said.
Whilst it is possible to use words carefully in conceptual discourse, it
does not mean they do not create a conceptual construct limited by its
roots. Autonomy, however much its intellectual genealogy has been in
pursuit of understanding freedom in a complex social world, is a word
that in practice supports that mastery. Agency disciplines the user to
think more carefully about the problem of who is master of a discourse,
where power is located discursively in language culture and its material
embodiment in structures and processes, and how more carefully artic-
ulated concepts – with their genealogy reflecting their momentum –
restore to Alice an equality over words. And if Humpty has to have a fall
to recognize the need to change his perception of his mastery and the
utility of his words, then that has virtue.
Notes
This chapter arises from a paper of the same title presented at the ‘Women and
Violence: The Agency of Victims and Perpetrators’ workshop held at the University
of Birmingham in 2011. My thanks to the participants for a fruitful discussion

and to Herjeet Marway for her editorial comments. The text was substantively
written in 2012
1. For rehearsals of these conceptual debates, see indicatively Tong (2008) and
Nicholson (ed.) (1990).
2. Auto Nomos is often translated as ‘self rule’ or ‘self governance’, although the
Greek term Nomos describes law within a cultural context rather than simply
as abstractive rules and procedures.
3. On the concept of autonomy and its thick and thin notions, see Dworkin (1988).
4. See, indicatively, Antony and Witt (eds) (1993) and Lloyd (1993).
5. Philosophically, this sort of reasoning is best represented within contextu-
alism, see DeRose (1999); and politically and sociologically it appears in crit-
ical social sciences, such as Mills (1972) and Bourdieu and Waquant (1992).
It is not to be easily rolled into either relativism or postmodernism.
6. This is not to ignore the efforts of women authors like Elizabeth Barrett
Browning, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf, or activists like Millicent Garret
Fawcett, to both promote and build on Wollstonecraft’s writings and example.
See Gordon (2005) and Todd (2000).
7. For any reading of Mill, see the brilliant Reeves (2008).
8. The sexual contract is explored in Pateman (1988).
9. On the possessive individual, see MacPherson (1962).
10. Selectively, Foucault (2002a, 2002b, 2003).
11. Examples of the wide-ranging literature that explores these complexities
includes Heyes (2007), Crossley (2001) and Collins (1990).
12. See Harding (ed.) (2003) and Yuval Davis (2011).
13. In what follows, I use some rather dated texts to illustrate the discussion. This
is substantially because the positions have not changed substantially in the
last decade – exactly the impasse this chapter seeks to address. The discussion
of feminist theories that follows in relation to rape and consent draws on
Moore and Reynolds (2004).
14. The discussion here is focused on heterosexual rape. This is not to say that
women do not commit acts of sexual violence or that other forms of rape,
such as male rape, are not important. For the purposes of this discussion,
however, the focus is dictated by the distinctions between the different forms
of crime and the overwhelming volume of heterosexual rape, assault and
violence. There is a voluminous literature on rape, but indicatively, for an
overarching discussion, see Horvath and Brown (eds.) (2009); Kelly (2013);
Bourke (2008); and, whilst dated, Lees (1997).
15. On Morgan, see McGregor (2005); Cowling (1997); and Hinchliffe (2003).
16. See the relevant clauses of the Sexual Offences Act 2003, Sections 75 and 76
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/42/section/75 and http://www.
legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/42/section/76.
17. See Mort (2000).
18. See Connell (1987, 2005); Haywood and Mac An Ghail (2003); and Mac An
Ghail (ed.) (1996).
19. See Archard (1998, 93); McIntosh (1992); and Segal (1994, 219).
20. Whilst it might be argued that same-sex relationships are not less likely
to have power inequalities and violent conduct, Pineau was exploring the
context of heteropatriarchal relations as producing ‘date rapes’.
214 Paul Reynolds
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Reynolds, P. 2004. ‘The Quality of Consent’ in Mark Cowling and Paul Reynolds
(eds) Making Sense of Sexual Consent. Aldershot: Ashgate, 93–108.
Roiphe, K. 1993. The Morning After: Sex, Fear and Feminism. London: Hamish
Hamilton.
Rose, N. 1999. Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge:
Rowbotham, S. 1992. Hidden from History: 300 Years of Women’s Oppression and the
Fight Against It. London: Pluto.
Segal, L. 1994. Straight Sex: The Politics of Pleasure. London: Virago.
Todd, J. 2000. Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life. London: Weidenfeld and
Nicholson.
Tong, R. 2008. Feminist Thought 3rd ed. Oxford: Westview Press.
Yuval Davis, N. 2011. The Politics of Belonging: Intersectional Contestations. London:
Sage.
12
What Is Violence?
Amanda Cawston
Introduction
This chapter explores definitions of violence, a concept with clear polit-

ical as well as philosophical implications, and that occupies a central
place in this volume’s investigation of women, violence and agency.
Does the term ‘violence’ capture a narrow range of actions, the para-
digmatic personal, physical and direct examples of violence, or does it
legitimately apply to an expanded range of actions and practices, the
paradigmatic cases of personal violence as well as the harmful conse-
quences of social, political and economic practices? By defining the
range of actions, states of affairs or practices that constitute violence,
answers to these questions help delineate our field of interest, facilitate
various perspectives and inform lines of inquiry.
The aim of this chapter is to uncover a specifically political concep-
tion of violence which will capture our interest in violence as it relates
to a fundamental problem for society. The chapter will first analyse (and
reject) several existing definitions of violence in terms of whether they
successfully describe a fundamental problem, and then propose a new
conception of violence that directs our attention towards problematic
attitudes rather than types of actions. This new conception allows us to
consider the relationship between women, violence and agency from
a new perspective, drawing our attention to forms of violence that are
generally overlooked on the standard, narrow conception, and rede-
fining the ways in which women may be both subject to, and partici-
pants in, violence. Secondly, the chapter will explore how adopting this
definition allows us to reconceive the relationship between women and
violence, via two test cases. Specifically, it will demonstrate how the
conception of violence as an attitude allows us to describe pornography
216
What Is Violence? 217
as violence, followed by some exploratory remarks on the implications

of this view for feminist philosophy more generally.
Politics is fundamentally concerned with preventing, controlling,

and countering violence in human affairs. But in order to address
the question of how to prevent (or reduce) violence, we first need
to know what sorts of actions, or states of affairs, we are interested
in minimizing. In other words, we need a definition of violence. A
successful definition of violence, however, should not be evaluated
in terms of how well it captures our common usage of the term, but
rather in how well it helps us identify the actions that constitute this
fundamental concern for politics. By including a particular class of
actions within a definition of ‘violence’, we offer a direction, a subject
upon which politicians, social scientists and philosophers can fix
their gaze. Misdefining violence, therefore, represents more than a
simple conceptual error. It is also a serious impediment to our efforts
to address the problem of violence.
This worry is expressed in the criticism directed at various proposed
definitions. Johan Galtung, for example, argues that traditional or
‘restricted’ definitions of violence unjustifiably set aside problematic
states of affairs (such as poverty, or ‘structural violence’), describing the
problem of violence too narrowly, such that too little is solved by its aboli-
tion (Galtung 1969). Conversely, C.A.J. Coady argues against Galtung-
style definitions of ‘structural violence’, claiming they are misleading
and will misdirect our efforts to deal with violence. He writes,
it may well be that quite different techniques, strategies and remedies

are required to deal with the social disorder of (restricted) violence
than are needed to deal with such issues as wage injustice, educa-
tional inequalities and entrenched privilege. The use of the wide defi-
nition seems likely to encourage the cosy but ultimately stultifying
belief that there is one problem, the problem of (wide) violence, and
hence it must be solved as a whole with one set of techniques. (Coady
2008, 34).
There are two different worries expressed in these statements. Coady’s

concern seems to be that if we adopt the wrong definition of violence,
our misunderstanding of the nature of the problem will steer us towards
the wrong remedies, potentially wasting effort and resources, or worse,
adding to rather than resolving the problem. Alternatively, Galtung’s
worry seems to be that the wrong definition of violence may mislead us
218 Amanda Cawston
into thinking we have solved the problem when in fact we have resolved
but one part of it. I aim to expand on Galtung’s worry and suggest that
the wrong definition of violence may mislead us into thinking we have
solved the problem when we have not solved it at all, but only effected a
superficial change in its appearance.
A poor definition of violence will be one that mistakes a contingent
property for a necessary feature of the underlying problem. Conversely,
a useful definition of violence is one that will point to the root of the
matter such that if we managed to ‘solve’ the problem it pointed to,
we could be confident that violence had truly been resolved. In what
follows, I evaluate three prevalent types of definitions of violence in
light of this worry, and argue that all three mistake contingent features
of violence for the fundamental problem. I then propose a fourth and
alternative definition that, in my view, avoids this mistake. I want to
suggest that a definition of violence that identifies a genuinely necessary
feature of the phenomenon is one that focuses on a particular attitude.
Acting violently
The first group of definitions characterize violent acts as those that are
performed in a certain way – specifically, actions that are done violently.
To act violently is to perform an action forcefully (Bäck 2004), with
suddenness or rapidity (MacCallum 2009), or in a way that is ‘like dealing
a blow’ (Coady 2008, 41). These ways of acting are of concern because
they often, if not always, are the cause of injury, damage and harm. An
example of this type of view comes from Robert Audi, who claims,
I believe that in the case of the concept of violence it is apparent that

the notion of vigorous abuse comes very close to forming a kind of
core; for virtually all instances of violence involve vigorous abuse,
and those that do not can be seen to exhibit important resemblances
to it or clear potential for it. (Audi 2009, 145)
The forcefulness or vigour of an act is not usually considered suffi-

cient to mark an act as one of violence, with most views specifying
further conditions that an act must have in order to qualify.1 Many are
keen to differentiate between the forceful and damaging nature of a
violent storm, for example, and the violent acts of a person, marking
the violence of nature as one kind of problem (perhaps a scientific or
technical problem), while the intentional forceful and damaging acts of
people present a different kind of problem, namely a political problem.2
To this end, many definitions include some requirement for intention-
ality, although there are variations on which aspects of the act must
be intended (the foreseen effects, the direct act itself regardless of the
foreseen effects etc.). Regardless of these additional conditions, propo-
nents of this type of definition insist that the way of acting is a neces-
sary condition. As a result, certain ‘gentle’ or ‘non-forceful’ yet harmful
actions will not be classed as violence on this view. Audi, for example,
claims that murder by gassing or infection by deadly bacteria, while
clearly problematic acts, are not appropriately called violence. Similarly,
Coady claims that murder via slow poisoning over several years is not
violence. Moreover, harms that are the product of certain institutional
or political arrangements, termed ‘structural violence’ by competing
views, will be excluded on this definition as well.
I want to suggest that conceiving of violence as a way of acting focuses
our attention on a contingent feature. On this point, I follow John Harris
(1974, 1980), who stresses the important distinction between under-
standing our use of the term violence, and what he calls ‘the problem of
violence’. As Harris rightly notes, we are concerned with
the phenomenon of men inflicting injury, suffering or death on one

another. We are not so much interested in the particular methods
men use to do this, or in the look, the physical appearance of the
actions that they use. We are interested in violence because it is a
particular kind of activity – the kind of activity in which men inflict
injury on one another. (Harris 1980, 18)
Harris offers several examples of actions that need not be done violently,
but are the sorts of actions that seem to be clear cases of people inflicting
harm on each other in a way that is problematic and of obvious interest
to political philosophy. For example, rebels who poison a water supply,
or who lock residents in their homes and leave them to starve are not
acting violently in the sense Audi and Coady describe. But, Harris claims,
it is clear that these are fundamentally problematic acts. A group that
declared it would abandon the use of Audi-Coady style violence, but that
made use of these tactics, remains just as much of a concern for political
philosophy. The danger of identifying the problem of violence as a partic-
ular way of acting is that it leaves open, and perhaps even promotes,
the development of new techniques of inflicting damage and injury on
one another that avoid appearing as violence in this narrow sense. One
contemporary example of this effect can be found in the support for the
use of economic sanctions against a rogue state rather than traditional
military force.3 Touted as a tactic that stops short of violence, economic
sanctions can result in devastating harm and suffering that rivals the
injury done by traditional violence (see also Pontara 1978). The worry
220 Amanda Cawston
is that defining violence as acts that are ‘done violently’ will push us
towards this type of ‘solution’, a response that in my view (and that of
Harris) fails to qualify as a solution at all, but merely changes the way in
which we inflict harm on others.
Suffering
The second type of definitions follows naturally from the criticisms
raised above. They reject the requirement that violence be done violently,
focusing instead on identifying ‘what is left when we subtract a violent
act from an act of violence’ (Harris 1980, 14). For Harris, and others, the
relevant remainder is the suffering, harm or injury that we inflict on
each other.4 He offers the following definition: ‘An act of violence occurs
when injury or suffering is inflicted upon a person or persons by an
agent who knows (or ought reasonably to have known), that his actions
would result in the harm in question’ (Harris 1980, 19).
Definitions of this type focus on actions that are problematic in virtue
of their actual consequences, regardless of whether those consequences
are brought about directly through vigorous force, or indirectly through
controlled or collective action, or perhaps even through omissions
or failures to act. While harm and suffering are the central necessary
features of this type of view, they are again not sufficient for violence.
Proponents of this view want to distinguish between the accidental
and the intentional causing of harm, as well as between intentional but
well-meaning infliction of suffering (such as the pain caused by bene-
ficial surgery), and the malicious or negligent causing of harm. These
distinctions provide the criteria for additional necessary conditions that
supplement the core requirement of harm, suffering or injury.
A notable feature of this class of definitions is the tendency to argue
for rather expansive definitions of the key terms ‘harm’, ‘suffering’, and
‘injury’. Harris, for example, takes these to include ‘[w]rongful action
or treatment; violation or infringement of another’s rights; suffering
or mischief wilfully or unjustly inflicted ... Hurt or loss caused to or
sustained by a person ... harm, detriment, damage’ (Harris 1980, 20).
Holmes distinguishes between hurt (which includes pain, suffering, and
aguish) and harm, where ‘people have been harmed only if they have
been made worse off as a result of what is done to them’, which may
include instances of hurt, although not necessarily (Holmes 2009, 278).
These broad definitions of harm and suffering go beyond the simple
intuitive meaning of these terms (the experience of physical or psycho-
logical pain), and suggest that violations should also be classified as
harms – that someone is harmed by wrongful treatment or violation of
her rights. This extension is motivated in part by the observation that

suffering itself does not always seem to be violence. The pain associated
with the necessary extraction of a problem tooth or the setting of a
broken bone does not seem to be the kind of suffering we are interested
in as a political problem.5 I think the concerns about suffering in the
narrow sense and harm in the broader sense reflect two different intui-
tions, and it will be helpful to examine them separately. The remainder
of this section will examine and evaluate the focus on suffering in the
narrow sense, while the more expansive notion of harm akin to viola-
tion will be discussed in the following section.
So, how does a definition of violence that specifies the infliction of
suffering as a necessary condition fare? Such definitions again miss the
mark and direct us towards the wrong kinds of ‘solutions’. It is easy to
imagine ways of continuing to perform acts that strike us as fundamen-
tally problematic that avoid the infliction of suffering. Very simply, it
is possible to murder someone in a way such that they feel no pain. It
seems clear that we would not consider the problem of violence ‘solved’
if murders, rapes and injuries continued to be carried out, although pain-
lessly. While this might seem obvious, the focus on suffering is perhaps
more prevalent than one might initially think, and to my observations
currently plays a large role in motivating solutions of just this sort. For
example, executing someone by lethal injection versus a firing squad is
perceived as ‘less violent’ in virtue of its humaneness. Similarly, a large
number of people seem satisfied that eating meat is a permissible practice
if the animals enjoy decent lives and are killed painlessly. In the killing
of animals, it is the suffering that is cause for concern and, as the meat
industry has shown, this problem can be solved while retaining what for
the animals remains a problematic practice.6 The worry, then, is that a
definition of violence that focuses on suffering will allow, and perhaps
even endorse, the development of solutions that will only change the
form violence takes rather than resolving the problem.
Violation
As we saw above, definitions of violence that focus on suffering in the
narrow sense push us towards unsatisfying responses to the problem,
leaving us with the broader interpretations of harm used or implied by
Harris, Galtung, Holmes and others. Importantly, this broader notion
of harm is not an extension of the concept of suffering, but a shift to
a different sort of wrong, that of violation (of a right). Some of these
broader notions directly reference the notion of violation, while others
implicitly rely on it. Newton Garver, for example, makes it explicit in
222 Amanda Cawston
his statement, ‘What is fundamental about violence in human affairs

is that a person is violated’ (Garver 1971, 242). Holmes, however, relies
on an implicit notion of harm as violation. He suggests that someone
is harmed if they have been made ‘worse off’, a claim that is too broad
unless combined with the notion of violation. I can make my fellow
citizens ‘worse off’ by taking a drink from the water supply, leaving less
water available than they had before and therefore worse off (although
perhaps trivially so, depending on the availability of water). For such
an act to be considered violence at all, it must be combined with the
assumption that the water was not mine to take, that I have violated
the rights others had to the water. Recognition of this implicit premise
allows us to categorize a variety of definitions as violation-type views
despite their use of terms like ‘harm’ or ‘injury’ (for example, Galtung
and Holmes).
One point of disagreement amongst proponents of this type of view
regards the scope and content of rights that people have, and whether
violation of any of them, or a smaller subset, constitutes violence.
Bernard Gert, for example, gives a very short list of rights, or rules, the
violation of which constitutes violence.7 Conversely, Galtung’s influen-
tial definition suggests that people have a general right to the maximum
possible realization of their potential (Galtung 1969). There are addi-
tionally a host of positions that fall along various points between the
two.8
This shift to characterizing violence as a violation seems to resolve
the problem cases explored so far – it will allow us to describe a murder
as violence even if it was performed quietly and with minimal and
controlled force, and such that the victim felt no pain. Regardless, the
victim’s right to her life was violated, and if the act satisfies any other
necessary conditions (the act and its consequences were intended), we
can confidently describe the act as one of violence.
However, it is possible to propose ‘solutions’ to violation-based views
that require only changes to our theoretical framework rather than
changes in our actual actions. There are several ways to work around a
violation-based view that enable us to dissolve the potential violation.
First, one could deny that the agent ‘violated’ was in fact entitled to the
right in question. This could be because no agent could be said to have
that right (a consequence perhaps of minimal conceptions of rights),
or because that agent is not entitled to the right in virtue of belonging
to a certain group (for example, is an animal, a child or a non-citizen
etc.). A second route might be to accept that the agent does possess
the right in question, but to assert that it is justly overridden by other
considerations and that the act is therefore not a violation of that right.
These other considerations might include conflicts with rights of higher
priority, or perhaps the agent has legitimately consented to forego her
entitlement to the right, or finally, the agent might perform some other
action that constitutes forfeiture of that right.
One may reply that just because one can offer an argument that
tries to show why an agent is not entitled to a particular right does not
mean the argument succeeds and that a violation has not occurred.
While I agree with this point in principle, I think we have reason to
be sceptical of our ability to avoid such moves. As political philoso-
phers are keenly aware, the needs, interests, desires and rights of agents
living in society necessarily conflict, meaning the goal of instantiating
the ideal that ‘[e]ach person has the same indefeasible claim to a fully
adequate scheme of equal basic liberties, which scheme is compatible
with the same scheme of liberties for all’ (Rawls 2001, 42) requires
determining priorities and specifying the mechanisms by which we
endorse some rights over others. Entangled then, as rights-based theo-
rists must be, in the project of balancing, prioritizing and denying
rights, I fear the potential for abuse is high. We have in the past
made use of the language and theory of rights, to excuse all manner
of offences and to dissolve their status as violations. Slaves could be
‘owned’ and mistreated as they were not thought entitled to the same
personal rights that slave owners were. Marital rape was not considered
a violation until fairly recently, as marriage was thought to constitute
consent to all future sexual activity.9 Children were not thought enti-
tled to rights that would prohibit corporal punishment, either from
parents or schoolteachers. While our modern views on these issues
have, thankfully, changed, contemporary examples of a similar nature
abound. The rights that refugees, immigrants or other non-citizens
enjoy are minimal, and offer a modern example of the urge to assign
rights by group membership, as does the case of non-human animals,
mentioned previously, criminals and those deemed to have intellectual
disabilities. In light of this troubling historical track record and the
lack of evidence for the belief that modern philosophers are somehow
less biased or entangled than our predecessors, I think there is good
reason to doubt the ability of violation accounts to guide us towards
genuine solutions to violence.
Violence as an Attitude
Focusing on the above issue regarding violation accounts provides
the beginnings of an alternative definition of violence. Violation
224 Amanda Cawston
accounts had us focus on those affected to determine whether an

action constituted violence or not. It was either something in the
nature (or membership) of those affected that entitled them to a right
against the action, and they had not acted in a way that constitute
forfeiture of that right. I want to suggest reversing the direction of our
focus. Rather than trying to identify some feature of those affected
by our actions that allows us to describe the act as a violation, we
could try to identify some feature of the actor that may prove useful.
I want to suggest that, rather than thinking about violence in terms
of particular kinds of actions, it is more useful to think of violence as
an attitude.
There is some support for this view within many of the accounts
seen so far. Most versions of all three types of accounts specify some
intention requirement in order to differentiate between accidents
and acts of violence. However, intention plays only a secondary role
in these definitions. For example, a suffering-based account might
require that the act be done intentionally in order to exclude cases
of suffering that result from accidents. It also, however, happens to
be the case that we would call the intentional infliction of suffering
an act of malice. We have a name for the attitude the act expresses.
Rather than starting with intentional acts that result in suffering (that
we happen to call ‘malicious’), I suggest starting with the attitude of
malice, which may be expressed in a variety of ways, some of which
will be overlooked if we focus only on one type of consequence or
mode of expression.
What exactly is the attitude on which we need to focus? It cannot be
limited just to malice or greed, as these are tied too closely to the idea
that the actor intended to cause suffering or to make others ‘worse off’,
which are only superficial features of violence. The attitude we want
must be more general and not tied to these specific forms of violence.
Returning again to the problems described with violation accounts, we
saw that our efforts were made problematic as a result of bias, specifi-
cally self-interested bias. I want to suggest, then, that the problematic
attitude is one of egoism.10
This attitude is more prevalent than one might think, and it may even
be impossible to be completely selfless.11 The impossibility of complete
selflessness does not, however, invalidate the view, but implies only that
there may be limits to how far we may succeed in ‘solving’ the problem.
As Mahatma Gandhi writes, ‘[f]or me non-violence is not a mere philo-
sophical principle. It is the rule and the breath of my life. I know I fail
often, sometimes consciously, more often unconsciously. It is a matter
not of the intellect but of the heart’ (Gandhi 1948, 74–75). This raises
a further point, that it is not only the malicious and greedy attitudes of
murderers and thieves that are of concern, but the egoism that makes an
appearance in all of our lives that represents the problem.
It is important to note that a conception of violence as an attitude is
not wholly distinct from actions. Actions, and their results are, of course,
the most salient and confronting aspect of this topic. And there is an
obvious and familiar connection between particular attitudes and the
kinds of actions in which they result. It is crucial, however, to recognize
that these familiar connections are not necessary and that an attitude
may be expressed in other ways than we are accustomed to. Furthermore,
attitudes can be expressed in individual actions as well as those that are
part of institutional arrangements. An attitude-based account will there-
fore include the paradigmatic direct and personal acts of violence of tradi-
tional definitions as well as so-called ‘structural violence’, in which egoistic
attitudes are expressed via sociopolitical or economic institutions.
This is a preliminary pass at identifying the attitude at issue, and not
to be taken as comprehensive. But it is specific enough for our present
discussion. I think it is clear that if we managed to ‘solve’ the problem
of egoistic attitudes, in the variety of forms it may take, we could be
confident that we had solved the problem of violence.
Attitudinal violence and feminism
With this conception of violence as an attitude in hand, I turn now to

some preliminary remarks on the implications of this view for issues of
interest to feminist philosophy. In the first part of this section, I examine
how this definition of violence allows pornography to be understood as
violence, despite the absence of direct, personal, physical violence by
the consumer, circumventing some of the theoretical difficulties femi-
nists have encountered on this issue. I then offer some more speculative
comments regarding the implications of this view for feminism more
generally, suggesting it may require a more critical evaluation of some
familiar feminist aims.
Pornography
Few who write about pornography refer to it as violence. Those who do,
for example, Andrea Dworkin (1981), have been criticized for misap-
plying the term for dramatic effect, unhelpfully misdirecting the debate
and alienating potential supporters. The worry is that the term has been
used metaphorically, perhaps belittling the suffering experienced by
those victims of ‘real’ violence, and accusing the consumers of pornog-
raphy of a worse offence than is justified. It is my view that pornography
226 Amanda Cawston
can be legitimately conceived of as violence, given the definition of

violence defended above, and furthermore, that this understanding will
be more fruitful when compared to existing approaches to the wrongs
of pornography.
Existing attempts to identify the wrongness of pornography have
pursued several avenues and encountered various difficulties. Some
have tried to argue that the wrongs of pornography lie in its connection
to suffering – either indirectly by encouraging and normalizing rape and
violence against women (a complex causal connection), or necessarily
in its production. As Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon’s experience
shows, the causal argument is difficult to make (MacKinnon and Dworkin
1997). The second claim is difficult to argue in light of other theoretical
commitments, such as the liberal belief that (genuine) consent neutral-
izes the wrong that may have been present when one person injures
or harms another. Supporters of the pornography industry could agree
with their critics that forced work in the industry is wrong (as would be
forced work in any other industry), and further, would make any harms
or injuries sustained as part of that work a further wrong. They could,
however, disagree that the pornography industry is fundamentally and
necessarily characterized by such lack of consent, and with the proper
regulation and oversight, it could avoid the problems of consent that
would make any such harms wrongful. Any critics who insist that even
with consent such harms are wrongful, run up against further liberal
worries about autonomy and paternalism, and risk facing the accusation
that they are not treating the women who choose to work in pornog-
raphy as the autonomous agents they are.
Another approach has been to characterize the wrongness of pornog-
raphy in terms of a violation. For MacKinnon, this takes the form of a
violation of the right to free speech by silencing women (by discouraging
women to speak, undermining the authority of their speech or causing
their speech to be misunderstood). Langton Rae (1993) argues that
pornography causes women’s speech to be misinterpreted, supporting
the view that pornography interferes with women’s right to free speech.
In contrast to the first approach, which tries to undermine support for
pornography on the basis of a right to free speech by pointing to the
harms it causes, this second approach pits one group’s right to free speech
(pornographers) against the same right of another group (women). This
approach also faces several criticism and difficulty, including the worry
that accepting that such a conflict of rights implies many other gener-
ally acceptable actions are problematic (R. Dworkin 1981). Furthermore,
critics disagree with the asserted content of the right to free speech, and
that we can legitimately claim that it entails the comprehensive entitle-

ment that MacKinnon and Langton suggest.
In sum, attempts to claim that the violence of pornography lies in the
harm it causes or requires, or in its violation of certain rights, faces signif-
icant challenges, and in my view has enjoyed little success. This is not
to say that these challenges cannot be overcome, but the obstacles are
considerable, and in the interim, the debate lacks a solid foundation.
The issues which critics of pornography encounter provide a good
example of the kinds of worries outlined in the previous more general
discussion of violence as a problem. Attempts to pin the problem on
harm and suffering only direct us to find ways to maintain the practise,
while appearing to address or dissolve these harms (via regulation or
consent). Efforts to characterize the problem as rights violations spawns
obfuscating debates that try to reconcile rights that necessarily conflict,
generating novel justifications for why some rights trump others, or
haggling over the content of key rights and who possesses them. I want
to suggest that continuing to focus on these areas will likely motivate
further efforts to ‘solve’ those problems in ways that avoid engaging
with the underlying, more substantial problem. If we, however, under-
stand the violence of pornography to consist in the attitude it expresses
and reflects, we will have additional and more fruitful tools with which
to grasp and address the problem.
Pornography can be understood to express or reflect the attitude of
egoism in at least two ways. The first is in a simple and straightforward
way, in that the consumer of pornography seeks to satisfy a self-directed
desire for sexual gratification. While this understanding is not incorrect,
it is hard to see why this is a helpful description. There is, however, a
more complex understanding available to us. Egoism not only moti-
vates certain straightforward desires but it also works more subtly, in
this case, driving the ways in which we like to see ourselves. I think
it fair to suggest that most ordinary consumers of pornography would
not consider it acceptable personally to purchase sexual ‘services’ from
a life-and-blood person.12 The social stigma of being labelled a ‘john’ is
significant. Furthermore, many would find the prospect of having to
personally face the reactions of the prostitute unsettling. I think many
find this prospect unsettling. Pornography, however, allows the prospec-
tive ‘john’ to bypass or circumvent these unpleasantries. The consumer
is able to satisfy a sexual desire that the consumer recognizes and believes
to be wrong, while avoiding the shame and the uncomfortable dealings
with another human being, as well as leaving unthreatened his belief
that he is a ‘good guy’. To offer an analogy, the modern meat industry
228 Amanda Cawston
functions in a way that dissociates the clearly necessary connection

between killing animals and eating meat (Adams 2010). This dissoci-
ation allows people to eat meat and still think of themselves animal
lovers. Pornography functions in a similar way, allowing consumers to
act in a way they would otherwise consider wrong, without seeing it
as a wrong.13 The focus thus shifts from trying to prove how pornog-
raphy constitutes a wrong externally to understanding it as a mecha-
nism for dissociation. Many (although admittedly not all) consumers
of pornography already believe that the personal, direct buying of sex
from another human being is wrong, although they have failed to see
how pornography, by distancing its consumers from the personal act,
allows them to ‘remotely’ express the very same problematic attitudes
that it requires. It is this more complex sense in which pornography
expresses egoism that allows us to describe it as violence, in a way that
offers something new and hopefully helpful to the debate.
Approaches to feminism
I wish to turn now to a more general discussion on what some of the
further implications of this view of violence are for feminism and femi-
nist philosophy. These remarks are intended to be simple preliminary
thoughts and suggestions of avenues of further study rather than final
conclusions on the matter. Furthermore, the general thought behind
these suggestions is not necessarily new, having been raised by many
others, although with different fields of interest in mind and starting
from different issues. Firstly, I want to draw attention to the point that,
while the conception of violence as an attitude allows us to describe
and conceive of several practices as violence that are not traditionally
seen as violence (for instance, pornography), this result cuts both ways,
and may require us to re-examine certain feminist practices, aims and
projects in a critical light. For example, a feminism that aims simply to
acquire an equal share of the currently male dominated and violence-
dependent pie will merely shift the burden of violence. This will likely
lend support for a radical feminism over a reformist, liberal feminism at
least with respect to issues of economic justice.
A critical examination of traditional feminist aims may also support
a more radical approach with respect to the range of issues that are
considered relevant. We should be wary of the potentially egoistic
suggestion that feminism can justifiably focus only on issues of women’s
oppression or exploitation, leaving other issues ‘aside for now’. As Carol
Adams and Josephine Donovan write in support of a feminist connec-
tion with animal ethics, ‘we believe that women, as themselves victims
of objectification and exploitation, must not abandon other victims of

such treatment in their rush to be accepted as ‘persons’ entitled to equal
rights’ (Adams 1995, 7). Fields such as animal ethics, global justice and
environmental ethics, for example, should not be thought of as diver-
sionary or optional subjects of feminist inquiry, but essential compo-
nents of a self-reflective, non-violent feminism.
Clearly, these remarks represent only a cursory sketch of the implica-
tions of an attitude-based conception of violence for feminist philos-
ophy. Similarly, the application of the view to the case of pornography
is only the beginning of a more thorough analysis, as well as but one
example of how the theory might be productive for a range of other
issues. Despite their preliminary nature, I hope both discussions illus-
trate the potential of an attitude-based conception of violence and can
serve as invitations to further investigation and debate.
The aims of this chapter have been threefold. First, definitions of
violence should be evaluated in terms of how well they identify neces-
sary features of a politically fundamental problem, rather than features
only contingently related to violence, or conceptual analysis. Each of
three common types of definitions of violence was then shown to fail
in this regard. Second, I offered an outline of an alternative definition
of violence that moves the focus away from problematic actions to atti-
tudes. Third, I explored how this definition might provide a new perspec-
tive from which to consider the relations between women and violence,
demonstrating, for example, how it exposes the violence of pornog-
raphy as well as how it helps answer more general questions about the
appropriate aims and scope of feminist philosophy. These two examples,
however, are but a cursory exploration of the consequences that adopting
this view of violence might entail. The shift in focus central to the view
may help motivate further novel approaches to a range of existing ques-
tions regarding women, violence and agency, as well as inspire new lines
of questioning in areas overlooked on the traditional narrow view.
Notes
This chapter is a revised version of a talk presented at the ‘Women and Violence:
The Agency of Victims and Perpetrators’ workshop at the University of Birmingham
on 17 June 2011, organized by Herjeet Marway and Heather Widdows, and was
the subject of a November 2011 session of the Workshop in Political Philosophy
at the University of Cambridge, organized by Clare Chambers. I am grateful for
the comments offered by these workshop participants as well as the suggestions
and assistance given by Raymond Geuss, Hallvard Lillehammer and Nathan
Wildman.
230 Amanda Cawston
1. In other words, this analysis of violence identifies ‘acting violently’ as a neces-

sary, but not sufficient condition for violence. Here ‘necessary’ and ‘sufficient’
conditions are technical terms. Simply, a necessary condition is one that is
required to make the claim in question, or is entailed by it, although it is not
enough to support the claim on its own, while a sufficient condition is enough
to guarantee the claim. For example, to describe a closed two-dimensional shape
as a square, it must have (1) four sides of equal length and (2) equal internal
angles. Conditions (1) and (2) are individually necessary and jointly sufficient
for having a square. Having only (1) does not guarantee a square, as parallelo-
grams have four equal sides, and having only (2) also does not guarantee a
square. Equilateral triangles, for example, are shapes with equal internal angles,
but having both (1) and (2) together does guarantee that we have a square (and
hence are jointly sufficient). Similarly, we cannot have a square without having
(1) or (2), which makes them necessary conditions for squareness.
2. Many are also keen to differentiate between damage or harm caused by acci-
dental human action, for example, tripping while carrying a full cup of hot
coffee, or falling into a porcelain cabinet, or accidentally slamming a door
on someone’s fingers etc. While these actions can be described as violent in a
sense, they are often bracketed as a different kind of problem – while they look
like violence (characterized by strong, uncontrolled force), are performed by
people (rather than nature) and are likely to result in damage/harm, they lack
the intentionality that makes such acts problematic for political philosophy.
3. The use of economic sanctions as an example of a tactic that on the surface
appears to be a more tolerable response than traditional military force was
raised by Elizabeth Ellis in a talk given at the Brave New World Conference
(Manchester, June 2011) entitled ‘Economic Sanctions: Better than War, Better
than Nothing?’.
4. For examples of similarly motivated views, see Honderich (1973) and Pontara
(1978).
5. Holmes (2009) makes reference to the pain associated with treatments admin-
istered by doctors or dentists. Pain of this sort is clearly a still a concern, but
not one of a political nature. It is rather a problem for medicine, and science
and technology more generally.
6. It is not that the modern meat industry succeeds only in promoting the percep-
tion that the production of meat is (or at least can be) a cruelty-free activity,
rather that some producers at least do make serious and successful efforts to
ensure their animals are well cared for and are killed painlessly. My claim is
that even if such methods became ubiquitous (thereby ‘solving’ the suffering
problem), non-human animals would still be being killed for food, a practice
that from the non-human animal perspective, at least, remains problematic.
7. Gert gives a list of five rules (out of a total of ten moral rules), any of which
if violated constitutes a case of violence. These rules are ‘Do not kill, Do not
cause pain, Do not disable, Do not deprive of freedom or opportunity, Do not
deprive of pleasure’ (Gert 1969, 616).
8. MacCallum argues for a definition of violence that focuses on the viola-
tion of the integrity of a person (which includes physical integrity as well
autonomy) (MacCallum 2009, 122–125). Garver includes a right to one’s body
and autonomy, as well as ancillary rights, including a right to the product of
one’s labour (Garver 1971, 243).
9. Marital rape was finally criminalized in the United Kingdom in 1991 (BBC
2008).
10. The attitude of non-violence, then, is one of selflessness.

11. For example, some may argue that at least some degree of egoism is required
to motivate and act on even the very basic actions required to sustain one’s
own life.
12. While some may suggest that they see nothing wrong with prostitution in
theory, I think they often have different beliefs when it comes to their own
actions, and even those who agree it is permissible in theory would struggle
to imagine doing it themselves.
13. Accepting the view that pornography can be legitimately labelled as violence
does not imply that it should be legally prohibited (censored). This is a
further step that requires substantial background discussion regarding what
the appropriate responses are to violence defined as an attitude.
References
Adams, C.J. 2010. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory,
20th anniversary edition. London: Continuum.
Audi, R. 2009. ‘On the Meaning and Justification of Violence’ in V. Bufacchi (ed.)
Violence: A Philosophical Anthology. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 136–167.
Back, A. 2004. ‘Thinking clearly about violence’, Philosophical Studies: An
International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition, 117(1), 219–230.
Coady, C.A.J. 2008. Morality and Political Violence. New York: Cambridge University
Press.
Dworkin, A. 1981. ‘Pornography’s Part in Sexual Violence’, Letter from a War
Zone: Writings 1976–1989. Available at: http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/
dworkin/WarZoneChaptIVC.html [Accessed July 2, 2012].
Dworkin, R. 1981. ‘Is there a right to pornography?’, Oxford Journal of Legal
Studies, 1(2), 177–212.
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6(3), 167–191.
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Publishing House.
Garver, N. 1971. ‘What Violence Is’ in J. Rachels (ed.) Moral Problems. New York:
Harper & Row, 243–249.
Gert, B. 1969. ‘Justifying violence’, The Journal of Philosophy, 66(19), 616–628.
Harris, J. 1980. Violence and Responsibility. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Holmes, R.L. 2009. ‘Violence and the Perspective of Morality’ in V. Bufacchi (ed.)
Violence: A Philosophical Anthology. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 267–293.
Honderich, T. 1973. ‘Democratic violence’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 2(2),
190–214.
Langton, R. 1993. ‘Speech acts and unspeakable acts’, Philosophy & Public Affairs,
22(4), 293–330.
MacCallum, G.C. 2009. ‘What Is Wrong with Violence’ in V. Bufacchi (ed.)Violence:
A Philosophical Anthology. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 112–130.
MacKinnon, C. and Dworkin, A. (eds.) 1997. In Harm’s Way: The Pornography Civil
Rights Hearings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Pontara, G. 1978. ‘The concept of violence’, Journal of Peace Research, 15(1), 19–32.
Rawls, J. 2001. Justice as Fairness: A Restatement. E. Kelly (ed.) Cambridge, MA,
London: Harvard University Press.
13
Ontology, Freedom and the Body
That Can Birth
Alison Assiter
Introduction
Luce Irigaray is located by Rachel Jones (2011) as a philosopher of

Becoming, as a process philosopher, as opposed to one of static Being. Yet
this only tells half the story. Importantly, Jones points out that Irigaray
set out to situate her critique of Western metaphysics at its founding
moment in the work of Plato. Fundamentally, Jones claims, Irigaray
challenges a key presupposition of much Western philosophy – its hylo-
morphism – its imposition of active Form on disorganized and some-
times inert matter, itself, in turn, implicitly identified with the female.
Crucially, then, for Jones, Irigaray is a metaphysician and she seeks to
offer a metaphysic that is at variance with many positions in the history
of Western philosophy.
This chapter does not focus on the agency of any particular woman or
group of women. It is, rather, concerned with a metaphysical position,
with a set of assumptions presupposed by a number of philosophers in
the tradition. These assumptions privilege the mental over the physical
at the deep metaphysical level. Specifically, I will suggest, a number of
philosophers in the tradition ignore the birthing body in their meta-
physical systems. This has a number of damaging consequences for the
agency of both men and women.
Western culture, Irigaray writes (as quoted by Jones 2011) has
‘displaced the significance of our maternal origins’ (25). The chapter
has three aims. Initially, rather than defending this very grand claim
of Irigaray’s, I would like, rather, to offer a reading of some elements of
Immanuel Kant’s thought that is informed by her perspective. Secondly,
I will consider how one might use Irigaray’s outlook to rethink a diffi-
culty that arises for Kant in relation to his view of freedom. Finally,
232
Ontology, Freedom and the Body That Can Birth 233
I will suggest that Søren Kierkegaard can overcome this difficulty in

Kant’s thought – the problem of how it is possible freely to do wrong.
The reading I will offer of Kierkegaard’s work is informed by his relation
to Friedrich Schelling. The flawed Kantian metaphysic may underpin a
number of contemporary views about the nature of agency.
I will begin the chapter with a brief account of Irigaray’s perspective,
as read by Jones.
Background: Irigaray
Philosophers other than Irigaray have challenged the notion of passive

and inert matter. What is distinctive about Jones’ reading of Irigaray is
her claim that the denigration of matter, the description of it as inert
substance, goes hand in hand with a forgetting of the female subject
position, but more specifically of the role for birth in the generation of
that kind of Being – the human being – that uniquely has the capacity
to reflect on its place in nature. Alongside this, I would like to add, is a
forgetting of the role of procreation more generally in ontology.
Jones, reading Irigaray, traces the forgetting of the role of procreation
in ontology back to Plato. She argues that the myth of the Cave, in
Plato’s Republic, ‘inscribes the forgetting of the maternal’. (38) Woman,
in the philosophical tradition, has been aligned with the body and the
material, the corruptible and the impure, but she is also viewed as the
object of the gaze.
The shadowy walls of the cave, in Plato’s myth, according to Socrates,
stand for the visible world – the world of appearance. The world outside
represents the intelligible world and the true reality of the Forms and
Ideas with the Sun, standing as the ultimate form – the form of the
Good. This form, in Irigaray’s reading, is the ‘father’ of children made
in its likeness.
Irigaray argues that this myth rests upon a blind spot. Plato, by
focusing on the eternal Forms as the only true reality, displaces our real
beginnings in birth. He – the ‘father’ or the Form – supplants birth from
the mother. Physical birth is relegated to the sensible inferior world of
becoming, whilst the soul – freed from the shackles of the body – is
‘re-born’ through the unchanging world of the Forms.
Irigaray writes, therefore, that in a topsy-turvy distortion, the Forms
substitute for our maternal origin, and set in train a logic of thinking that
is expressed throughout the history of Western philosophy. One of the
most extreme expressions of this is in René Descartes, whose thinking
self gives birth to itself by means of a process of thought. Irigaray, in
234 Alison Assiter
Jones’ reading, suggests that the subject, in Descartes, becomes its own
‘other’ ‘in such a way that it gives symbolic birth to itself’ (100). Irigaray
borrows from Descartes’ Optics, and the title of her chapter in Speculum
(1985) on Descartes, ‘And the Eye of a Man Recently Dead’, is derived
from an experiment in this work.
I will begin the next section by outlining, briefly, Irigaray’s perspective
on Kant.
Irigaray on Kant
Irigaray, reading Kant, suggests that, although the subject, for him, is
active in constituting knowledge, it must be given the matter of sensa-
tion if it is to process this into form. The subject is dependent on this
outer matter. Until it is organized by the forms – space and time and the
Categories – this matter is chaotic and disorganized. Moreover, nature,
for Kant, is specularized. It is nature as ‘seen’ by the mind. There is a
similarity, then, for Irigaray, between Descartes and Kant. Descartes sepa-
rates the thinking ‘I’ from any materiality, but so too is the Kantian self
constructed against a chaotic matter that it orders into objects. The self
is founded, indeed, on a ‘bottomless abyss’, a ‘dark sea without shores or
lighthouses’1 (Kant 1912, 65–66).
I would like to move, now, to consider the implications of this reading
of Kant, albeit briefly outlined, for his view of freedom and specifically
the freedom to do wrong. This, as has been noted, as will be discussed
below, is a problem for Kant. I will look at three ways of conceiving of
the relation between freedom and the moral law, and consider prob-
lems with each of them, but also examine each in the light of Irigaray’s
reading.
Kant on free will and determinism
Kant wanted to defend an incompatibilist and libertarian account of

freedom.2 He believed that genuine freedom required no less than this.
The incompatibilist account is his notion of ‘transcendental’ freedom.
In the Critique of Practical Reason and in the Groundwork (1970), Kant
notes a link between freedom and the moral law. ‘The moral law’, he
wrote, ‘is a law of causality through freedom’ (29). A contemporary of
Kant, Carl Schmid, suggests that, at least sometimes, Kant made the
connection between these two so strong that he effectively became an
‘intelligible fatalist’ (Schmid 1790, 50, in Kosch 2006).3 The moral law
causally determines the free will.4 Kant’s references to the ‘holy will’
suggest this reading. He intends the notion of the ‘holy will’ to be a

description of the finite rational will insofar as it operates intelligibly.
The self, therefore, viewed as intelligible agent, must be seen as perfectly
moral. A serious consequence of this interpretation of Kant, however, is
that immoral agents fail to be free. One is free if and only if one follows
the moral law. Whereas, prior to this, he had been mainly preoccupied
with the freedom to do good, in his later work Religion within the Limits
of Mere Reason Alone (RA, 1960), Kant concerns himself with the problem
of freely doing wrong and he discusses the origin of evil.5
But reading this notion through Irigaray’s eyes, there is another impli-
cation. The active purposive element here is the moral law. Kant both
believed that there are purposes in nature, at least nature as viewed by
finite rational beings, and he was also convinced that such notions must
be unscientific. It was his strong conviction that the purposiveness of,
for example, a blade of grass, could not be incorporated into the proper
scientific Newtonian and mechanical notion of causation. Purposes
can neither be specularized nor can they be mechanically configured.
Purposes cannot be seen. Yet, Kant does not see any of these kinds of
problems with the idea that the moral law becomes an active causal
force. This seems intuitively odd, since it is difficult to conceptualize a
logical form – the moral law – as having powers or capacities. Even if
there is a relation of entailment between the moral law and the free will,
at least one of these must shape the self that acts. We cannot ‘see’ causal
powers in nature and this vexes Kant, but nor can we ‘see’ the operation
of the will and this does not seem to concern him.
An alternative, developed partly in RA, to the above ‘rational fatalist’
reading of all free actions is that some free actions, those that are wrong
or evil, are freely undertaken but grounded in some other force – outside
time and space – than the moral law. This is the second interpretation
of the relation between freedom and moral law I would like briefly to
discuss.
When he is criticizing the Stoic view that evil consists in the mere
lack of knowledge of what is good, Kant writes, ‘So it is not surprising
that an Apostle represents this invisible enemy, who is known only
through his operations upon us and who destroys basic principles, as
being outside us and indeed an evil spirit ... As far as its practical value
to us is concerned, moreover, it is all one whether we place the seducer
merely within ourselves, or without; for guilt touches us not a whit less
in the latter case than in the former, in as much as we would not be
led astray by him at all were we not already in secret league with him’
(1960, 52).
236 Alison Assiter
In the above passage, the ‘evil spirit’ functions in an analogous fashion

to God. One grounds the moral law, and the other would ground evil
or wrongdoing. In the third Critique, Kant argues that physical teleology
needs to be supplemented with a moral teleology, for physical teleology
on its own ‘if it proceeded consistently, instead of borrowing, unno-
ticed, from moral teleology, could not provide a basis for anything but
a demonology, which is incapable of providing a determinate concept of
the deity’ (1902, 444).6 If the proof of teleological causation in the third
Critique were only a proof of a physical form of cause, then the ground
of this might be some kind of being outside time and space – a demon
analogous perhaps to Descartes’ evil demon.7 Kant offers a moral proof
of the existence of God: when we act freely from the moral law, we are
acting as though we are pure rational beings. This is, Kant writes, ‘the
idea of the supersensible within us’ (1902, 5: 474), and this gives rise to an
idea of the supersensible outside us; a supersensible Being that grounds
morality in nature – at least insofar as it is supposed to be a teleological
whole. The Supreme Being, therefore, is conceived by analogy with our
own ‘supersensible’ capacity – the capacity to act freely in accordance
with the moral law. Correspondingly, Kant hypothesizes a ‘spirit of an
originally more sublime destiny’ (1902; 6: 44) that tempts human beings
into evil.8 He writes that the absolutely first beginnings of evil, as with
the first beginnings of good, are incomprehensible to us, finite limited
beings. Now, there is a distinct advantage of this second interpretation:
it provides evidence of genuine metaphysical or transcendental freedom
to do wrong.
There are, however, a number of disadvantages of the interpretation.
Firstly, it would undermine the crucial argument of the second Critique
that freedom and the moral law reciprocally imply one another. Some free
acts would be grounded in some other unfathomable source, whilst free
and moral acts would be grounded in pure reason and the moral law.
A second objection to this notion, proposed by Gordon Michalson,
is that, as he puts it, ‘devilishness would mark the limit point beyond
which no moral regeneration would be possible’ (1990, 73). According
to his reading of ‘devilishness’, the notion would remove altogether our
moral capacity. ‘Freely willing to reject the moral law would mean exer-
cising reason for the sake of being irrational’ (75). Perhaps the difficul-
ties pertaining to this interpretation, in the end, stem from the radical
separation that parallels other separations, of the grounds for doing
good from those for acting wrongly.9
Another way of putting the problem is that, if a person chose to act in
accordance with the devil, then he or she might also lose the capacity
to act from the moral law, and one of Kant’s arguments against suicide
is precisely that it prevents the person from continuing to act as an
autonomous and free agent.
Once again, though, construing this through the Irigarayan lens,
we have a kind of double reversal. Instead of noting the source of
freedom in the natural being, in what Irigaray calls a ‘sensible transcen-
dental’ (1993, 32), Kant locates the ground of freedom in some being
conceived by analogy with ourselves as purely rational beings. This is
now a perfectly rational being that grounds, or ‘gives birth to’, our moral
capacity. So the grounding of nature, rather than being within nature,
is displaced onto some perfectly rational being that lies outside nature.
Then, in parallel, since it is clearly much harder to place the capacity for
wrongdoing into this rational nature, there has to be some perfectly evil
being – the counterpoint or the mirror image of the perfectly rational
being. Both lie outside nature. But is it not perfectly possible, without
these contortions, for nature to operate as itself the ground? I will return
to this point.
A third interpretation I would like to consider is the following: Kant
sometimes hypothesizes an inner self – a ‘disposition’ that ‘chooses’, on
certain occasions, to subordinate the moral law to something else. In
RA, he gives a number of possible readings, compatible with this inter-
pretation, of what happens when a person does wrong. For example,
he writes, ‘the ground of evil cannot lie in any object determining the
power of choice through inclination, not in any natural impulses but
only in a rule that the power of choice itself produces for the exercise of
its freedom i.e. in a maxim’ (1960, 6: 21).
A number of contemporary commentators have offered alternative
interpretations of freely doing wrong for Kant that fit with this notion
of a ‘disposition’ to choose a maxim. Michalson calls this a ‘disposition’
to subordinate, within a maxim, the moral law to some sensuous incli-
nation (1990, 41).10 So the account of freely doing wrong, then, involves
this ‘disposition’ to choose a maxim. Sometimes the will may choose a
maxim that conflicts with the moral law.
Now we have a further level of distortion. Instead of being shaped
by internal material forces that might sometimes be forces that lead to
good and sometimes not, we have a further causally efficacious mental
element – a disposition to choose a causally active rational self or to
choose to subordinate this causally active self to a sensuous capacity.
Allen Wood, for example, suggests that freedom is the capacity to act
according to rational norms. He claims that, in acting freely, the agent
is acting from a special kind of causality. A will acts not only according
238 Alison Assiter
to laws but also ‘according to their representation’ (1999, 172). The law
of a free cause must be one ‘it represents to itself’. The free self, on this
reading, is a ‘disposition’ to choose some law.
Once again, though, this involves attributing causation to some kind
of mental faculty that is characterized now by means of a further layer of
mirroring – the self does not only act from laws but from the representa-
tion of laws. Then if it makes a mistake, does it act from a representation
of a representation?
In his third Critique, Kant sets out to unite ‘the immense gulf between
nature and freedom’ (1987, 175–176). The work is concerned with tele-
ological judgments or maxims describing how we ought to judge nature.
For Kant, a thing is a natural purpose ‘if it is both cause and effect of
itself’ (370). In the case of natural purposes, the parts depend upon the
whole. A tree, for example, is self-organizing in three ways: (1) the tree
produces itself in relation to its species: ‘within its species, it is both
cause and effect’ (371); (2) the nourishment taken in by the tree enables
its development; and (3) the various components of the tree depend on
and link with one another.
For Kant, though, the ultimate purpose is ‘man’. Man is a natural
purpose, although he is not really this – we judge reflectively that this
is what he is; we judge him as though he is purposive. For Kant, ‘purpo-
siveness is a reflective judgment; not a constitutive concept of experi-
ence’ (400). In other words, by means of double reflections, not only
is nature not itself purposive but rather the ultimate purposiveness is
‘man’. Again, in a further reversal, it is only that we have to suppose, for
the understanding of morality, ‘man’ to be the ultimate purpose. ‘Man’
is the purpose against which we judge the purposiveness of everything
else. Kant writes that ‘man is the only being on earth that has under-
standing and hence an ability to set himself limited purposes of his own
choice, and in this respect he holds himself lord of nature; and if we
regard nature as a teleological system then it is man’s vocation to be the
ultimate purpose of nature, but always subject to a condition; he must
have the understanding and the will to give both nature and himself
reference to a purpose that can be independent of nature, self sufficient
and a final purpose’ (318).
Once again, we have a reversal of actual purposiveness in nature onto
a perfectly rational will and a further reversal of the process of birth from
a mother onto a ‘lord’ of nature who becomes the ultimate purpose, so
long as he uses his understanding and his will effectively.
Elsewhere in the third Critique, Kant offers a completely different
picture. There is a section that is usually disregarded in the commentaries,
although it is also recognized that this section of the Critique does, in

a significant sense, prefigure Charles Darwin. Kant talks, here, about
genera of animals sharing a common schema, about their having been
produced according to a common archetype. He suggests that the species
of animals is ‘produced by a common original mother’ (304). He writes
the following: ‘he can make mother earth (like a large animal as it were)
emerge from her state of chaos, and make her lap promptly give birth
initially to creatures of a less purposive form, with these then giving
birth to others that became better adapted to their place of origin and
to their relations to one another, until in the end this womb itself rigidi-
fied, ossified, and confined itself to bearing definite species that would
no longer degenerate, so that the diversity remained as it had turned out
when that fertile formative force ceased to operate’ (ibid).
What is wrong with this, according to Kant? I find two reasons in
Kant’s work for rejecting this account. Firstly, he writes, ‘in giving this
account, the archeologist of nature will have to attribute to this universal
mother an organization that purposively aimed at all these creatures,
since otherwise it is quite inconceivable (how) the purposive form is
possible that we find in the produce of the animal and plant kingdoms.
But if he attributes such an organization to her then he has only put off
the basis for his explanation. This is no explanation at all’ (1987, 305).
In other words, once again by means of a triple reversal of the account,
Kant is arguing that the only way this kind of view of the origins of
purposiveness can function, is if this ‘mother’ had a super intelligence
and could ‘see’ her capacity to produce her effects. But this would effec-
tively turn her into the supersensible ground considered earlier. The
material and biological processes of birth cannot, for Kant, function as
the ground, basically because the ordered nature that we know is itself
produced by us.
Secondly, Kant argues that those who think in terms of the whole think
of it in terms of an ‘all encompassing substance’ – which is Spinozism –
and only therefore a more determinate version of pantheism. So, in this
objection to his own account, Kant has removed the process element of
the ‘mother’ and of the evolution of other species, and turned it once
more into his own inert, mechanical matter, which, being inert and
mechanical, clearly cannot ground a process system.
What is the reason for this? One reason, as noted earlier, is Kant’s
Newtonianism. For the latter, a position which Kant took up in his early
writings as well as in the later, the quantity of matter remains always the
same, and every change has an external cause. The categories shape the
nature of matter as the sum of appearance. Kant’s view of natural science
240 Alison Assiter
has it deal with substantial bodies dependent upon external forces for
change. Yet Sir Isaac Newton himself found it difficult, within his frame-
work, to account for the force of gravity.11
But the second reason has to do, surely, with Kant’s view of women
and his picture of the nature of inner bodily space. Christine Battersby
has pointed out how difficult it is for Kant, on his view of the nature
of space and time and of matter, to account even for his own inner
bodily space, let alone for that of a body that is capable of giving birth.
Knowledge of things in space involve ‘outer sense’, and knowledge of
outer sense is knowledge of something other than the ‘I’. Time is the
form of inner sense. So, as Battersby puts it, ‘Kant needs a body in order
to be a self; but the body he needs is neither self nor not self’ (1998, 70).
Of course, this ‘inner bodily space’ includes the ‘purposiveness’ of the
female body in producing another self from within itself. The capacity of
a body to ‘birth’, therefore, is inexplicable because it is literally outside
(actually ‘inside’) his view of space.
Moreover, women, for Kant, are refused the kind of personhood
that entails free will and pure rationality. Women are fully animal and
human. However, frequently they are denied the status of ‘persons’ in
the sense of being full moral agents. They are grouped together with
‘domestic servants, apprentices, hairdressers and other “passive” citi-
zens’ (Kant 1797, 7: 209, 79–80, in Battersby, 64). They therefore cannot
have the ‘active’ thinking capacity that goes along with being a person.
Kierkegaard and the concept of anxiety
Now, in the final section of the chapter, through a reading of Kierkegaard’s

(or the pseudonym Haufniensis’) Concept of Anxiety (CA, 1980), I would
like to rethink the Irigarayan notion of the ‘sensible transcendental’.
This would be a form of the transcendental that arises directly from
matter and that the notion of the birthing body can provide. It would
have its own capacities and powers to generate another from within
itself. Specifically, however, I would like to suggest that it is these powers
and capacities that are fundamental, rather than the substance or the
entity that ‘possesses’ the capacities.
Kierkegaard was influenced by Schelling.12 He attended the latter’s
Berlin lectures and was at first transfixed and then disappointed.
Schelling, in his Freiheitsschrift (2006) makes a very large claim akin to
that of Irigarary. He writes, ‘ The whole of Modern European philos-
ophy since its inception (through Descartes) has this common defi-
ciency that nature does not exist for it and that it lacks a living basis’
(7: 355). Rather than defending this view about the whole of Western
philosophy, I would like briefly to outline his argument and from this,
offer a reading of Kierkegaard’s CA. ‘The Freiheitsschrift presents an active
process ontology that, significantly, “precedes our thinking of it”’ (7:
421). In other words, there is Being before thought. Each activity can
be depicted in terms of ground and consequent, and this distinction,
in turn, underpins Schelling’s system. Every organic being is dependent
upon another with respect to its genesis. As Iain Hamilton Grant has put
it, ‘nature itself must furnish the only possible basis for a philosophy of
freedom’ (2008, 5). Philosophy can offer a natural history of our mind.
In another paper (2013), I argued that Kant cannot explain the origin
of evil – he argues that the story of Adam and Eve cannot do this, for
either Adam is outside history and therefore his action cannot explain
‘sin’ in the rest of us or he is inside history, in which case his sin is
just like ours. This, I suggested, is linked with the difficulty he has of
explaining how it is possible freely to do wrong. I would like, now, to
suggest how Kierkegaard can partially overcome these difficulties.
Kierkegaard’s CA is influenced both by Schelling’s Freiheitsschrift and
by Kant’s RA.13 In CA, Haufniensis is concerned with freedom – under-
stood as the capacity for both good and evil, and with the origin of this
notion. He writes that the difficulty for the understanding – I read this
as Kantian reason – is ‘that sin presupposes itself’ (1980, 32). With his
brilliant wit and prose, Kierkegaard compares Kant’s claims about Adam
to the counting rhyme in which children delight: ‘one tennis ball; two
tennis balls ... up to nine ... and tennis balls’ (ibid.).
Instead, Kierkegaard writes, ‘by the first sin, sinfulness came into Adam’
(1980, my italics). The position is the same, indeed, for every other
human being. The concepts with which Kantian speculative reason
deals, belong in logic, whilst the notion of sin lies in ethics. Putting
Kierkegaard into my words, then, when a concept in logic is negated,
the original concept is cancelled. Innocence, however, is a natural state
of the natural being that may continue in existence. Innocence is igno-
rance. One can, according to Kierkegaard, no more give a psychological
explanation of the Fall than one can give a logical or a mechanical causal
explanation. But one can offer another kind of causal account.
Kierkegaard’s account, I believe, can be reconstructed to run as follows:
in the biblical story, Adam, existing as a natural being, in a world of
similarly constituted natural beings, existed. But Adam was neither
free nor not free. Adam had no awareness of the possibility of choice.
Eve – in some way a derived person – came into being later. She, via the
serpent, seduced Adam. At that point, Adam became aware, through
242 Alison Assiter
sensuality, of good and evil. By the first sin, sinfulness, or the capacity
to reflect on our passions and desires and to enact some and not others –
in other words, freedom – came into Adam. Adam may have existed
alongside other natural objects with their powers and capacities. These
natural objects possessed powers and capacities that were akin to our
human conceptual apparatus, but they were also different. The natural
objects existing alongside Adam were not, in other words, purely inert
mechanical things.
Importantly, though, Haufniensis writes, in CA, ‘woman is more
sensuous than man’ (64) and that he is ‘introducing her in her ideal
aspect which is procreation’ (65). Might not it therefore be appropriate
that ‘sin’, or the capacity to be aware of right and wrong, came first into
Eve, rather than Adam? It would be appropriate, both because she is
‘more sensuous’ and therefore more anxious than man, and also, more
importantly, because she has the capacity, or potency, to give birth.
Indeed, perhaps it is because of the latter that she is the former. It is
well known that this greater degree of anxiety, for Haufniesis, signifies
strength rather than weakness.
For Kant, nature could not function as a causal ground of freedom
for two reasons. Firstly, phenomenal nature is set up in opposition to
freedom. Secondly, for Kant, nature is co-extensive with the phenom-
enal experience of rational and finite beings. But, for Kierkegaard, nature
can function as the causal ground of freedom, for natural beings might
both pre-exist, in a temporal sense, and exist in a spatial sense outside
the domain of limited and finite natural and rational beings. Adam and
Eve, to reiterate, may have been simply part of a pre-existing nature.
Their existence in this fashion fits with a metaphysic which has nature
operating as the ground of human action. An active nature, with powers
and capacities, on this account, pre-exists human reflective capacity.
Adam and Eve, then, on this reading, existed and acted, but in blissful
innocence of what they were doing.
The reading I am offering of the Eve story fits with a Schellingian-
inspired influence on Kierkegaard. It is consistent with a picture
according to which ‘matter itself becomes, in some manner difficult
to conceive, capable of participation in the form of the understanding’
(Grant 2006, 37). For Schelling, ‘subjectivity arises in nature’ (ibid.,
162).14 In Ages of the World (2000), Schelling writes, ‘necessity is before
freedom’ (44). For Schelling, human beings are derived creatures,
emanating from a pantheistic Absolute, which can be construed as God
or Nature. But Schelling’s nature is a living nature; it is an active and
dynamic nature.
Moreover, Schelling, also was, in his Freheitschrift, responding to the

above difficulty in Kant’s thought. For him, Wesen, or Being, has a dual
character: it is being insofar as it is the ground of existence and being
insofar as it is. There is, therefore, in Deus sive Natura, or God or Nature,
both God or Nature’s ground of existence (what Schelling calls the dark
principle) and that in God in which he exists (the light principle).
In this system, there is a constant process of production. Returning to
Kant’s metaphor noted above in the third Critique of a common origi-
nary mother, there is material in Schelling that might partially support a
picture like this (although it would be read very differently from the way
Kant views it). For Schelling, the capacity to give birth – the ground –
could be construed as the ‘becoming’ of which the being that is born
is the consequent. But the capacity to give birth itself presupposes a
being that has this potency. The series must ultimately culminate in a
being that gives birth to itself – a being that has its ground within itself.
Schelling notes the ‘yearning of the one to give birth to itself’ (2006, 59,
7: 395). Nature as a whole creates itself and therefore creates the creative
force that gives rise to other dependent beings. In its turn, underlying
all this, in order to avoid an infinite regress, there must be something
that precedes all Being – Schelling’s Ungrund. At the other end, as partic-
ular things, human beings emerge from previous grounds, from parents,
grandparents, from other species and then from non-animal creatures.
We, as human beings, are the most particular. In a further dimension of
this process, I am suggesting that Kierkegaard, in CA, adds the evolution
of the capacity, in finite beings, for rational thought, and for freedom to
do right and wrong.
It is perhaps noteworthy that, to my knowledge, whilst the word
‘birth’ appears in Schelling’s works, commentators have not particu-
larly noted its significance and its value for Schelling’s overall system.15
One reason for its value is that the capacity to give birth, as well as the
birthing body, is a natural notion. It is thus consonant with a naturalist
reading of Schelling. The capacity to give birth is a natural force that
requires no thought on the part of the birthing body. It is, to return to
Irigaray, less hylomorphic than a model that has the ‘potency’ depicted
as a soul or an idea. It is less likely, therefore, to picture matter itself as
inert.
Kierkegaard was well aware of these notions. In his Notes on Schelling’s
Berlin Lectures, he writes, ‘Kant took pure reason only in the subjective
sense, not as the infinite potency of cognition, as is done here ... The
content of the infinite potency of cognition is the infinite potency of
being’ (1989, 337). Moreover, he continues, ‘the first content of reason
244 Alison Assiter
is not something actual; its content is the opposite of actuality. This

word reason is ... feminine gender’ (ibid.).
This reading of Kierkegaard (or of Haufniensis) fits with Irigaray’s
development of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the ‘flesh’. Merleau-
Ponty, in Phenomenology of Perception (2006), describes the ‘double
sensation’ of visibility and tangibility illustrated by the touched and the
touching of my right hand on my left (1968, 134). The body, he argues,
is both an object of sight and of touch, as well as itself being capable
both of seeing and touching. There is, he writes, an interconnecting of
‘seeing’ and tangible body.
Irigaray (2004) challenges Merleau-Ponty, suggesting that his picture
fails properly to supersede the dualism of ‘seer’ and visible object. The
tangible, according Irigaray’s criticism, remains subservient to the
visible. The prenatal relationship, by contrast, for Irigaray, offers a pref-
erable model for the kind of reversibility Merleau-Ponty seeks.
As Laura Green, whose work drew my attention to Irigaray’s critique
of Merleau-Ponty, puts it, ‘Irigaray’s criticism of Merleau-Ponty helps
us to relocate the body that births in terms of its phenomenological
capacity to undo the binary logic which tends to underpin western
thought’ (2011, 152).
Irigaray suggests that theorizing a body that is capable of birthing
can create new ontological possibilities. Moreover, extending Irigaray’s
thought, if one thinks from the perspective of the foetus, in the prenatal
phase of its development, there is no separation between subject and
object, subject and world. The prenatal is genuinely a capacity, a power.
It is the capacity to become an independent self-substance. This capacity
in its turn is akin to Schellings’ Ungrund.
Haufniensis writes that in innocence, man is not qualified as
spirit. Man is neither a beast nor an angel. He is neither animal nor
is he rational. Kierkegaard – or rather the pseudonymous author
Haufniensis – outlines how the state of innocence in the Garden of Eden
is precisely that. There is no knowledge of good and evil. Adam cannot
understand the prohibition. There is peace and repose. But what else is
there? Nothing. Nothing has the effect of producing anxiety. Anxiety
is ‘freedom’s actuality as the possibility of possibility’ (1980, 42). Man
is a synthesis of the ‘psychical and the physical’. Anxiety ‘passes into
Adam as the possibility of being able’. Freedom, then, is the capacity to
choose either to be guided by a norm that stems from a transcendent
being – or a transcendent nature – or not to be. Haufniensis’ account
of freedom, unlike Kant’s, therefore allows for the freedom to do good
and bad.
Now I would like to add to this. Kierkegaard, or Haufniensis, in CA, and

Victor Eremita in Either-Or Part 1 (E/O, 1987), recognizes the significance
of the act of birth, for he begins E/O with a reference to this (19). In CA,
Kierkegaard, or Haufniensis, writes, directly reflecting the Schellingian
inspired view of human beings outlined above but also making a specific
point about woman: ‘the creation of Eve outwardly prefigures the conse-
quence of the relationship of generation ... in a sense, she signifies that
which is derived’ (63). ‘God is tempted by no-one’ (64).
Freedom then strictly came into Eve rather than Adam. Freedom
cannot ‘come into’ Eve by a literal act of birth. But it is appropriate that
the emergence of the capacity to reflect on one’s freedom, particularly
the freedom to do wrong, should emerge first into a body that can birth.
This is because birth or procreation is the means by which species repro-
duce themselves. It is also an appropriate metaphor for a naturalized
process philosophy, which sees beings emerge from one another in rela-
tions of dependence upon one another.
There is support, indeed, for this view of the role of woman, and
specifically of Eve, in Kierkegaard’s Stages on Life’s Way (SLW, 1988). In
that work, the character Johannes the Seducer learns the ultimate truth
from a woman. Johannes has the beginning of the world containing
only males. The gods, fearful of their creation, would have liked to
remove these beings. But once created, the men could not be destroyed.
Instead, they had to be taken captive ‘by a force that was weaker than
his own and yet stronger’ (71). The force was woman. Woman is the
most seductive thing. She is also explicitly connected with finitude and
change. Yet Johannes represents these latter qualities as preferable to the
pretence – which the male represents – of autonomy and independence.
For Schelling, this pretence that the human, now represented by the
male of the species, is the origin of his own being, is the source of evil.
Kierkegaard, then, combining the texts of CA and SLW, can be read as
suggesting that the capacity for good and evil – or freedom – first ‘comes
into’ Eve, as the more sensual being but specifically also as the being
that can birth. It comes in, moreover, through sexuality. Woman is more
sensual and therefore more anxious than man. But once it appears in
Adam, the capacity emerges as the individual’s representing himself as
autonomous, as separate and as rational.
Eve, then, is more sensuous, but she is closer to the ‘real’ natural
human being than Adam. She depicts the natural dependence of all
singular individuals on their precursors, as well as on others and on
their natures. Adam, however, comes to signify something different – a
purely autonomous, rational being who is aware of good and bad. The
246 Alison Assiter
more sensuous being, by contrast, is the more anxious and the closer to
the ‘real’ human being. ‘The more anxiety, the more sensuousness’ and
‘in the moment of conception, spirit is furthest away and therefore the
anxiety is the greatest’ (72).
Conclusion
In this chapter, I have firstly briefly outlined Irigaray’s ontology. Using

this, I have suggested that one can read a well-known problem for Kant –
the problem of how it is possible freely to do wrong – as deriving party
from his ontology. This ontology makes it difficult for him to conceive
of active nature outside the rational capacity of finite beings like us.
He also, perhaps, exaggerates the extent to which we can be perfectly
rational beings, and this leads him to downplay the extent to which
humans can do wrong.
Kierkegaard, by contrast, offers an ontology that is more in tune with
that of Irigaray. This ontology allows him to see freedom – understood
as the capacity to do wrong – as arising out of an active nature that
pre-exists human reflective capacity. Specifically, in a move that links
directly with an Irigarayan norm, he sees Eve – a woman – as the person
into whom freedom first emerged. This is important, for she has a body
that can birth.
In conclusion, then, Kierkegaard’s perspective on agency grounds
human freedom in a natural being that has the capacity to give birth to
others. Kierkegaard’s picture, to put this in different words, grounds the
agency of humans in the natural world, rather than in some supersen-
sible capacity. His view makes sense of the capacity in humans to act in
morally bad ways as well as morally good. It is, therefore, a view of the
agency of the self that is closer to the way in which finite limited beings
like us actually behave than is that of Kant.
Notes
Some of the material in this chapter also appears in a different form in Alison
Assiter (2015) Kierkegaard, Eve and Metaphors of Birth, Rowman and Littlefield.
1. Translation The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the

Existence of God, as ‘a dark and shoreless ocean, marked by no beacons’,
Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, Vol. 1, Theoretical Philosophy,
P. Guyer and A. Wood (eds.) 1755–1770, CUP, 1992, Preface, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, p. 111.
2. I use these expressions in relation to the free will/determinism debate. Kant
believed in a determinist position in relation to the phenomenal world, but
he also thought that there must be room for a form of spontaneous, non-
phenomenal causation, for moral and rational beings.
3. C.C. E. Schmid, Versuch Einder Moralphilosophie, (Jena: Crocker, 1790,
quoted in Kosch, p. 50–2.
4. Paul Guyer notes that ‘there are numerous passages in the second Critique that
suggest that, as in the Groundwork, Kant still conceives of the moral law as the
causal law of the noumenal will ... The possibility – in these circumstances – of
freely chosen immoral actions remains inconceivable’ (2006, 225–6).
5. This problem may befall all attempts to argue that reasons can be causes. See
M. Kosch (2006) note 13, 52, and also A. Wood (1999).
6. I. Kant, Gesammelte Schriften, 5 (1902) 444 (AK).
7. See G. Banham (2006), chapter 5, for a discussion of this.
8. Appears in RA (1960) as ‘a spirit of an originally loftier destiny’.
9. A contemporary and revised account of Kant and the diabolical, which paral-
lels this point, is offered by Alenka Zupancic (2000). She argues that if there
are actions that satisfy some sensuous desires but that also lead to the end of
desire, then they are, in some sense, carried out from the moral law. If, for
example, someone chose, knowingly, to satisfy their desires to the point of
death, then that would involve them in choosing to act in such a way that
they would no longer be able to desire at all. Effectively, Zupancic argues,
insofar as devilishness involves the application of a maxim, then this is
equivalent to the moral law, since adopting opposition to the moral law as
itself a maxim is equivalent to the moral law. Nothing, on her reading, can
become a maxim that one ought to follow, except the moral law. But also
opposition to the moral law in the end – if it is diabolical – would be the
moral law itself. It is the moral law, because the moral law is defined as that
which commands without saying why it commands.
10. I find something like this interpretation also in Alenka Zupancic (2000),
and Michalson (1990); Korsgaard (1996); O’Neill (1989); and Allison (1991).
Allison suggests that the Gesinnung is the practical counterpart of the tran-
scendental unity of apperception (208). Is there not, however, as Zupancic
claims, a difference between the Gesinnung and the active choice of disposi-
tion? (37). Zupancic argues that the Gesinnung is the ‘blind spot’ that sepa-
rates the phenomenal from the noumenal (ibid.).
11. See Newton (2004).
12. See my paper (2012), and also Kosch (2006).
13. See Green (1992).
14. I discuss the influence of Schelling on Kierkegaard in more detail in Assiter
(2012).
15. I would like to mention two of our undergraduate students, Heather Nunney
Boden and Rosie Massey, who carried out, for their UG dissertations, some
very interesting work on this.
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Index
abortion, 66n3, 97, 117, 157 binary, 3, 113, 124, 166, 173, 198–9,
Adam and Eve, 241–2, 244–5 244
Adorno, Theodor, 149 characterization of levels of, 125n11
affect regulation, 76, 77, 79–80 content-neutral conditions, 66n6,
Afghanistan, 124n6, 178–9, 192n10 96, 110, 114–21, 123–4
African National Congress (ANC), decision-making, 114–19
107n11 extending substantive condition,
Agamben, Giorgio, 153, 160 99–101
agency female suicide bombers, 91–4, 96,
autonomy, and women, 210–12 98, 100–101, 113–24
case of rape and sexual violence, ground clearing, 94–6, 212
205–10 judgments about, 103–6, 108n12
choice and self-governance, mental capability, 57
199–200 political, 95, 101
denial of, 130, 133 208–9 problem with, 202–5
empowerment, 179, 185–8, 190–1 rape and sexual violence, 205–10
feminism in digital world, 170–4 rape threatening, 15–20
feminist debates on, and self-governance and choice, 198–9
prostitution, 53–6 self-worth and self-trust, 87–8n14
lacking in prostitution, 57–61 substantive conditions,7, 91–2,
self-harm, 82–4 97–9, 100, 114–19
see also victim True and the Good, 115, 120, 122,
Agustin, Laura, 65–6n3 125n12
Akin, Todd, 132 women, 30–1n13, 200–202, 210–12
Al-Aqsa Martyr’s Brigade, 92 worries for substantive conditions
Alexander, Jeffrey, 185 for, 101–6, 116–19, 120–4
Alonzo, Elena, 5, 6, 34
Améry, Jean, 184, 186, 188, 191–2n4 Battersby, Christine, 240
Anderson, Michelle, 137–40 Bech, Gitte Lillelund, 178
anger, validation and tolerance of, Benjamin, Walter, 190
85–6 Berlin, Isaiah, 34, 36
anti-liberalism, 146, 148, 156, 158–9 Brecher, Bob, 5, 8, 145
anti-Semitism, 148–9 Brison, Susan, 17, 18, 21, 31n15,
Archard, David, 131, 133, 136 31n17, 184
Arendt, Hannah, 179, 190 Brøgger, Suzanne, 154
Assiter, Alison, 5, 9–10, 146, 232 Brown, Beverley, 151
attitude, violence as, 216, 218, 223–5 Brown, Wendy, 181, 185
Australian Research Centre in Sex, Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 213n6
Health & Society, 26 Brownmiller, Susan, 182–184
autonomy, 7, 95 Burgess-Jackson, Keith, 17, 20
adequacy of options, 58 bystanders, men as, 26, 32n26
agency and, 199–200, 210–12
amounts of (degrees), 119–24, 202 Cahill, Anne J., 17, 21, 30n8, 191n2
251
252 Index
Cameron, Deborah, 148, 152, 158 techno-transcendence, 163–5

capabilities, prostitution, 57–61, 64, violence through virtual looking
65n2 glass, 165–70
Card, Claudia, 17 Doezema, Jo, 65n3
Carroll, Lewis, 212 domestic violence, 1, 4, 34
caste system, lack of independence, restraining orders, 48–9n6
59–60 see also intimate partner violence
Cawston, Amanda, 3, 9, 216 (IPV)
Chapkis, Wendy, 54 Dworkin, Andrea, 8, 144–8, 208, see
Chechen bombers, 112, 124n7 also Pornography: Men Possessing
Cheng-Hopkins, Judy, 178 Women (Dworkin)
Child Exploitation and Online Dworkin, Gerald, 125n10
Protection (CEOP), 169–70
child sex abuse, 168–9 education, rape culture, 28–9
Christman, John, 95, 125n10 egoism, 9, 224–5, 227–8, 231n11
Coady, C. A. J., 217–19 Eliot, George, 200, 213n6
collective agency, women, 62, 64, 173 empowerment, security discourse of,
common law, rape classification, 138 185–8
communicative sexuality, 27–8 Enlightenment, 148–51
Conly, Sarah, 137–8, 140, 141n4 epistemic humility, 7, 103, 105
consent Eremita, Victor, 245
positive model of, 29–30n2 ethics, self-harm, 84–5, 87n10
rape, 129–30, 135–7, 198, 201–3,
206–10 Facebook, 32n27, 129, 133, 167
see also rape Fatah political group, 92, 107n2
Cornell, Drucilla, 146 Fawcett, Millicent Garret, 213n6
Coroners and Justice Act 2009, 86n5 fear, rape and, 17–20
criminal justice system, 29n2 female suicide bombers
domestic violence, 49n7 autonomy of, 91–4, 96, 98,
intimate partner violence (IPV), 40, 100–101, 113–24
41 decision making of, 114–19
culture, treatment of men and Dzhennet Abdullaeva, 111
women, 85 examples, 111
Muriel Degauque, 111, 112, 116–17,
Darwin, Charles, 239 120–1
death, continuum with suicide, 80–1 Palestinian women perpetrating
de Beauvoir, Simone, 3, 72, 183 terror attacks, 92–4
decision making, female suicide Wafa Idris, 92, 93, 97, 98, 107n2
bombers, 114–19 female violence
depression, prostitution, 57 against men, 48n2, 72, 129, 130–1,
Descartes, René, 233–4, 236, 240 140n2
determinism, Kant on, 234–40 political, 4–5, 185, 190
devilishness, 236, 247n9 self, 4, 5, 71–6, 80
digital world see also female suicide bombers; self-
agency and feminism, 170–4 harm; women raping men
feminism and change, 174–5 feminism
Internet, 162–3 agency and, in digital world, 170–4
self-generated indecent imagery agency and prostitution, 53–6
(SGII), 163, 169 anti-rape discourses, 180–5
Index 253
feminism – continued Henchard, Michael, 200

digital world, 166, 170–5 Hobbes, Thomas, 187
rejecting victim framework, 1–2 Hoffman, John, 210
violence, 2–3, 228–9 Holocaust, 148–51, 185–6, 191, 192n5
Foe, Pamela, 182 Holroyd, Jules, 5, 7, 91
Foucault, Michel, 180, 182, 191n2, Horkheimer, Max, 149, 188
203–4, 208
Frazer, Elizabeth, 148, 152, 158 Idris, Wafa, 92, 93, 97, 98, 107n2
freedom, 242 Internet
Adam and Eve, 241–2, 244–5 online pornography business, 167–9
anxiety, 244 self-generated indecent imagery
Haufniensis, 241, 242 (SGII), 163, 169
Kant, 232, 234–8, 242 spatiality and techno-
negative conception of, 34, 36, 37, transcendence, 163–5
42–3 women, violence and agency, 8
as non-oppression, 6, 34, 42–5, 47 see also digital world
philosophy of, 241 Internet Watch Foundation (IWF),
positive conception of, 36, 37, 42–4, child sex abuse, 168–9
49n11 intimate partner violence (IPV), 6
right or wrong, 243, 245, 246 criminal justice system, 40, 41
free will, 234–40 cycle of violence, 42
Friedman, Marilyn, 114 freedom as non-oppression, 6, 34,
Frye, Marilyn, 5, 182 42–5, 47
Fulton, Laurie, 178 health-care system, 40
legal system, 39
Galtung, Johan, 217–18, 221–2 material abuse, 35
Gandhi, Mahatma, 224 media, 41
Garver, Newton, 221–2, 230n8 negative conception of freedom, 34,
gender 36, 37, 42–3
assumptions, 1, 3 parental alienation syndrome (PAS),
expectations, 104 41, 49n9
inequity in rape culture, 19–20, 24 police, 39
norms, 94 positive conception of freedom, 36,
power, 166–7, 171 37, 42–4, 49n11
rape, 15, 17, 23, 129 psychological abuse, 35
science and engineering, 172–3 restructuring of society, 45–7
understanding of violence, 5–6, 10, social categories, 41
162–3 unfreedom, 6, 34–5, 37–8, 40, 42–4,
see also women raping men 48n1
Gert, Bernard, 222, 230n7 varieties and effects of, 35–6
Gleeson, Michael, 31n22 Irigaray, Luce, 10, 232–4
global security, women in, 178–9 Itzin, Catherine, 146
Green, Laura, 244
Greer, Germaine, 180 Jean, Rhéa, 6, 52
Jeffreys, Sheila, 53, 55, 65n3, 208
Hardy, Thomas, 200 Jones, Rachel, 232, 233, 234
Harris, John, 219–20, 221
Harwin, Nicola, 174 Kant, Immanuel, 10, 201, 232–4, 246,
health-care system, 40, 46 246n2, 247n4, 247n9
254 Index
Karim, Aisha, 184 New York Radical Feminists (NYRF),

Kaysen, Susanna, 72 182
Kierkegaard, Søren, 233, 240–6 NICE (National Institute for Clinical
Excellence), 74
Lang, Berel, 149, 150 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 180
Larsen, Anne-Marie Esper, 179 Nike, 23–4, 32n26
Law, Iain, 8, 129 ‘no’ model, rape, 138
Lawrence, Bruce, 184 Nussbaum, Martha, 55, 58, 64n1
lesbian violence, 48n12, 78
Levi, Primo, 188 Oshana, Marina, 95, 125n10
liberalism, 95, 146, 148, 151, 156–9,
201–2, 204–5 Palahniuk, Chuck, 86n1
liberty, autonomy and, 202–3 Palestinian women
contested choices, 101–6
Mabus, Raymond E., 178 perpetrating terror attacks, 92–4
McKinnon, Catharine, 145, 208, Pankhurst, Christabel, 147
226–7 parental alienation syndrome (PAS),
male complicity, rethinking, 20–5 41, 49n9
male-on-female violence, 48n2, 166–7 Pateman, Carole, 54, 55
intimate partner violence, 6, 34–42 paternalism, 44, 50n12, 203, 226
prostitution, 1, 6, 52–63 peritraumatic dissociation, 138
rape, 134–6, 140, 205–10 peritraumatic paralysis, 138, 139
see also intimate partner violence personal autonomy, 7
(IPV); prostitution; rape Pickard, Hanna, 4, 5, 7, 71
Marcus, Sharon, 184–5 Pineau, Lois, 27, 209, 213n20
Marcuse, Herbert, 189 police, domestic violence, 39
Mardorossian, Carine, 180–1 policeman at the shoulder test, 77,
Marway, Herjeet, 1, 5, 7, 48, 110, 213, 81
229 policy/practical recommendations
May, Larry, 28 autonomy of women, 201, 207
media, intimate partner violence intimate partner violence, 6, 35,
(IPV), 41 46–7
mental capability, prostitution, 57 prostitution, 60
mental health, suicide and self-harm, science and engineering, 172–3
72–3 self-harm, 74, 84–5
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 244 terror attacks, 92
Meyers, Diane, 30n5, 114, 125n11, victim framework, 1–2
191n1 women raping men, 134–5
Mill, John Stuart, 151, 200, 201 political autonomy, 95, 101
Millar, Paul, 31n22 Poltera, Jacqui, 6, 15
Millett, Kate, 157, 182 pornography, 1, 5, 8, 9
Miriam, Kathy, 55, 62 anti-liberalism, 158–9
Moffett, Helen, 25, 31n20 cause and effect, 148–51
Motz, Anna, 73, 81, 87n7, 88n17 liberal harm, 151–4
Murphy, Ann, 189 meaning of, 146, 152
online business, 167–9
Nazi genocide, 149–50, 185, 192n8 self-generated indecent imagery
negotiation model, rape, 138–9 (SGII), 163, 169
Newton, Sir Isaac, 240 violence, 225–8, 231n13
Index 255
Pornography: Men Possessing Women marital, 223, 231n9

(Dworkin), 8, 145–6 negotiation model, 138, 139
anti-liberalism, 158–9 ‘no’ model, 138
basic argument, 146–54 scenario, 129
cause and effect, 148–51 threatening autonomy, 17–20
liberal harm, 151–4 ‘yes’ model, 138, 139
text, 154–8 see also women raping men
post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), rape culture
18, 35, 38, 57, 66n4 education, 28–9
Primoratz, Igor, 137 gender inequity, 19–20
pro-sex work men addressing, 22–3
advocates, 62, 66n4 men contributing to, 23–5, 32n24
theoreticians, 52, 53–5, 57, 64, 65n3 redistributing responsibility for,
prostitution, 1, 6, 231n12 25–9
capabilities or possibilities, 57–61 rape law, 205–6, 208, 210, 211
decent work and relations, 60 rational agency, self-harm, 73
feminist debates on agency and, rational agents, 77, 83
53–6 rational deliberation, 77, 81, 86n3
lack of agency in, 57–61 Raz, Joseph, 6, 52, 57, 58
rational capabilities, 56–7 resilience, security discourse of, 185–8
sex industry, 52–3 responsibility/blame
threat to women’s agency, 61–3 autonomy of women, 16, 198–9,
voluntary, 62, 63 201, 205, 209–10
psychologism, 44, 50n12 collective memory, 192n8
psycho-socioeconomic context, self- female suicide bombers, 111, 112,
harm, 87–8n14 122, 125n12
intimate partner violence, 42, 43
radical feminism physical lives of others, 189
agency and prostitution, 52–7, 64 present and past wrongs, 186, 191
position on rape, 182 prostitution, 60
violence, 9, 228 rape culture, 6, 16–17, 19, 22–3,
women’s autonomy, 208 25–9
radical feminist abolitionists, 52–3, self-harm, 74, 83
55–7, 64, 65n3 victim framework, 2
rape, 1, 5, 29n1, 213n20 women raping men, 132
acquaintance, 209 Restorative Justice Congress, 88n15
autonomy, agency and case of, restraining orders, 48–9n6
205–10 Reynolds, Paul, 5, 9, 197
common law, 138 Roiphe, Katie, 65n3, 181, 209
consent, 198, 201–3, 206–10 Rosenberg, Marshall, 88n15
cultural beliefs, 133–4
definition of, 134–6, 140 same-sex relations, 61, 213n20
fear of, 30n10 Sand, George, 200
feminist debate about, 180–5 Satz, Debra, 62, 63, 66n9
forms of, 209, 213n14, 213n20, Schelling, Friedrich, 233, 240–5
231n9 Schmid, Carl, 234
gender-neutral, 8, 137 Schmidt, James, 149
lacking consent, 129–30, 135–7 Schott, Robin May, 2, 8, 9, 178
legal classifications of, 138–40 Schulhofer, Stephen, 138–9
256 Index
security Sharipova, Marium, 111, 112, 116–19,

resilience and empowerment, 185–8 121–3
women in global, 178–9 slavery, oppression, 59
self-defence social media, 4, 8, 167
courses, 21–2, 31n17 Sohail, Sanjar, 179
rethinking men’s complicity, 20–5 Sontag, Susan, 153, 155
women harming partners in, 49n7 Sorial, Sarah, 5, 6, 15
women’s autonomy, 16 South Africa, rape in, 25, 31n20
self-generated indecent imagery South African Truth and
(SGII), 163, 169 Reconciliation Commission,
self-harm, 4, 5, 71–4, 80 88n15
affect regulation, 76, 79–80 STEM (science, technology,
agency and responsibility, 82–4 engineering and math), 172–3
ethics, 84–5, 87n10 Stoljar, Natalie, 97–8
other-directed ends of, 80–1 substantive accounts of autonomy
other-directed violence, 76–8 extending, 99–101
prototypical forms of, 75 Stoljar’s case for, 97–8
risk factors for self-directed strong and weak, 107n3
violence, 78–9 structure of, 98–9
self-directed ends of, 79–81 Wafa Idris’ choice and, 98
suicide and, 72–3 worries for, 101–6
understanding, in women, 76–82 suffering, violence, 220–1
validation and tolerance of anger, suicide, 4, 72–3
85–6 suicide bombers/bombing, 1, 7, 91
as violence, 74–6 application, 120–4
self-rule, 122, 198, 213n2 autonomy of, 113–14
sex education, 26–7 decision-making of female, 114–19
sex industry, women’s sexual agency, examples, 111
52–3 female, 7, 110–13
sexual assault, 29n1 prevalent portrayals, 111–13
sexual harassment, 29, 61–4, 137 see also female suicide bombers
sexuality, economic pressures Sullivan, Barbara, 55
on, 61–3 survivor, 181, 183–4, 191n3
Sexual Offences Act 2003, 135, 206–7,
210 Tabet, Paola, 56
Sexual Offences and Abortion Acts of Taliban, 111, 112, 124n3, 124n5–6
1967, 157 Taylor, Helen, 200
sexual violence, 4, 5, 71, 198 techno-transcendence, digital age,
feminist debate, 53, 181–5 163–5
men’s complicity in, 16–17 terror attacks, Palestinian women
pornography, 147, 152, 168 perpetrating, 92–4
post-conflict settings, 178–9 Theron, Charlize, 25
rape, 205–12, 213n14 thinking technology, 192n6
self-defence, 22 tolerance, prostitution, 60
sex work, 6, 52, 62, 64n1 totalitarianism, 50n12, 185, 190
anti-, 52 totalitarian menace, 44, 50n12
pro-, 52, 53–5, 57, 62, 64, 65n3,
66n4 UK National Institute for Clinical
sharia law, 4 Excellence (NICE), 74
Index 257
UK Sexual Offences Reform Act of White Ribbon Day, 28, 30n3

1967, 151 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 152
Umatov, Doku, 111, 124n1 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 200, 213n6
Unfreedom, intimate partner violence women
(IPV), 6, 34–5, 37–8, 40, 42–4, analysis of choices, 91–2
48n1 autonomy and agency, 210–12
United Nations Entity for Gender construction of autonomy, 200–202
Equality and the Empowerment contemporary society, 197–8
of Women, 175 empowering to self-care, 84
female suicide bombers, 110–13
victim free will and determinism, 234–40
critical theory of, 188–90 full autonomy, 30–1n13
feminist anti-rape discourses, 180–5 Irigaray on maternal origins, 233–4
gender and security, 178–80, 190–1 non-violent, 46, 72, 85, 88n16, 137,
rape fear and anxiety, 19 224, 229, 231n10
security discourse, 185–8 passive, 1, 3, 21, 26, 40, 54–5, 179,
victimization, 181 198, 233, 240
vigilance, 19, 30n11 as perpetrators of violence, 6–8, 10,
violation, violence as, 221–3 22, 24, 71–2, 77, 80, 85
violence science and engineering, 171–3
acting violently, 218–20, 230n1 understanding self-harm in, 76–82
approaches to feminism, 228–9 western culture, 232–3
as an attitude, 216, 218, 223–5 see also female suicide bombers;
case of rape and sexual, 205–10 women raping men
definitions of, 216–18, 230n8 Women into Science and Engineering
digital world, 165–70 (WISE), 171–2
feminist debate about rape, 180–5 women raping men, 129, 130–1,
other directed and self-directed, 140n2
3–4, 71–6, 80–1, 84 cultural beliefs, 133–4
political, 4–5, 92, 95, 101, 107n2, definition of rape, 134–6, 137
185, 190 lacking consent, 129–30, 135–7
pornography, 225–8, 231n13 legal classifications of rape, 138–40
power of, 146–7 myth about arousal, 131–2
self-harm as, 74–6 willingness to have sex, 132–3
structural, 3, 5, 10, 165, 217, 219, Women’s Aid, 173–4
225 Wood, Allen, 237
suffering, 220–1 Woolf, Virginia, 213n6
violation, 221–3 work, sexualization of, 63, 64
women’s choices, 91–2 World Health Organization (WHO),
see also female violence; intimate 71, 74
partner violence (IPV); Wurtzel, Elizabeth, 72
pornography; prostitution; rape;
sexual violence ‘yes’ model, rape, 138, 139
voluntary prostitution, 62, 63 Young, Iris Marion, 187
Youngs, Gillian, 4, 8, 162
Westlund, Andrea, 104, 105, 115,
124n8 Zupancic, Alenka, 247n9–10

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Genders and Sexualities in the Social Sciences

Series Editors: Victoria Robinson, University of Sheffield, UK and Diane

Editorial Board: Raewyn Connell, University of Sydney, Australia, Kathy Davis,

Brian Heaphy, Carol Smart and Anna Einarsdottir (editors)

Sally Hines and Yvette Taylor (editors)

Barbara Pini and Bob Pease (editors)

Victoria Robinson and Jenny Hockey

Yvette Taylor, Sally Hines and Mark E. Casey (editors)

Thomas Thurnell-Read and Mark Casey (editors)

Yvette Taylor, Michelle Addison (editors)

Herjeet Marway and Heather Widdows

Genders and Sexualities in the Social Sciences

Notes on Contributors viii

Part I Women as Victims of Violence

2 Women between Agency and Coercion 34

3 Prostitution and the Concept of Agency 52

Part II Women as Perpetrators of Violence

5 Autonomy, Value and Violence: Assessing Substantive

6 Female Suicide Bombers and Autonomy 110

7 Women Raping Men 129

Part III Governance, Violence and Agency

9 Violence, Techno-Transcendence and Feminism:

10 ‘Not Just Victims ... But’: Toward a Critical Theory of

Part IV Theorizing Violence and Agency

12 What Is Violence? 216

13 Ontology, Freedom and the Body That Can Birth 232

Alison Assiter is Professor of Feminist Theory at the University of the

Bob Brecher is Professor of Moral and Political Philosophy and

Amanda Cawston holds a PhD in Philosophy from Downing College,

Jules Holroyd is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Nottingham,

Rhéa Jean holds a PhD in Philosophy from the Université de Sherbrooke

Iain Law is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of

Herjeet Marway is a lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the

Hanna Pickard is a reader in Philosophy at the University of Birmingham

needs, and develops and delivers training on responsibility and blame in

Jacqui Poltera is a manager in Primary Health in Australia. Recently she

Paul Reynolds is Reader in Sociology and Social Philosophy at Edge Hill

Sarah Sorial is a senior lecturer in the Philosophy Program in the

specialization is primarily at the intersection of political philosophy and

Heather Widdows is John Ferguson Professor of Global Ethics at the

Gillian Youngs is Professor of Digital Economy at the University of

This collection considers the agency of women who do violence and

rejected the victim framework is that it disempowers women and denies

are not expected to be violent. Violence, and its corollaries of aggres-

These different sites of violence, moreover, can overlap in various

The section on women as perpetrators kicks off with a chapter that

Using a different framework, Iain Law closes the section on violent

Sjoberg, L. and Gentry, C. E. 2007. Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Women’s Violence in

Rape is a ubiquitous, gendered crime overwhelmingly committed by men

the philosophical literature on rape. The more difficult question is how

This is attributable to a variety of reasons, including the fact that many

How rape and fear thereof threaten autonomy

Minimally specified, to exercise autonomy, an agent needs the capacity

The immediate psychological responses to such trauma include,

While victims of rape will experience a higher level of fear and

Self-defence and rethinking men’s complicity

Rape theorists argue that learning self-defence can increase women’s

In a similar vein, Brison argues that learning self-defence can be

similar penalties.21 This case is by no means an isolated incident.22 On

a community whose attitudes about bringing shame on the family or

Redistributing responsibility for rape culture

We have argued that the prevalence of rape is in part made possible by

addressing rape culture. However, acknowledging men’s complicity does