The 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence concludes with Brigitte Lewis’ examination of the roots and impact of feminist digital activism, both online and off. While the internet is undoubtedly a cesspool of sexual harassment, it is also the site … Continue reading →

Senthorun Raj discusses how pop culture stereotypes about homosexuality enable bureaucratic violence towards refugees for the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence. What do Madonna, Oscar Wilde, Greco-Roman wrestling, clubbing at Stonewall, and having a lot of sex have in common? … Continue reading →

Lisa Featherstone reveals the controversies that dogged the campaign to criminalise marital rape in Australia in the 1970s and 1980s in the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence. From 1976 to 1994, Australian jurisdictions introduced a raft of reforms to … Continue reading →

For the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence, Mary Tomsic explores cinematic representations of physical and sexual violence against women in We Aim to Please, a 1970s Australian feminist film. As a historian, representations of complex ideas in art and … Continue reading →

The 16 days series continues as Jane Freeland looks at the spirit of survival women demonstrated in the face of domestic violence at other women’s shelters – this time in Cold War Germany. What struck me most profoundly while researching the history of domestic … Continue reading →

Joanne McEwan delves into legal responses to wife beating in eighteenth-century England, and its resonance with contemporary discourses in the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence series. Between 1731 and 1735, Thomasin Wheeler appeared before Hackney Justice of the … Continue reading →

VIDA’s 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence series continues with Dianne Hall discussing how gendered familial roles in early modern Europe institutionalised family violence and influenced its treatment in the courts. Trying to address the huge problem of domestic violence in our … Continue reading →

For the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence, Lisa Durnian examines patricide prosecutions where children killed their mothers’ abusers, demonstrating how it is not just the immediate victims of violence who suffer in abusive households. Domestic murders are perhaps … Continue reading →

Vera Mackie explores women’s experiences of militarised sexual abuse during the Asia-Pacific War, and the survivors’ campaign for acknowledgement by the Japanese government in the eighth post in the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence series. I opened the white … Continue reading →

Sheilagh Ilona O’Brien reflects upon contemporary witchcraft persecution by examining the communal violence historically enacted against women thought to be witches in the seventh post in our 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence series. Warning: this post includes the explicit … Continue reading →