Les violences faites aux femmes, un combat séculaire ed. by Anne-Françoise Déquiré (review)

This work for non-specialists brings together studies from different disciplines on violence against women. The introduction reviews the different types of violence, a number of related concepts, and the issues and institutions involved in reducing it. Its approach to gender is constructivist: violence is first and foremost understood as a relation of domination.

The originality of the work lies in the number and diversity of its research studies, and the two chapters by Jean Foucart reviewing the literature on violence and prostitution. It does document different types of violence against women and should therefore be of interest to researchers working on these issues. However, the topics are wide-ranging and do not refer to any explicitly formulated research problem or project, and inter-chapter consistency is weak since the book encompasses the perspectives of so many disciplines. The connection between violence against women and the facts studied is not always clearly explained or problematized. And the introduction, though it works to develop a broad definition of violence against women in all its varieties, offers no theoretical framework when in fact much of a theoretical cast has been published in the last decades. Had the work adopted a theoretical perspective, the empirical studies could have been fit into an analytic framework that would have given them more depth. Likewise, recent references on how to measure and quantify violence would have considerably improved the book.⁽⁶⁾

Its contribution consists above all in the seven chapters presenting new qualitative and quantitative data. Two are by volume editor Anne-Françoise Déquiré and further develop her earlier research on forced marriages and homeless women. The first is based on ten interviews with adult daughters of North Africans, aged 20-35, living in France. In the system she describes, women are not at all free to choose; their marriage is a family affair with strong implications for parents’ and siblings’ reputation. However, the contextual information is relatively old; more recent data is available. Déquiré’s second chapter is based on 19 interviews with women “living rough” and 9 with aid professionals and volunteer workers. Two-thirds of the women questioned were living in shelters, most dual-sex, where they did not feel safe with male residents. Moreover, according to the author, the job activities such women are offered reproduce gender stereotypes by giving priority to women’s potential status as mothers: jobs are seldom available for women over 50 and what jobs there are seldom reinforce self-esteem. Women on the street use three strategies to protect themselves from the symbolic violence of being looked at by passers-by and the physical and above all sexual violence of homeless men: “invisibility through cleanliness,” masculinization, and not washing to discourage sexual aggression. It should be noted that there are important recent studies on these questions that might have been included in the bibliography.⁽⁷⁾

Another two of the seven chapters are by Richard Matis, a gynaecologistobstetrician and vice-chair of Gynécologie Sans Frontières (Gynaecologists without borders). The first analyses a victim study conducted in maternity hospitals in 2010-2011. Overall, the survey findings are consistent with those from the 2003 French national survey⁽⁸⁾ cited as a reference, though contrary to that survey, violence types were explicitly indicated in the questionnaire. In what is in fact an extension of the Henrion report of 2001,⁽⁹⁾ Matis offers recommendations for better informing professionals and raising awareness among gynaecologists and maternity clinic staff about violence against women. The chapter on female genital mutilations is particularly precise and well documented, offering what the author terms a “medical approach” to the problem. After an exhaustive description of female genital mutilations and their medical and psychological effects, the author analyses professional practices, primarily those of midwives and gynaecologists. He then makes his recommendations, the first of which is the importance of diagnosis, which gynaecologists...