Violence and Activism at the Border

Contents

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Preface and Acknowledgments

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pp. ix-xvi

Throughout thirty years of teaching and research in political science, my life passions have addressed government responsiveness to women and gender inequalities. Searching beyond policy rhetoric, I focus on policy implementation, or the lack thereof, and on change, drawing on evidence-based research and collective action: women’s movements, ...

Chapter 1. Violence at the U.S.-Mexico Border: Framing Perspectives

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pp. 1-28

The world’s attention has focused on Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, at the northern border of Mexico, as the ghastly, premier center of female homicides in the twenty-first century. For more than a decade, grisly reports and documentaries have emerged about the murders of young women, raped and mutilated before death. Theories abound over who is doing the killings. Some attribute the murders to psychopathic serial killers and gangs. Others decry organ harvesting (the 2003 pretext for the Mexican...

Chapter 2. Culture and Globalization: Male Backlash at the Border

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pp. 29-50

Violence against women has touched most people in the world, through their own experiences or those of their mothers, daughters, sisters, and/or friends. Violence against women occurs in many forms, from rape, sexual assault, and battering to psychological and verbal attacks including Sexual and other physical violence is now considered a crime in most ...

Chapter 3. Women Speak about Violence and Fear: Surveys and Workshops

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pp. 51-71

Thus far, I have contextualized the border, framed and documented violence against women in the Americas, and considered gender performance as a conceptual tool for understanding changing power relations between men and women, activism against violence, male backlash, and responses from government. In this chapter I will ground the...

Image Plates

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Chapter 4. Framing and Mobilizing Border Activism: From Femicide to Violence against Women

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pp. 79-109

Since the mid-1990s, a tiny network of activists in Ciudad Juárez has fomented a denser cross-border organized movement and eventually a looser transnational movement of people horrified at the city’s infamy, femicide, and police impunity. Movement growth and transformation wrought tensions surrounding representations including issue...

Chapter 5. Government Responses to Violence against Women

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pp. 113-142

Activists can raise awareness, and nonprofit staff can offer counseling and shelter, but neither group is equipped to intervene in conflict, to investigate and prosecute crimes, or to protect public safety in homes and streets. Those tasks belong to police forces, prosecutors, and the criminal justice system, institutions embedded in the state. In this chapter I offer another perspective on comparative institutions that respond to violence against women in flawed ways, threatening women’s lives and...

Chapter 6. Toward Eradicating Violence against Women at the Border: Conclusions

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pp. 143-159

This book is dedicated to the problems of and active resistance to violence against women on both sides of the border. In it I have examined domestic violence and as well as female homicide. One-quarter of women experience physical assault at the hands of their partners, and hundreds of women have been killed in Ciudad Ju�rez, some of them ...

Notes

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pp. 159-160

Bibliography

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pp. 161-178

Index

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pp. 179-184