Content area
Texte intégral
Book Reviews
Violence Against Women: The Bloody Footprints. Edited by Pauline B. Bart and Eileen G. Moran. Sage Publications, Newbury Park, California, 1992, 294 pp., $46.00 (hardback), $23.95 (paperback).
This edited volume began as a collection of papers in a special issue of Gender & Society published in 1989. The authors examined violence against women from a feminist perspective. They pointedly presented a cultural, sociopolitical, and structural context of violence inflicted upon females of all ages in our society within historical and contemporary time frames. The authors collectively challenged prevailing myths that men who use violence to control women are "sick individuals" and are psychologically incapable of discerning the consequences of their misogynist subjugation of women. Furthermore, they suggested that because of the sociopolitical subordinate status of females in our society, males generally are not often conscious of the "male plot" to control and keep women in "their place." These authors poignantly asserted that females' subjugation by males in our society is historically rooted and contemporarily reinforced in the sociopolitical fibers of all our social institutions (e.g., political, economic, educational, religious, familial, medical, and legal) and are ingrained in our social and cultural values, norms, and mores.
In Part I, entitled "Types of Violence Women Experience," the authors discussed violence against women, ranging from pornographic phone calls, sexual harassment in the workplace, incest, rape, physical and emotional battering, and femicide. Regardless of the type of violence being discussed, the authors present very persuasive arguments that men use violence as a means to terrorize, control, and constrain the lives of women and girls while empowering themselves.
Scully and Marolla, in their chapter "Riding the Bull at Gilley's: Convicted Rapists Describe the Rewards of Rape," discussed the cultural and structural factors that encourage rape and the rewards rapists receive from raping females. Based on interviews with convicted rapists (N = 114; 54% black and 46% white), they identified rewards (as these rapists themselves perceived) they received in raping women: (1) a sense of revenge or punishment-collective liability of all women, (2) rape was a "low risk act" because many women frequently fail to report rape, (3) rape was an "added bonus" in the commission of other criminal activities, (4) sex is a male's entitlement and by raping...