New directions in sexual violence scholarship: law, power and change

This edited collection brings together leading and emerging scholars in the important field of sexual violence scholarship. The last ten years have witnessed an international reckoning on sexual violence, typified in the mainstream imagination by the #MeToo movement, acknowledgement of the violence of university campus life, and the overdue recognition of the enduring harms of child sexual abuse. While the state has been forced to respond through law and other political processes, at times revealing its agility and at other times its archaic investment in the past, much of the real work responding to sexual violence and abuse has taken place within communities, and in the personal responses of the individuals writing the scripts of their experiences. This volume explores the nuances of these individual experiences and considers how they are shaped and reflected by intersecting axes of power including gender, race, class, age and able-bodied status. It reflects on law and law reform in the area and suggests new modes and frames through which to explain and understand sexual violence and institutional responses to it. Debates within this contested personal and political arena do not map onto longstanding binaries of liberal and radical feminism, nor conservative and progressive politics. This interdisciplinary volume traces that murky terrain and features some of the leading international scholars writing on sexual violence in English today. This book will appeal to scholars and students across the broad disciplines of law and legal studies; criminology; gender studies; political science and sociology.