This edited volume represents a joint effort by international experts to analyze the prevalence and nature of gender-based domestic violence across the globe and how it is dealt with at both national and international levels. With studies being conducted in 20 different countries and 4 distinct regions, the contributors to this volume shed light on the ways in which contextual particularities shape the practices and strategies of addressing the socio-cultural and legal problem of gender-based domestic violence in the countries or regions where they do research. Special attention is devoted to developing countries where there is a lack of a consistent legal definition of gender-based domestic violence and where violence against women is widely considered a private matter. The authors of the chapters share a common goal of raising public awareness of the significance in nuanced local experiences of women and other individuals from gender and sexual minority groups facing gender-based violence.
Furthermore, the authors attend, analytically, to the newly emerging, overlapping influences of COVID-19 and global warming. Their research findings acknowledge and provide a detailed account of how the two ecological and socio-economic crises can combine to produce economic devastation, disconnect victims from necessary social services and assistance, and create a large degree of panic and uncertainty. In addition, they intend to offer insights into next steps to not only adjust existing public policies, legislation, and social services to the ever-changing national and global contexts, but also to make new ones.
The book is intended for a wide range of scholars (both professors and students) and practitioners in a large number of areas, including but not limited to criminal justice, criminology, law, human rights, social justice, social work, nursing, sociology, and political or public affairs.
Dongling Zhang, PhD, is an Assistant Professor from the Department of Global Languages, Cultures and Societies, Webster University, the United States of America. He earned his PhD degree in Justice Studies from Arizona State University. His research interests include university entrepreneurship education, micro-enterprise development program in China's urban areas, social capital theories, and feminist theories. His current research focuses on the power dynamics of entrepreneurship, exploring various forms of collective and interpersonal violence instigated by the overwhelming influences of entrepreneurial ethos. It specifically examines the institutions through which a social body--the entrepreneur--is continually structured and transformed. These institutions include the family, neighborhood, labor market, government, and more.
Diana Scharff Peterson, PhD, has nearly 20 years of experience in higher education teaching in the areas of research methods; comparative criminal justice systems; race, gender, class, and crime; statistics; criminology; sociology; and drugs and behavior at seven different institutions of higher education. She has been the chairperson of three different criminal justice programs over the past 20 years and has published in the areas of criminal justice, social work, higher education, sociology, business, and management. Her research interests include issues in policing (training and education) and community policing, assessment and leadership in higher education, family violence, evaluation research, and program development. She is the co-editor of Domestic Violence in International Context published by Routledge in 2017.
