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Book Review: Against violence against women: The case for gender as a protected class

Against Violence Against Women (Fields, 2013) is marketed as an interdisciplinary textbook for sociology, psychology, or women’s studies classes that include domestic violence among the covered topics. It also seems to be aimed, at times, at practicing psychologists and toward policy makers, as well as the general public. Given the current goals of the American Psychological Association’s Committee on Women in Psychology to promote the health and safety of all girls and women internationally (Chrisler et al., 2013), the book is timely and important to all of these potential readers. Fields’ (2013) book is composed of an introductory chapter, an epilogue, and six chapters addressing various regions of the world. The book presents case studies of women who have suffered from violent treatment in areas with which the author is familiar, along with brief descriptions of history, mythology, and beliefs. The first of these regional chapters attempts to describe Africa, an impossible task given the number of cultures, languages, traditions, tribal structures, patterns of colonization, and economic variation on that continent, as Mahlon et al. (2013) note in reference to that geographic region. Other chapters address the countries of Afghanistan, India, and China; the region of Siberia within Russia; what the author terms Celtic Europe; and the Negev Bedouin tribe in Israel. However, there is no rationale for why particular areas were selected, and the material is not logically or consistently presented. There appears to be no cohesive scholarship guiding the book. Rather, it is a collection of somewhat decontextualized case studies presented from a Western perspective that reads a bit like a voyeuristic travelogue with the flavor of sensationalized journalism designed to hold the attention of uneducated readers. We were both pleased to see a book to help raise awareness of the extent and depth of the problem of femicide, female genocide, and familial or societally sanctioned violence directed against women throughout Asia and Africa. Presented as it is, however, the book fails to represent the underlying scholarship inherent in feminist studies and the psychology of women. The book could unintentionally damage the status of those academic disciplines. The goal of the book, to investigate the potential of nongovernmental agencies and international courts to protect human rights and to explore ‘‘whether international law can successfully intervene and hold perpetrators of violence against women accountable’’ (Fields, 2013, p. 103), is worthwhile but the information included does not really address this in any coherent manner. Furthermore, no valid analysis of causes for violence toward women was evident, and discussing or researching domestic violence only from the perspective of one outside the culture studied is of little value for understanding or prevention of the phenomenon (McCarthy & Westphal, 2013). Some attempt to provide local perspective was evident, but citations of research regarding societal or domestic violence within the regions discussed, as well as citations of cross-cultural research on gender violence, were notably lacking despite the fact that much exists in the literature (see, e.g., Malley-Morrison, 2004 or Malley-Morrison & Hines, 2004), including research on domestic violence conducted outside the United States by psychologists indigenous to the cultures in which they gather data now available in English (see Jaafar & McCarthy, 2009). In summary, there are many factual errors and oversights in this book that render it unsuitable as a text in seminars on women’s studies, sociology of violence, or the psychology of women. We would encourage the author to consider a second edition of the book with attention to the detail and accuracy it deserves. Fields writes with passion and her experiences uniquely suit her to effectively complete the laudable task she has undertaken with this book. We hope one day she will.