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Review of Victimology

Sexual violence against women: Still a controversial issue for victimology?

Sandra Walklate
International Review of Victimology 2014 20: 71 originally published online 25 October 2013
DOI: 10.1177/0269758013508681
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Article

Sexual violence against

women: Still a controversial
issue for victimology?

International Review of Victimology

2014, Vol 20(1) 7184
The Author(s) 2013
Reprints and permission:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0269758013508681
irv.sagepub.com

Sandra Walklate
University of Liverpool, UK

Abstract
The purpose of this article is to offer a critical analysis of the strengths and limitations embedded
within the victimological embrace of the criminal victimization survey as a mode of measuring the
nature and extent of sexual violence against women. Over the last 25 years great strides have been
made in recognizing sexual violence as a problem that has global dimensions. Such recognition
notwithstanding, concerns remain about who, what and under what conditions such violence is
included in this recognition. This article deploys Latours (1987) concept of the black box to
examine what is measured, how it is measured, and who is included and excluded in the measurement of sexual violence as articulated by the criminal victimization survey method. In unravelling these questions it becomes evident that what is to be done about sexual violence, and
whose knowledge counts in relation to what is to be done, remain problematic issues for the
victimological engagement with this agenda.
Keywords
Black box, counting, positivist victimology, sexual violence

Introduction
The United Nations (2010) reports that:
Violence against women is a universal phenomenon.
Women are subjected to different forms of violence physical, sexual, psychological and economic
both within and outside their homes.

Corresponding author:
Sandra Walklate, Eleanor Rathbone Chair of Sociology, Department of Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology, University
of Liverpool, Eleanor Rathbone Building, Bedford Street South, Liverpool, L69 7ZA, UK.
Email: S.L.Walklate@liv.ac.uk

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Rates of women experiencing physical violence at least once in their lifetime vary from several per cent
to over 59 per cent depending on where they live.
Current statistical measurements of violence against women provide a limited source of information,
and statistical definitions and classifications require more work and harmonization at the international
level.
Female genital mutilation the most harmful mass perpetuation of violence against women shows a
slight decline.
In many regions of the world longstanding customs put considerable pressure on women to accept
abuse. (United Nations, 2010: 127)

On 26 March 2013, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a programme by Michael Sandel (as a part of his
Public Philosopher series) in which he asked an audience in Jaiphur to consider the question: Is
rape worse than any other crime? Obviously scheduled in the aftermath of the widely publicized
Delhi rape case that occurred in December 2012, this programme generated a remarkably diverse
debate amongst the audience, and in some respects it is possible to argue that the broadcasting of a
programme such as this stands as a marker of the extent to which sexual violence against women
now has a significant international profile and is considered to be an issue of global concern. However, Mooney (2007) asks, in respect of domestic violence in particular, how it is that such behaviour can be both a public anathema and a private commonplace all at the same time. I want to take
these observations as the backcloth against which to explore what have been, and what might continue to be, controversial issues embedded in the victimological engagement with sexual violence
against women. For the purposes of this article, following and developing the work of Kelly (1988)
and Lundgren et al. (2002), I shall be taking sexual violence to mean:
the frequency (either high or low) with which any act having explicit or implicit sexual contact
comprising any actual or threatened behaviour, verbal or non-verbal aimed at an individual that (in)directly hurts, degrades, frightens or controls her/him at the time of the act or at any time in the future.
(Walklate and Brown, 2011: 489)

This definition subsumes domestic violence within the purview of sexual violence, and encompasses the full range of violence(s) up to and including murder. As a starting point the scope of this
definition is illustrative of the nature of the controversy surrounding this issue, as will become
apparent below.

Controversy and black boxes

For those committed to feminism, the victimological engagement with (sexual) violence against
women was historically a controversial issue. This controversy reached a critical focal point with
the publication of Amirs (1971) work on rape. Rooted, as this study was, in a victim precipitation
understanding of rape, it provoked a strong reaction from within feminism, not only as a result of
the empirical difficulties associated with his findings (see Morris, 1987) but also because of the
presumed victim blaming connotations associated with the concept of victim precipitation itself.
As a result of this study victimology became equated with the ideological weaponry that women
were routinely subjected to (Rock, 1986), in which the power of the word victim itself emphasized the passivity and powerlessness intrinsically associated with being female. The feminist
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response to this oppression was captured in their conceptual embrace of women as survivors of
sexual violence rather than victims of it. However, the feminist challenge to victimology ran, and
still does run, much deeper than such a conceptual debate.
In the intervening years, each of these voices (the victimological and the feminist) have, in their
own way, contributed to raising awareness of, and the need for, improved responses to sexual violence. In some respects this goes without saying see, for example, the observations of Ljundwald
(2010) and Letschert and van Dijk (2011), and the analysis of the feminist impact on progressive
social policy proffered by Htun and Weldon (2012). However, the challenge posed by second wave
feminism raised much more fundamental questions than whether or not to refer to women as victims or survivors. That challenge asked questions about what actually counted as knowledge:
whose voice was to be heard (Walklate, 2003). Arguably this challenge has not lessened and it
is this controversy that this article seeks to address. Before taking this analysis further it will be
of value to say something about how the term controversy is being understood here.
The analysis explored here draws upon the work of Latour (1987). That work asks fundamental
questions about the role of social science and social scientists. Put simply, rather than treating
claims to knowledge as black boxes and using them as the basis on which to make further
knowledge claims, Latour asks us to unpack the black boxes: to identify the voices of dissent,
to look for discrepancies and to highlight the uncertainty associated with knowledge claims. Latour
(1987: 2 3) states that:
The word blackbox is used by cyberneticians whenever a piece of machinery or a set of commands is
too complex. In its place they draw a little box about which they need to know nothing but its input and
output . . . That is, no matter how controversial their history, how complex their inner workings, how
large the commercial or academic networks that hold them in place, only their input and output count
[and will be described].

So in this article, I want to unpick the black box of victimologys concern with sexual violence
against women and explore what has been taken for granted within it. Specifically this exploration
results in four questions relating to our understanding of the nature and extent of sexual violence:
what to count, how to count, who to count, and what is to be done on the basis of that counting.
Interestingly, some aspects of these questions, especially in relation to the question of statistical
measurement, are alluded to in the quote used at the beginning of this article taken from the United
Nations statistical report published in 2010. That report states:
Current statistical measurements of violence against women provide a limited source of information,
and statistical definitions and classifications require more work and harmonization at the international
level. (United Nations, 2010)

This comment is indicative of some of the problems embedded in victimologys black box. In
excavating the knowledge claims made about sexual violence by pursuing the questions suggested
above, this analysis will, by implication, facilitate an understanding of why, despite the undoubted
recognition of sexual violence as a problem of global concern, the questions posed by the United
Nations and Mooney (2007) are even more pertinent now than they might have been in 1971 when
Amirs study of rape was first published. In particular, it will afford an insight into how current
knowledge is being shaped, how that shape is informing policy, and what spaces exist for this
shape to be changed.
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What to count
Violence in and of itself has substantial subjective as well as objective features which become
particularly problematic when it comes to questions of measurement. Whilst at one end of the
spectrum there is little doubt that the killing of one human being by another (whether or not that
is endorsed by the state) counts as an act of violence, for many other acts, whether they are understood as violent or not is dependent upon the meaning ascribed to them and the context in which
they occurred. Such observations also apply to acts of sexual violence. For example, female genital
mutilation, now considered an act of sexual violence for campaign groups in the Westocentric
world, does not feature in the same way in other parts of the world where such acts may be
considered an important rite de passage. Thus, whatever the sex of the perpetrator or the victim,
one persons friendly gesture may well be conceived as another persons act of violence. Kelly
(2011: xxii) neatly reminds us,
Sending someone a red rose is normatively viewed as an act of affection; it becomes an act infused by
malice only when its meaning can be discerned through prior threats or unwanted interactions.

Consequently, foregrounding violence as an act that has meaning ascribed to it, meaning that
reflects the cultural setting in which it occurs, alongside how an individual may have experienced
such an act, alerts us to one of the controversial aspects of understanding sexual violence: what to
count.
Conventionally there have been two ways of approaching what to count: one that takes the legal
framework as its definitional starting point for what counts as sexual violence; and one that takes
the individuals own definition of what counts. Classically each of these definitional approaches
has been articulated on the one hand in the criminal victimization survey and on the other by feminist informed work. Kellys (1988: 41) intervention in introducing the concept of a continuum of
sexual violence defining such violence as any physical, visual, verbal or sexual act that is experienced by the woman or girl, at the time or later, as a threat invasion or assault, that has the effect
of hurting her or degrading her and/or takes away her ability to control intimate contact was
seminal in exposing the tensions between peoples own experiences of violence and those so
defined as such by the law. In the time since this intervention both the strengths and weaknesses
of this approach to the question of what to measure have been subject to critical scrutiny (see, for
example, Walby et al., 2011), but it nonetheless set an agenda around the other questions of concern here (how to count, who counts and what is to be done about it) that has had significant
influence.
Historically these two different approaches have worked with not only different understandings
of what to count but also have resulted in different emphases on when to count the feminist
informed approach expressing a preference for prevalence (life time) studies, with the criminal victimization survey approach working with incidence (time limited) studies. Such differences notwithstanding over the last decade or so the differences in what to count have become less
visible. Just as an example of this, the Home Office in England and Wales recently adopted the
following definition of domestic violence:
Any incident or pattern of incidents of controlling, coercive or threatening behaviour, violence or abuse
between those aged 16 or over who are or have been intimate partners or family members regardless
of gender or sexuality. This can encompass, but is not limited to, the following types of abuse:

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psychological, physical, sexual, financial, emotional. Controlling behaviour is: a range of acts designed
to make a person subordinate and/or dependent by isolating them from sources of support, exploiting
their resources and capacities for personal gain, depriving them of the means needed for independence,
resistance and escape and regulating their everyday behaviour. Coercive behaviour is: an act or a
pattern of acts of assault, threats, humiliation and intimidation or other abuse that is used to harm, punish, or frighten their victim. (Home Office, 2013)

This definition illustrates both the complexity associated with the question of what to count as
well as the extent to which that complexity has been informed by feminist work like that of Liz
Kelly. It is also suggestive that in some policy contexts, contemporarily, there is a wider and much
more nuanced understanding of not only what to count but also what actually comprises that which
is to be counted. It also reveals much about who is to be counted since the definition above, and
more recent definitions of specific acts of sexual violence such as rape reflect endeavours to be
gender neutral in responding to sexual violence (the question of who to count is explored more
fully below). Yet despite the increasing complexity associated with definitions of what counts
as violence, tensions remain around who decides what counts: women themselves or the measuring
instrument in use? Kelly (2011: xxi) observes:
few surveys, even when they are cast as on VAW [violence against women] and/or health, ask about the
everyday intrusions in which womens personal and being with their self is intruded upon: what is measured counts, and not counting means that the everydayness of violence is again hidden, minimized and
trivialized.

This tendency to silence everyday violence in what to count is compounded by the tendency to
silence culture too. Machado et al. (2010) point out that feminist work around violence against
women centres the importance of situating what counts as such violence within a patriarchal cultural context. Centring patriarchy determines the what, how and who questions in relation to such
violence and clearly puts men and their behaviour on the academic and policy agendas. Yet, as they
go on to argue, putting culture in the frame in understanding violent and/or abusive behaviour
towards women is neither simple nor straightforward. Indeed, centring legal definitions of sexual
violence in how such violence is counted, as the criminal victimization survey does, embeds a
tendency to even out cultural differences around what to count within and outwith national boundaries. Thus what to count (contrasting definitions of violence) and how to count (survey methods or
listening to womens voices, our second black box question) become inextricably intertwined.

How to count
In their exploration of the measurement issues associated with sexual violence, Walby et al. (2011)
point to the use of three different sources of data: police recorded data, criminal victimization survey data and data from small studies. Each of these data sources has strengths and weaknesses that
are more fully discussed by them. Originally the difference between incidence measures and prevalence measures, commented on above, also equated with a quantitative and qualitative divide in
relation to the data gathering process on (sexual) violence against women. However, the seminal
work of Russell (1990) on rape in marriage did much to dispel the efficacy of this divide. This work
offered an empirical challenge for the feminist commitment to qualitative work by women, with
women, for women, and in more recent times there has been a significant development in feminist
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informed survey work. Walby and Myhill (2001) have pointed to a range of improvements that
have been made to survey techniques, from interviewer practices, to mode of enquiry, to how the
concept of violence is operationalized, to the nature of the sampling frame, all of which can
facilitate taking forward a feminist informed agenda around violence using the survey method.
These developments have informed survey work in this area in Finland (Piipsa, 2003) and, following the lead of Statistics Canada, different countries have engaged in their own national surveys of
violence against women (see, for example, Muller and Schrottle, 2004 on Germany; FougeyrollasSchwebel, 2005 on France). However, what lies behind these developments is the criminal victimization survey as both a national, and increasingly an international, tool of counting. If, as Walby
et al. (2011: 108) assert, The quantitative measurement of the extent of sexual assault has
contributed to the process of making the issue one of public debate and has succeeded in putting
sexual violence on the policy agenda in a way in which qualitative, small scale studies favoured by
second wave feminism did not, why should the use of this tool be considered controversial?
The criminal victimization survey asks people about their own experiences of crime. Thus it is
assumed that the respondent can remember accurately what has happened to them within the timeframe of the survey, that they define what has happened to them in the same way that the survey
does (a particularly acute problem in relation to crimes of violence as implied above), and that they
define what has happened to them as criminal (again, particularly acute for people whose everyday
experiences comprise behaviours that are defined as illegal but which they may not recognize as
such see Genn, 1988). All of these problems can be summarized as respondent bias. Other problems associated with the criminal victimization survey can result from interviewer variability: are
the questions asked in the same way with different respondents (different problems arise with faceto-face interviews than with telephone interviews); coder variability (how coding is managed and
implemented); the structure and composition of the sample; and the response rate. In particular,
how do non-respondents compare or contrast with respondents. A detailed analysis of all of these
problems can be found in Lynn and Elliott (2000) (see also van Dijk, 2010; though also note the
work of Walby and Myhill, 2001, referred to above).
It is possible to summarize all of these difficulties as being the problem of identifying who the
victim is and of what they are a victim. As has already been observed, some inroads have been
made into the ways in which these surveys address and prioritize the questions of domestic violence and sexual assault, which have been enhanced in particular by the development of selfcompleted question sections to such surveys. As a result, at least in terms of cost effectiveness,
such surveys are seen to represent good value. The International Criminal Victims Survey
(ICVS) obviously shares the same problems as national surveys but faces the additional difficulty
of deploying this method and methodology in different socio-economic and cultural contexts: the
problem of comparison. Here the simple question might be whether asking the same questions in
different socio-cultural and legal settings elicits similar enough answers to make sense of the data.
The reports that the ICVSs have produced are carefully worded, illustrating that every effort is
made to make clear how data have been collected and analysed as well as what can and cannot
be read into them. Nonetheless, there are some challenging technical problems that the ICVS has
to tackle. These range from how to take account of the different legal frameworks in which the
survey might be being conducted, and the data collection process, to the problems of language
translation. Indeed, much work since the first ICVS has gone into refining and standardizing the
survey questions an issue to which we shall return below.
Despite this catalogue of difficulties, the criminal victimization survey method has gone from
strength to strength, with Jan van Dijk deservedly gaining recognition for his work in this area as
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recipient of the Stockholm Criminology Prize in 2012. So far, so good, but what lies in the black
box? If we take a peek inside this box, the domain assumptions of positivism embedded within
mainstream victimological work become apparent. Such assumptions centre attention on the
search for regularities (patterns in the data). If we explore these assumptions a little, they alert
us to (at least) two problems: the fallacies of the data generating process (Hope, 2007); and
Occidentalism (Walklate, 2008a).
Positivist victimology, through the criminal victimization survey, strives to uncover the regular
patterns of criminal victimization: regular patterns that can be supported by evidence rather than
assertion. Underpinning this is the assumption that it is possible to infer the causes of victimization
from the patterns of victimization. This presumes that crime (in this case sexual violence) is an
event rather than a process and, as an event, can be measured. Hope (2007) has pointed out that
this results in a data generating process subject to at least five fallacies: the ecological fallacy
(making observations about individuals on the basis of aggregate data); the contextual fallacy (not
measuring variables appropriately); the aggregation fallacy (using aggregate data as though it
might measure variables appropriately); the individualistic fallacy (taking what individuals say out
of context); and the selection composition fallacy (selecting and constructing a sample that produces a self-fulfilling prophecy). Moreover, it is important to add that this data generating process
assumes that the term victim itself is non-problematic: the victim is either taken to be given by
the criminal law or is given by the self-evident nature of their suffering in other words, what it is
that victims say and identify as having happened to them. Taken together, these assumptions
conceal an inherently static and functionalist view of society. Thus positivist victimology may provide snapshots of the regularities of criminal victimization but cannot provide an understanding of
the social and historical production and reproduction of those regularities through time and space.
Not only do these assumptions operate at the expense of other ways of conceptualizing victimology
which afford different answers to the question of who the victim is (for a fuller discussion of this
see Walklate, 2007, chapter 2), but also they frame how the last of the questions to be addressed
here might be answered: What is there to be done about sexual violence? Moreover, this commitment to positivism also conceals a further problem that of Occidentalism.
In discussing the development and influence of the ICVS and the drive for standardization
referred to above, van Dijk (2010: 646 647) mentions that Dictating a common mode is unrealistic
given the different survey capabilities in different countries but some degree of pressure towards
standardization seems advisable. In disassembling this pressure it is possible to discern the
problem of Occidentalism. In summary, the drive to produce questions and data that are standardized
is at the cost of understanding the specificity of the local socio-cultural context using the AngloAmerican speaking axis as the gold standard for the kinds of questions the ICVS asks. The answers
to these questions then become the measuring rod against which other countries responses to crime
are compared, measured and judged. This smoothing out of culture and cultural difference that I have
exampled elsewhere, using Caldeiras (2000) anthropological study of crime and social order in Sao
Paolo (Brazil) (see Walklate, 2008a), has been detailed by Machado et al. (2010). These black box
assumptions belie victimologys Occidentalism (paralleling that of criminology see Cain, 2000),
and speak of hegemonic epistemological claims to knowledge (de Sousa Santos, 2009). Such
assumptions at the epistemological level frame who can speak, who can listen, in what terms and
what about (Aas, 2012). Indeed, such issues may well be part of the reason why the conduct of victimization surveys in developing countries has stalled (van Dijk, 2010: 647).
So criminal victimization survey research, despite its favoured position within victimological
research, is not without its problems. Most of those problems derive from an implicit commitment
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to positivism at a methodological level that sets limits on the value of the data that the survey
method produces. These limitations also apply to those surveys used to make sense of the nature
and extent of violence against women. None of this is intended to imply that this method(ological)
way of counting has not been of value in advancing the political and policy case for attention to be
paid to the question of sexual violence. On the contrary, arguably as a result of the primacy given to
this kind of counting that the political and policy case has been made and to a certain extent won, as
suggested above. However, this does not mean that awareness at this level has resulted in change in
behaviours, as observed by Mooney (2007). Thus, criminal victimization survey findings are not
meaningless just rather limited in terms of providing understanding or explanatory potential, as
alluded to by Hope (2007). In the absence of understanding and/or explanation, devising policies
that might have specific outcomes (what to do in the light of having counted) becomes
problematic.
So far, then, and referring to the questions posed by Aas (2012), we have considered the shape
of what can be spoken about in relation to sexual violence and in what terms. The next question that
our exploration of victimologys black box on sexual violence leads us to consider is, in Aas
(2012) terms, who can speak. For the purposes of this article I am taking a particular inflection
to this question by asking who to count.

Who to count
Asking the question of who to count carries with it at least two interpretations. The first focuses
attention on the practical issues of who is included and excluded for the purposes of measurement.
The second draws attention to the power relationships that may be more or less influential in
informing how such measurements are used. These two inflections are connected, with the second
in particular affording a link with the last black box question to be unpicked here: What is to be
done on the basis of counting? Consequently it will be of value to say something about each of
these interpretations in turn.
Historically, feminist work and criminal victimization survey work have adopted different
stances on the question of who is to be included and excluded for the purposes of measurement.
Feminist work, as has been stated above, has been informed by the desire to engage in work that
has inimically taken women as its focal concern. However, it would be more than simplistic to
assume that all feminist informed work took this view (space dictates that this issue cannot be fully
explored here). As the discussion above implies, the separatism implied in the by, with, for position does not accurately convey the contemporary relationship between feminism and more conventional (victimological) survey methods because the divide between them is contemporarily less
clear-cut. Re-iterating the by, with, for position, however, does serve as a reminder of the importance of asking about who asks the questions and who is listened to. Moreover, it is also important
to note that, whilst in the early 1970s when by, with, for women research was embraced, it may
have been assumed that sexual violence, including domestic violence, was a problem solely for
women. There has been a considerable challenge to that assumption in the intervening time period.
Contemporarily there is greater awareness of men as victims of both sexual and domestic violence
even if, in the context of the latter issue in particular, the problem of understanding what counts as
violence remains (see, for example, the work of DeKeseredy and Schwartz, 2011). So the question
of who counts for the purposes of measurement carries with it (perhaps) slightly different implications now than it did some time ago. No doubt heteronormative tendencies remain, and these
tendencies can erase other realities (Ball, 2013); who to count is a complex subject.
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Moreover, if it is accepted that the criminal victimization survey has become the dominant
method for measuring sexual violence, then it is important to make explicit those contexts that are
conventionally included and excluded by this method. Routinely, crimes that occur within state or
private care/custody institutions, crimes committed by the state from police brutality to war crimes
(though see the innovative use of a type of victimization survey by Hagan and Rymond-Richmond
(2009) in documenting violence in Dafur including sexual violence), and crimes committed by
business corporations are all hidden from view by this survey method. In particular, this results
in a range of hidden (potential) victim groups namely, children and young people (though it
should be noted that in January 2009 the British Crime Survey was extended to cover those under
16 years of age), and homeless and disenfranchised groups, some of whom may be particularly
vulnerable to violence particularly sexual violence. The recent report into the Jimmy Savile case
and its aftermath more than illustrates this (Gray and Watt, 2013).
A subsidiary question, though nonetheless an important one to the question of who to count, is:
At what point in a relationship does such counting count? This question inevitably affords a link
between questions of counting with questions of practice. In other words, what kinds of cases of
sexual violence are most likely to succeed in the criminal justice system and how do they match, or
fail to match, with peoples real lives? This can be put simply as the efficacy (for practice) of the
dangerous stranger as opposed to the reality of the dangerous familial and familiar (for peoples
real lives). Indeed, there is increasing evidence to suggest that some points in a relationship are
far more dangerous than others. In this respect the work of DeKeseredy and Rennison (2013) has
been particularly important in highlighting the process of exiting a relationship as being both likely
to provoke violence and being most likely to be hidden from public counting procedures. This
work reminds us of the importance of process in understanding the what, how and who of measuring the nature and extent of sexual violence. Moreover, as was suggested above, this observation
also links with our last black box question of what to do on the basis of counting.

Having counted, what is to be done about (sexual) violence?

As has been implied in the discussion above, tackling sexual violence has risen up the political and
policy agenda in parallel with the increasing presence and sophistication of the criminal victimization survey and its feminist informed iterations. I have offered an analysis of the shape and form of
the what is to be done question elsewhere (Walklate, 2008b). In making the distinction between
the law in theory and the law in practice, that analysis asked questions about the predominance of
the criminalization approach to tackling sexual violence (despite evidence to the contrary concerning the efficacy of this approach) and the tensions between this strategy and the interests that might
be served by it. There it was suggested that:
[in such policies it] may appear that the needs of women as voiced by feminist campaigns have been so
imagined. But have they? A deeper analysis might suggest that these imaginings have rather been the
needs of the criminal justice process itself alongside those that inhabit this space. (Walklate, 2008b: 49)

At this juncture it will be of value to situate this observation about policy within a wider (global)
context.
Demsey (2007) reminds us that in 1994 the United Nations required member states to show due
diligence in punishing acts of violence against women. Indeed, this requirement, alongside
European human rights legislation, has afforded the opportunity for such violence to be put on the
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agenda in a meaningful way in some countries, the aforementioned problems associated with
counting notwithstanding. However, as the UN group, INSTRAW (2005), recognized, the
challenge was then, and still is now, to shift behaviour. Brown et al. (2010) refer to this problem
as the implementation gap, and it is overlaid with what Walby et al. (2011) refer to as the justice
gap. These gaps draw together all that evidence commonly referred to as the problem of attrition.
This is a problem that has international/cross-cultural dimensions (see, inter alia, Daly and
Bouhours, 2009; Lovett and Kelly, 2009). These gaps are suggestive of a persistence in the ways
of thinking about sexual violence that give ongoing space to notions of the deserving victim, victim
blaming, and questions of legitimacy surrounding the status of being a victim and/or an offender.
Indeed, their persistence adds weight to the importance of understanding what counts and what is
counted as sexual violence. However, the focus on gaps implies a view that the policies in and of
themselves are right
they just need to be made to work better. However, if we consider the
question of what is to be done a little more deeply, it is possible to discern another gap that which
Lewis and Greene (1978) refer to as the conceptual gap. The presence of this gap is intimately
linked with the rise of the way in which the counting questions asked in this article have unfolded.
The contributions of DCruze (2011), McGregor (2011) and Bell et al. (2011) taken together
lead us to consider that, despite evolving understandings of sexuality and sexual norms, the intractability of the historical traces of being thrown down (a historical reference to being sexually
assaulted) resonate down the centuries, and remain with us today. It is in these traces that the
tensions between the recourse to changing the law, the drive for standardization in offering an
evidenced case for changing the law, the associated problems of policy implementation, and what
we might call womens real lives (the conceptual gap) become most apparent. It is worth
exploring the links between these processes in a little more detail.
There are, of course, difficulties for different states in implementing recommendations like
those suggested by the United Nations in relation to violence against women that relate to their
varied legal heritages. Shapland (2010) observes that, almost by definition, criminal justice
systems afford a different role for the victim (whoever that victim may be) depending on whether
or not that system emanates from Anglo-Saxon common law traditions (like the UK) or Napoleonic or Roman law traditions (like France and the Netherlands). Indeed, the recognition of these
difficulties lies behind the funding of a Feasibility study to assess the possibilities, opportunities
and needs to standardise national legislation on violence against women, violence against children
and sexual orientation violence by the European Commission (2010). The use of standardize
here is interesting. Lovett and Kelly (2009) report, in documenting attrition in rape cases across
Europe, that different systems produce very similar outcomes. However, looking for standardization, echoing the drive for standardization in the international criminal victimization survey, may
not alleviate the problem of ensuring an adequate and appropriate response to violence against
women. To state the obvious, this is in part a result of the fact that not all such cases would come
to the attention of the either the civil or the criminal justice systems in the first place. Perhaps more
importantly, however, a strategy of standardization needs also to take account of the questions of
the what, who and how of measuring such violence occurs, and the extent to which the answers to
these questions match with peoples real lives.
To summarize, Stanko (2007) has observed that, despite all the efforts and interventions
directed towards bringing offenders to justice, she experiences more continuity with the past than
she does change. In a similar vein, Mooney (2007), quoted earlier, has asked how it is that domestic
violence can be such a public anathema but at the same time such a private commonplace. Both are
referring, in different ways, to the lived reality of sexual violence. Mooney (2007: 169) goes on to
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suggest that the values whereby mens violence to women is sustained in the face of public
imperatives otherwise exist throughout the width and breadth of popular culture. Consider, for
example, the vicarious pleasure gained by some young males in witnessing violence on a good
night out (Winlow and Hall, 2006). Such violences manifest themselves differently in different
social contexts, of course. To return to the example with which this article started, in order to
understand the Delhi rape case and the response to it, it must surely be pertinent to understand
the context in which that occurred. Such an understanding would inevitably include religion, caste,
demography and changing socio-economic processes, as well as gender relations, the call for a
robust criminal justice response notwithstanding. It is at this level of understanding that it is
possible to appreciate how violence becomes folded into everyday life an intertwining of the
descent into the ordinary in which ordinary people become scarred (Das, 2007: 14). Thus we
might gain an insight into how a woman living with violence judges the risk of poverty and
homelessness as worse than the violence she knows she will be subjected to (see also Genn,
1988; Kirkwood, 1993). This is her lived reality. This is the ordinary violence of everyday life.
In fading out these voices, as Jordan (2011) suggests, the ordinariness of violence is rendered
absent. This ordinariness is also rendered absent in the conceptual understanding that underpins
policy. Moreover, we have traced this absence by taking a look inside the black box of the criminal
victimization survey approach (the positivist victimological approach) to measuring (sexual)
violence against women.

Conclusion: So whose knowledge counts?

In the preceding discussion every effort has been made to recognize the successes made as a result
of the development of a mainstream victimological tool, the criminal victimization survey, in
becoming ever more proficient in measuring the nature and extent of sexual violence. The achievements of this process have been remarkable (alongside the campaigning voices of the feminist
movement) in putting sexual violence against women (and men) on national and international
policy agendas. However, alongside those successes it is important to note that they have come
with costs and compromise. In opening the black box of positivist victimologys commitment to
the criminal victimization survey the discrepancies and uncertainties with the knowledge claims
associated with such surveys have been exposed. In asking the questions of what, how and who
to count and what to do on the basis of this counting it is possible to discern at least a partial answer
to the question posed by Mooney (2007). It is within the silences generated by this black box and
its assumptions that violence can be both public anathema and a private commonplace all at the
same time. This (partial) answer, of course, implies a conceptual understanding of violence not too
dissimilar to that of Kelly (1988), Genn (1988) and Lundgren et al. (2002). Whether exploring particular acts of sexual violence or responses to such violence, appreciating the lived reality of both
victims, and importantly perpetrators, is perhaps central to making the shift in attitudes and behaviour required. Such changes are required not only in the law
which, as McGregor (2011)
observes, has failed to ask much of men and the associated implementation process, but also for
men and womens real lives. This lived reality of sexual violence takes place within a cultural
context. That context, as Connell (1995) has astutely observed, perpetuates the power that men
have over women, children and other men. It is rooted in presumptions of normative heterosexuality, and it is the violences that have these roots that the criminal and civil justice processes still
struggle with the most (Kelly, 2011). This is especially the case when the parties concerned are
likely to be known to each other. This violence, which is private, contested, intimate and
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potentially embarrassing in its sexual nature and consequences for all parties concerned see, for
example, the recent work of Weiss (2010, 2011)
contributes to the difficulties in reporting,
recording and successfully prosecuting such cases and, of course, to the capacity for counting
them. Machado et al.s (2010) comprehensive examination of the relationship between culture and
wife abuse, alongside the assertion made by Lundgren et al. (2002) of the importance of situating
violence against women and the response to it within their socio-cultural settings, endorses the
view that the failures of policy, as Kelly (2011: xxiv) suggests, demand conceptual maps which
enable us to make sense of the paradoxes of violence against women in the twenty-first century.
As the preceding analysis has intimated, one place to start might be in unpacking the black box of
victimology and the criminal victimization survey into which some of these issues have faded from
view.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their feedback on this article and Michael Mair in SSPC at
Liverpool University for introducing me to Latours concept of the black box. The faults that remain are, as
always, my own.

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