The Rise of the Individual and Tensions with Institutional Structures

The years from 1800 are also marked by the rising power of the individual vis- à-vis a host of institutional structures - religious authorities, governments of all forms, workplaces and families.

Legislation to criminalise domestic violence empowered wives relative to their husbands, daughters-in-law relative to parents-in-law, and children relative to elders. Parallel legislation provided sanctions against those using violence against animals. The banning of caning and strapping in schools gave students increased dignity relative to their teachers and seniors. Bans on beatings of workers changed factories and farms as bosses came to recognise that their employees were not their property. Each of these shifts would occur at different times in different legal jurisdictions but the trend over the course of the centuries was inexorable - interpersonal violence inflicted by the powerful over the less powerful was no longer acceptable. In its place emerged the notion that the powerful had a duty of care and a responsibility not to use violence, even when it was within their means, if they sought respect for their status. Violence became the mark of the ‘out of control' individual, the person without dignity, as the decades from the mid twentieth century progressed.

Just as class struggles sought to equalise power between the working classes and the elites, and nationalist struggles sought power from colonial rulers, the global women's movement fought against patriarchal social and familial systems that had rendered women effectively the property of men.

Debate continues to rage around the issue of prostitution and pornogra­phy and whether these phenomena are violence against women or simply acts of choice. The slippage between wartime prostitution and sexual slavery is made evident in Caroline Norma's study of the Japanese military's ‘comfort women' throughout the Asia-Pacific theatre in World War II.^[3] The mass rape of women by invading forces that has been documented as occurring in almost all the conflicts of the past 200 years is exposed and challenged as illegitimate. Since 2008, rape within war has been regarded as a war crime within the UN's Resolution 1820 on wartime sexual violence; signatory states are required to take actions to educate troops and punish perpetrators. Women's reproductive capacities are recognised in this legislation, with mass rape being identified as genocidal where it meets the UN's definition of ‘intent to destroy'.^[4] Preventing violence against women remains a key global goal for the twenty-first century as NGOs, governments and commu­nity groups mobilise, but a key stumbling block is the role that women play as symbols of family or national honour - a role that has often stripped them of individual rights to bodily integrity. It has also made sexual violence against women a theme ripe for exploitation in wartime propaganda.^[5]

While women fought to gain independence from fathers and husbands, children too were gaining their rights as individual human beings to be free from violence both inside and outside the family.

Changes in the perceptions of the causes of interpersonal violence in the decades from 1800 produced new ideas about punishment and pre­vention. Prisons are conceived of as places of reform and rehabilitation. Perpetrators are framed as products of society-wide failings. Where in previous centuries violent criminal behaviour might be explained by possession by evil spirits like the devil, by the mid twentieth century such anti-social acts by individuals would be understood as emerging from poverty, abuse and inequality. The roots of violence are no longer spiritual failings but sociological ones. Accordingly, governments have set about providing programmes of education, food, health and public facilities as mechanisms for preventing violence and in order to bring more people into middle-class lifestyles.