Conclusion

Abstract

The argument underlying this monograph is well expressed in Gilligan’s words quoted above. Research findings seem to confirm both Gilligan’ s and Kurtz and Turpin’s theories on violence. Thus, violence is to be considered a result of “causal connections between personal-level and global-level structures, processes and behaviors” (Kurtz and Turpin, 1997:208), with both “cross-cut by gender” (Moser, 2001:39). It is evident that an understanding of the role of structural violence in both the creation of situations in which violence against women occurs and in the development of effective social responses and prevention measures to it is necessary in any society, and in a society under stress in particular. Indeed, although social change is the reality of almost all countries in the contemporary (globalized) world, the speed and accumulation of changes and related stresses in everyday life are more pronounced in developing and war-affected societies. Thus, doing research on interconnections between social change, gender and violence in post-communist and war-affected societies has allowed me to identify a multitude of causes of violence against women in the post-Cold War world.

“... What is particularly effective in increasing the amount of violence in the world is to widen the gap between the rich and the poor....Relative poverty — poverty for some groups coexisting with wealth for others — is much more effective in stimulating shame, and hence, violence, than is a level of poverty that is higher in absolute terms but is universally shared. ”(p.238–39)

“ If humanity is to evolve beyond the propensity toward violence that now threatens our very survival as a species, then it can only do so by recognizing the extent to which the patriarchal code of honor and shame generates and obligates male violence. If we wish to bring this violence under control, we need to begin by reconstituting what we mean by both masculinity and femininity.”(p.267)

“If cleaning up sewer systems could prevent more deaths than all the physicians in the world, then perhaps reforming the social, economic, and legal institutions that systematically humiliate people can do more to prevent violence than all the preaching and punishing in the world” (p.239)

James Gilligan, Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic (1997)