ÌÇÐÄTV

Second Seminar

Gendered Violence: Naming Harm, Negotiating Justice, Imagining Resistance

December 16, 2026

Darcie Thomas

University of ÌÇÐÄTV

"Her Sufferings were so Great and Intolerable": Historicising Domestic Abuse through a Feminist Lens

If the primary function of the law is to respond to social problems, domestic abuse ought to be considered a recent phenomenon. Under UK law, coercive control was only defined and criminalised in 2015 under the Serious Crime Act, and the first domestic abuse act came into being in 2021. However, just because domestic abuse was not codified in law, does not mean such behaviour was not occurring, and the history of domestic abuse demands further investigation. Focusing on the eighteenth-century, my seminar examines how domestic abuse was not an unfortunate consequence of English marriage law, rather, the conditions required for its prevalence were embedded into the law’s very essence. To demonstrate this, we will examine proto-feminist and legal theorist Sarah Chapone’s treatise The Hardships of the English Laws in Relation to Wives (1735). We will consider the ways in which Chapone depicts marital cruelty, documenting patterns of behaviour that could be acknowledged as domestic abuse today. In so doing, we will debate the value of bringing modern domestic abuse research into historical narratives, enabling us to think more broadly about the strengths and challenges of using interdisciplinary research for the advancement of feminist scholarship.

Franica Camilleri

University of Malta

Voices Unheard: Survivors' Experiences of Navigating Family Court in Domestic Violence Cases

This presentation draws on a review of the literature to examine survivors' experiences of navigating family court in cases of domestic violence. While much of the existing discourse on justice responses to domestic violence centres on the criminal justice system, family court remains an under-examined site where survivors often continue to encounter their abuser through custody and access proceedings long after a relationship has ended. The literature points to family court as a space where survivors can experience further trauma, compounded by a lack of trauma-informed awareness among some professionals and a system not designed with survivors' safety and wellbeing at its centre. This presentation argues for the need for trauma-informed approaches within family court, and situates this argument within a broader doctoral project that ultimately aims to centre survivors' own voices and experiences, rather than institutional or professional perspectives, in understanding how the justice system responds to domestic violence. In doing so, it seeks to shift the conversation about court reform back to the people it should serve: survivors themselves, and what justice means from their perspective. This will be of interest to those working in gender studies, socio-legal studies, family law, psychology, and social policy.

Ellie Buxton

Loughborough University

Engaging Men in the Conversation: How Should we Respond to Misogyny in the UK?

This paper evaluates the impact of Law 2114 of 2021 in Colombia, which expanded paternity leave, introduced shared parental leave, and created flexible part-time schemes to redistribute caregiving responsibilities between men and women. Using microdata from the Colombian Household Survey (GEIH) for 2019–2023 and a difference-in-differences (DiD) approach, we estimate the law’s effects on five labor outcomes: pension contributions, labor income, hours worked, inactivity, and self-employment. The analysis is disaggregated by gender, marital status, and sector to capture heterogeneous responses.Findings reveal significant effects among specific subgroups. Fertile women experienced lower inactivity and more hours worked, particularly in stable sectors such as education, health, and public administration, where pension contributions also rose. Married fertile women, eligible for shared leave, showed further declines in inactivity. For fertile men, overall effects were limited, yet in non-pandemic-affected sectors pension contributions and self-employment increased significantly. These results suggest that while aggregate impacts remain modest, the reform fostered measurable labor adjustments where institutional and household conditions favored co-responsibility. We conclude that expanding paternity leave and enabling shared, flexible schemes are important steps, but insufficient to transform gendered labor and care dynamics in a highly informal labor market. More ambitious reforms, structural incentives, and cultural change are required for effective co-responsibility.

Millie Guy

University of ÌÇÐÄTV

Flexible Patriarchy? How did Secondary School Girls' Exercise Agency in a Context of Rape Culture?

Research on violence against women and girls has increasingly focused on the harmful sexual behaviours (HSB) girls experience within schools, identified as key sites of gendered violence. However, current research underexplores how girls themselves navigate HSB within a context of rape culture in UK secondary schools. The study used creative, qualitative methods with women aged 18–23 to explore what forms of HSB they experienced in secondary school and how they exercised agency in response. Girls’ complicit agency was most prevalent, as participants largely felt unable to challenge rape culture norms. Resistant agency was present but remained constrained, as its sustainability was dependent on collective performance. Most significantly, some girls negotiated a hybrid form of agency that was both resistant and complicit, avoiding social repercussions while simultaneously disapproving of HSB. These findings show that girls’ agency, although meaningful, remains structurally constrained, complicating binary understandings of agency as either resistant to or complicit with patriarchal structures. The study proposes the concept of flexible patriarchy to capture how such structures accommodate rather than simply suppress resistant agency. This research offers insight for future research and interventions grounded in girls’ existing and attainable forms of agency rather than idealised models of resistance.