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Your thoughtful questions:

1. [Please type your first question here. Remember to include a one-paragraph explanation of where your question is coming from (e.g., what you read that inspired your question, what you were thinking, why you were confused, etc.).]

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Looking at your topic through the lens of this week’s readings:

3. How did this week’s readings affect your understanding of the topic you chose in Week 0?

Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour

35:

0021– 830

© The Executive Management Committee/Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600
Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

Blackwell Publishing, Ltd.Oxford, UKJTSBJournal for the Theory of Social Behaviour0021-8308© The Executive Management Committee/Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005351Original ArticleGenetically Modified Organisms

Paula Castro and Isabel Gomes

Genetically Modified Organisms in the Portuguese

Press: thematization and anchoring

PAULA CASTRO AND ISABEL GOMES

Centro de Investigação e Intervenção Social Instituto Superior de Ciências do Trabalho e da Empresa, Lisboa ABSTRACTThe main aim of this paper is to examine how the recent themata developments in Social Representations Theory can be linked with the classical process involved in the construction of social representations—anchoring—, as well as with the communicative modalities that are part of the theory since its inception. This was done through a study of the representation ofGMOs in the Portuguese press, taken as an opportunity for addressing the issues related to the role played by old categories in rendering new meanings and in establishing new categories.A further objective of the study, more applied in nature, was to explore whether the central characteristics of the representations of biotechnology in European countries were also present in Portugal.All articles that included the expressions Genetically Modified/Genetic Modification/Manipulation or Transgenics, were collected, in five Portuguese newspapers, during the years of 1999, 2000 and 2001. Content analysis of the 239 articles collected showed that their thematical organisation re-constitutes the Red/Green dichotomy found in most European countries. TheRed/health discussion is structured around such themata as health/disease, risk/safety, benefits/problems, and anchors in categories like science and progress. The nature /culture opposition emerges, in turn, in the Green/food discussion, which anchors on categories like ideology and employs Propaganda as a communicative modality—a set of indicators configuring amore polemic debate. The conclusions discuss the relevance of linking themata with anchoring and the importance of devising more fine-grained tools for the analysis of Diffusion.Key words: Social representations theory; genetically modified organisms; themata; anchoring; communicative modalities

INTRODUCTION

An examination of the impact of the three major technological innovations since
World War II—nuclear power, information and communication technology and
biotechnology — shows that, although technological innovation, in general, progresses
rather smoothly through society, there are some innovations that progress more
smoothly than other . . . Nuclear power, for instance, met with strong and loud
contestation since the beginning. In contrast, it is hard to remember examples of
controversy surrounding information and communication technologies (ICT).
Whether the ultimate fate of biotechnology in the public sphere will resemble that
of nuclear power or that of ICT is perhaps not yet totally clear, since the issue is not
closed. As the anti-nuclear movement has shown, sometimes resistance to technology
is fuelled by reservations regarding fundamental moral values ( Van der Pligt, 1985;
Van den Daele, 1993; Wagner et al., 1998). Since biotechnology has been considered
by the public a technology that is both risky and morally questionable (Bauer,
2002), its future is also dependent upon the way it is framed in the public debate.

Currently, however, as researchers in the area notice (Dahinden, 2002), not
even the terminology of the field is totally established—biotechnology, genetic
engineering, genetic modification, are still competing definitions “in what seems
to be a complex game played for control of semantics in the public sphere”
(Gaskell et al., 1998, pg. 8). Considering that “definitions are not just technical
issues, but are a matter of framing for the purpose of opinion and attitude forma-
tion and for regulation” (Bauer, 2002, pg. 97), what we seem, then, to have with
biotechnology is a field where the battle “is being waged in the arena of language,
as much as that of science” (Ogden, 2001, pg. 340). And it has to be added that
the debate has been very intense and controversial, with very divergent evaluative
positions, and involving very different interests, orientations and identities, with
the various actors involved in it generally finding their way into the media
( Wagner, Kronberger & Seifert, 2002).

Paula Castro and Isabel Gomes

The biotechnology debate can thus be considered a good opportunity for
examining the role played by language in fostering social change, and, more
precisely, the role played by old categories in pushing new meanings and objects
through society. And the press can be seen as a strategic place where to study
both the “battle of words” being fought in the area, and the intertwined battle
of contents and positions.

BIOTECHNOLOGY AND THE BATTLE OF WORDS

The relevance of the biotechnology debate was perceived by several researchers
that examined media coverage, public policy and public perceptions of biotechno-
logy and Genetically Modified Organisms in EU countries (see Gaskell, Bauer &
Durant, 1998; also Jesuíno et al., 2001; Bauer 2002; Dahinden, 2002; Liakopoulos,
2002; Kohring & Matthes, 2002; Wagner et al., 2002). This bulk of work shows
that in most countries—France, Austria, United Kingdom, Netherlands and
Sweden, namely—the moment of higher attention of the press to biotechnology
were the years between 1995 and 199

. It was also during these years that NGOs
became increasingly involved in the debate and more broad based advisory
groups were created (Liakopoulos, 2002).

However, it should not be overlooked that both the nature and the extent of
public concern about modern biotechnology are very different in different parts
of Europe (Bauer et al., 1998). For instance, while in Greece there was little public
reaction at all, in Italy the major concern was with the ethical implications of
human reproductive technologies and in the UK most public attention was
given to genetically modified food (Bauer, Durant & Gaskell, 1998). In the UK
press debate, moreover, the discussions incorporated a dichotomy—the Red/Green
dichotomy—, that was latter successfully exported to other countries (Bauer, 2002).
This dichotomy separates biomedical manipulations with impact on the health
area—Red—, from genetically modified food and agricultural products—Green.

The dichotomy can also be found in the area of public perceptions, since
Eurobarometer surveys show that, around the EU countries, the public is less
supportive of Green than of Red products, with GM medicine receiving the more
positive evaluations (CNADS-CES, 2000). Moreover, a comparison of the 199

and the 1999 Eurobarometer surveys shows that the support for GM food
decreased. Since the 1999 survey was undertaken after a phase of public debate,
which was intense in several countries, this shift shows how the health and med-
icine applications of genetic modification were somehow better shielded from
contestation and controversy than the food and agricultural products.

It can be hypothesised, in line with the notion that a “battle of words” is being
fought over biotechnology, that this shielding is an effect of the Red/Green
separation itself, even if it is not to be deduced that the situation was “purposefully
engineered by RED proponents” (Bauer, 2002, pg. 106). Nevertheless, the making

Genetically Modified Organisms

of distinctions is a pre-condition for the different categories defined to acquire
different status, and this particularisation mechanism (Billig, 1985) may have had
protective effects over the health domain. At this point it can also be noted that
the Green-Red dichotomy is an example of how “splitting” functions as a defence
mechanism. Joffe (2003), applying this concept to the area of risk perception,
argues that “the goal of splitting, manifest in representations, is to keep the bad
away from the good in the hope that the good will not be invaded or destroyed”
( pg. 62). Although psychoanalysis locates these defence mechanisms in the mind,
Billig (1999) has argued that they can also (or perhaps preferentially) be found in
the uses of language. The categorisations and particularisations that language
produces are among these uses, and the Red/Green dichotomy seems, in this
sense, to clearly perform the task of splitting, by leaving one category with (almost)
all the bad parts, and the other with the good ones, thus engendering repres-
entations with the corresponding qualities.

Another way of looking at how the battle of language develops is by examining
the metaphors employed to refer to biotechnology. In this respect, the Informa-
tion Technology metaphor—anchoring biotechnology to IT by statements such
as “people are programmed by their genes”—occupied the second place both
in the ’80s and in the ’90s in the U.K. press (Liakopoulos, 2002). In face of the
uncontested success of IT in the public sphere, this is not surprising, particularly
if we accept that “language is a technology as any other” (Ogden, 2001, pg. 338).
Indeed, a technology that has the fantastic capacity of rendering the new through old
words, which lend their positive or negative qualities to the new target domain.

In sum, then, the point of the previous pages was to show that are several
reasons for stating that an important part of the battle of biotechnology is being
fought with words. This can be stated because the press is one of the privileged
theatres where the battle is being staged, and where the various identities and
positions can form in ranks. But this can also be stated because the way language
is used, what distinctions are being made with and through it, how these distinctions
are contested and defended, the functions they perform, which old categories
are being chosen for carrying new meanings, all of these are crucial questions in
this area. Indeed, all of these are crucial questions when we try to address the
more general issue of how technological innovation progresses through society, or
the even more general problem of how novelty relates to what is old. In other
words, all of these are crucial questions when we try to understand how—in the
well known terms of Moscovici (1976)—the unfamiliar becomes familiar, and the
transformations it suffers in this process.

PORTUGAL—THE CENTRALITY OF THE PRESS FOR THE BATTLE OF WORDS

That the press plays a central role in the “thinking society” dynamic and has to
be accorded privileged attention, were also ideas present in Moscovici’s first study.

Paula Castro and Isabel Gomes

In Portugal, unlike in other EU countries, analyses of the media coverage of
biotechnology were not conducted for the period 1973 –1996 and only the period
1992–1999 has been covered, but focusing on just one paper ( Jesuíno et al.,
2001). These reasons made a more encompassing study of the press relevant for
gaining an understanding of the options presented to the Portuguese society. The
centrality of the role of the Press becomes even more evident when we know that
Portugal was among the less well-informed countries with regard to biotechno-
logy ( Wagner et al., 2002), and that scarce inter-personal communication around
this issue implied that the country was described as one that had not yet initiated
the process of symbolic coping with biotechnology—a process driven by “inter-
individual and mass media communication” and “by which individuals come to
render new technologies or scientific achievements intelligible” ( Wagner et al.,
2002, pg. 323)

.
In this context, it is incumbent upon the press to set the agenda of what is

discussed and how, and a study of the representation of GMOs in the Portuguese
press presented an opportunity for addressing, through the theoretical instruments
of social representations theory ( Moscovici, 1976; 1988; 2001), the issues related
to the role of old categories in rendering new meanings. More specifically, it was
an opportunity to develop a study that would link the recent

themata

developments
with the classical process involved in the construction of social representations—
anchoring. And this was the main goal of the study. In order to achieve it, an
analysis of the period ranging from 1999 to 2001 could assure coverage of a
moment for which there were expectations of a stronger involvement of various
actors, since some crucial events were observed towards the end of the ‘90s. This
was the period examined.

Finally, a further objective was to explore a more generic question, this being
the following: can the analysis of the old words and categories used to render the
new help us foresee the future fate of biotechnology in the public sphere? Can it
help us discern for biotechnology a fate more similar to that of nuclear power or
a future more akin to that of ICT? Or to put it in another way, can an analysis
of current words help us understand future worlds?

To fully develop the rationale for these questions, a brief digression through
some central concepts of Social Representations Theory is needed.

SOCIAL REPRESENTATIONS AND COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS

Common sense is acquired by each of us during the normal course of our life. It is a mother-
knowledge which we assimilate, without specific training, at the same time as our mother
tongue. (Moscovici, 2001, pg. 11)

Social Representations Theory is since its inception interested in the analysis of
common sense, the forms it assumes, the transformations it suffers, and the

Genetically Modified Organisms

contents that feed it (Moscovici, 1961/76, 2001). In this sense it is a theory about
“folk thinking” (Moscovici, 2001, pg. 17), and about social knowledge ( Marková,
2000). It emerged from a study of the transformations suffered by scientific con-
cepts when appropriated by common sense and put to circulate in society—since
this was the subject that Moscovici addressed through an examination of how
psychoanalysis was appropriated by French society in the ’50s. In light of the
subject that occupies us here —how innovation in biotechnology progresses
through society—, it can be said that what occupied Moscovici in that first study
was already the analysis of how scientific innovation progresses through society.
This is a specific aim that Moscovici explicitly connects with the period during
which the theory was formulated (Moscovici & Marková, 2000). The fact that it
was initially formulated with this specific aim does not, however, imply that this is
its sole objective. On the contrary, this approach can be said to incorporate the more
general intention of understanding the functioning of the processes of appropriation,
transformation and use of any type of knowledge. And it posits that these processes
have to be invoked to explain how our society manages two simultaneous phenomena:
diversity and consensus, differentiation and similitude (Moscovici, 1984; Billig,
1988; also Jovchelovitch, 1996; Castro, 2003). The simultaneous character of these
phenomena is what has to be understood in our times, when a puzzling diversity
of options in all fields is opened to people (Gervais & Jovchelovitch, 1998).

This is what the theory undertook to do, also considering how, in the unceasing
circulation and recycling of the contents of common sense, what is old constantly
re-emerges in what is new. This is to say, how new objects are understood through
the lenses of old ones, in the complex transformations common sense suffers
through communication. In these transformations several systems are involved.
Everyday conversation, or interpersonal communication, and the press are two of
the more important ones (Marková, 2000), and the theory has developed a
number of analytical tools for examining their operation and impact.

First of all, the approach developed an articulated set of tools for the analysis
of the press that date back to Moscovici’s first work. These are the ideas referring
to the communicative modalities—Diffusion, Propagation and Propaganda.
Developed through analysis of the French press, they are a tool for examining
both the contents and the structure of press articles. According to that first work
(Moscovici, 1976), Diffusion is a communicative modality that sets opinions and
beliefs on motion and circulation; these beliefs can be—and often are—contradictory
ones; this modality is not, however, characterised by attempts at conciliating
them. The aim is not to solve contradiction, and accommodate divergence, but
to present it, and let the reader arrive at his/her own conclusions. A second
modality—Propagation—tries instead to articulate, with an overarching concili-
ation key, what seemed contradictory. A third modality—Propaganda—is focused
on behaviour, on its reinforcement or creation, and depicts a dichotomised world
where what is right and what is wrong are on very different sides, and there is no
space at all for conciliation.

Paula Castro and Isabel Gomes

It can be said that these proposals rest upon a very clear recognisance of the
role of contradiction and the existence of a number of ways for dealing with it
that are deducible by logic. That is, when we face the fact that about a certain
relevant social issue there is and there is also , the
logical options available are four. It is possible to choose one against the other
(Propaganda), or it is possible to aim for conciliation on a super-ordinate level,
redefining the beliefs as not contradictory at all (Propagation), or it is possible to
just acknowledge their existence side by side, not favouring one over the other
(Diffusion). It has been part and parcel of the generalist Press’s identity the claim
that their role is to follow through the narrow and hard path of the latter option—
that is, the impartial rendering of all positions to be found about controversial
issues. Aims like objectivity and impartiality are central in the definition of the
journalistic ethic. However, it is hardly possible to defend that when put to con-
crete use, language can remain the totally transparent and impartial media we
describe when describing logical possibilities. It is well known that the impossibil-
ity of this transparency has now been both fully theorised and demonstrated
( Wittgenstein, 1953; Hodge & Kress, 1996; Potter, 1996).

Social Representations theory itself, through another of its analytic tools, conveys
the difficulties of a simplistic understanding of diffusion. The analytic tool in question
is the notion of “anchoring”, a process regulated by a socio-normative meta-system,
and implied in the classification of people, objects or ideas into categories. What
is social in this process is the selection of the anchoring categories, determined by
the socio-normative meta-system that organizes the life of the groups. This is how
Moscovici describes it: “it can always be observed that the initial direction, the angle
from which a group will try to cope with the non-familiar, will be determined by
the images, concepts and languages shared by that group” (1981, pg. 189). Developing
this idea, Markova and Wilkie (1987), in turn, consider anchoring a “conservation
principle”, assuring continuity in the reaction of the public to events.

When applied to the study of the press articles about GMOs, these ideas lead
us to presupposing that different articles, different authors and different news-
papers will choose different anchoring categories. They will compare GMOs to
various discoveries, diseases, or organisms of the past. The selected categories in
turn, will transport GMOs to different universes of meaning, and will make them
progress through society by different paths.

Going back to what was said about the communicative modalities, what these
ideas imply, then, is that in the concrete renderings in the press articles of the
controversial ideas about a subject, even if both sides are given voice, the anchor-
ing categories used for describing them may differ, and probably will. In turn, this
difference may be a subtle way of giving unbalanced, partial, renderings. A par-
tiality that may only be clearly visible through the perspective accorded by a joint
analysis of several articles published during a length of time.

During the ’90s, the theory developed yet another instrument for the study of
communication—the concept of

themata

. Moscovici e Vignaux (1994, see pg. 62)

Genetically Modified Organisms

state that themata may be considered “idées-sources”/source-ideas, that allow for
a better conceptualisation of the relations between representation and commun-
ication. They also argue that the concept is useful for a more through examination
of the ways the past has for re-emerging constantly in current communications
and representations—a constant concern in the work of Moscovici (cfr. Moscovici,
1984b; also Jovchelovitch, 1996; Castro, 2002). It is in this sense that “themata
appear to have a generative as well as a normative power in the formation of a
representation, fitting “new” information to the already existing one ( Moscovici,
2001, pg. 31). Themata are the core notions that maintain “the stability of the
network of communicated knowledge and practice” ( Moscovici, 2001, pg. 31).

Marková (2000) defines

themata

as “such oppositional categories which, in the course
of history, become problematized; for one reason or another they become the focus
of attention, and a source of tension and conflict ( pg. 446). Examples of

themata

are:
nature/culture; reason/emotion; edible/non edible; beautiful/ugly. However, it is
important to insist that not all oppositional pairs become themata that generate
social representations. For that, they have to be brought to public attention, and generate
argumentation (Markova, 2000). Sometimes, a pair, or one of its terms, can lay
dormant for a hundred years, and revive again only under the touch of conflict.

Themata incorporate the idea that we think and reason in an argumentative
way, by contrasting arguments (Moscovici, 1976; Billig, 1988). They carry the
assumption that at the heart of arguments and as generative devices for their
development, are these central oppositional pairs. This is the reason why the
study of themata can help advance our understanding of the “old and irritating
enigma of common sense, i.e., why it affirms one thing as well as its opposite
(Moscovici, 2001, pg. 32). And, by the same token, it is also possible to hypothesise
that themata are also the reason why “social representations occur in pairs, each
one having its alternative” ( pg. 33), a question that has gained more space in
Moscovici’s texts during the last years (see Moscovici, 2001; 2002).

OBJECTIVES

Framing the issues in the above way implies that studying the themata developed
in the press articles would be useful for understanding the organisation of the
semantic fields about GMOs. If a study of the anchoring categories could be
added to the themata analysis, it would be possible to obtain an integrated over-
view of the pattern of representations. And if the previous analyses were to be
linked with an examination of the communicative modalities, an overview of the
level of conflict associated to the various representations could be achieved.

Within this frame, the specific aims of the present work were:

• To find out which were the themata more frequently used by the Portuguese
press when writing about GMOs, during the years of 1999 to 2001, in order

Paula Castro and Isabel Gomes

to map out the general configurations of the contrasting semantic fields
mobilised around this subject.

• To study how the themata were linked with the categories selected for
anchoring the GMOs, that is, the categories towards which, through com-
parisons, the GMOs are linguistically pushed.

• A final goal was to study how the communicative modalities of the articles
were related to the configurations of themata and anchoring categories. The
assumption behind this last goal was that linking the communicative modal-
ities to those configurations would allow a clearer picture of the themes and
comparisons around which clear opposition emerged, and of the themes
and comparisons that were more shielded from controversy and were passed
as less polemic.

METHOD

All the articles that included the expressions Genetically Modified/Genetic
Modification or Genetic Manipulation, or Transgenics, were collected, in five
Portuguese newspapers—three daily papers and two weekly papers—, over three
years—1999, 2000 and 2001. The daily papers are papers of wide circulation,
and the weekly papers are more important ones in the country. All belong to the
generalist press.

The articles were coded with a Coding Manual adapted from another study of
the Press (Naiff, Sá & Moller, 2003; Castro, 2003b), and transformed to conform
to this object of study

. Each article was considered a unit. For the analysis of the
themata, the articles were read several times, until 13 oppositional pairs were
defined. Afterwards, each article was coded four times, and for each time a term
(of the two each thema comprises) was identified as being developed in the article
and coded as such. For instance, if an article mobilised expressions such as respect
for nature, simplicity, life without technology, purity and so on, it was considered
to develop the natural/cultural thema, and coded 1 in this thema, meaning that
it developed the first term of the pair.

For the codification of the anchoring categories, the first step was to develop a
set of 11 categories that considered the comparisons and analogies for GMOs.
For instance, if the GMOs were compared to hybrid corn, the category was
“agriculture”. If they were compared to other revolutions of the past, the category
was “progress”, and if their results were compared to pollution, the category was
“contamination”. Afterwards, each of the 11 categories was coded as present or
absent from each article.

In order to code each of the articles on one of the three communicative modal-
ities, the definitions above provided in the review of these concepts were used.
Also used were the more operational guidelines as follows. An article was coded
“Propaganda” only if it defended a clear position and admitted no doubts or the

Genetically Modified Organisms

possibility of conciliation. Only in cases when at the end of the reading it was
obvious that the author was either pro or against Genetic Modification was the
article coded as Propaganda. An article was coded as “Propagation”, instead,
when the author explicitly presented a way of conciliating positions. The concil-
iation could be envisaged as already occurring or as postponed to the future, but
the idea that the different positions could be accommodated in an overarching
outcome had to be present. Finally, articles that brought contrasting positions to
the reader, but made no attempt whatsoever at choosing or conciliating them –
presenting only a listing of the different possibilities—were coded Diffusion. Also
coded was the general orientation of the article—it could be favourable, unfavour-
able or assume no clear position.

RESULTS

The total number of articles collected was 239; about 9% (n = 21) were published
in the weekly papers, and the rest (around 91%) in the daily press. Journalists
were the authors of 91.6% of the examined articles. Only about 5% of the articles
were written by researchers or scientists. During the three years studied only one
letter from a reader was published. There were also notoriously few interventions
from the NGOs, as well as from politicians. It is thus evident that the issue of
Genetic Modification was not highly visible in the Portuguese press during these
years.

In what concerns the general tone of these articles mostly authored by profes-
sional journalists, the majority are not clearly either pro or against GMOs, and
the proportion of these does not vary along the years under study. There was
however a tendency for the articles with a favourable orientation to augment
( ( X

(233,4) = 8.2, p < .08) from 1999 to 2001. In what concerns the communicative modalities, diffusion is the most common

one, which was to be expected, since all the newspapers belong to the generalist
Press, and the majority of articles are authored by journalists. Propagation was
present in only 8 articles and Propaganda in less then 10% of the articles.

On the whole, these results show how incipient the debate on GMOs was in
our country during these years—neither scientists, nor people involved in govern-
ing the country were assiduous in the pages of the five more important papers.

Table 1. Orientation towards the GMOs in the daily press: Frequency and residuals, by year

1999 2000 2001 Total

Favorable 9 ( −) 12 (=) 17 (+) 38
Unfavorable 25 (=) 27 (=) 16 (=) 68
No clear position 52 (=) 51 (=) 30 (=) 133

Paula Castro and Isabel Gomes

Genetic Modification was an issue reported mainly by journalists, who alone
remained the principal responsible for influencing what the Portuguese public was
to think about GMOs. This is, obviously, an added reason for inspecting in detail
the articles published. For if diffusion implies that a diversified audience is being
sought, and several sides of the issues are discussed in order for the reader to
make his/her own decisions, it is important to try to find the fine contents of the
articles, through a joint examination of themata, anchoring categories and com-
municative modalities.

This was attempted with an

homals

, that was performed entering the themata
variables as the sole active ones, a procedure that allows for these to be the sole
responsible for the configuration of the space defined through the co-occurrences
matrix. The remaining variables were afterwards projected over this space as
illustrative variables. The input matrix used for the

homals

procedure is presented
in Table 2.

The

homals

yielded two first axes responsible for 42% of the inertia (eigenvalue
for the 1st dimension = .2372; eigenvalue for the 2nd dimension = .1840). The
corresponding discrimination measures are presented on Table 3.

As stated, the anchoring categories were afterwards projected on the space
defined by the first two axes, as illustrative variables. From the 11 original anchor-
ing categories, only the six with higher frequencies were projected. The same
procedure was followed for the communicative modalities, the global positioning
of the articles and the year when they were published. The projection of the first
two dimensions, with the active variables defining the space (the themata) and the
projected variables is presented in Figure 1.

The first quadrant shows that the issues of Illness, Ignorance, Problems
and the Safety and Risk issues involved in Genetic Modification are often jointly
developed. In this quadrant we can find the only pair that has the two terms that

Table 2. Input Matrix for the Homals

1 2

Benefits/problems 29 50
Nature/culture 10 49
Knowledge/ignorance 15 105
Public/private 21 55
Health/disease 33 35
Risky/safe 39 18
Global/local 20 6
Past/present 18 26

Note. For every pair, the first term was ascribed the number 1, and the second the number
2. Table 2 thus shows that 29 articles dealt with the benefits of GMOs, and 50 articles
treated the problems these can bring. From the 13 original themata, only the eight with
higher frequencies were used for this analysis.

Genetically Modified Organisms

compose it un-separated—the pair risk/safety. This is a pair that is at the very
heart of this discussion, condensing a rather relevant set of issues, and we can see
that the two terms are mobilised together, that is, when an article speaks of risks,
it also thematizes safety.

Table 3. Discrimination measures, by variable, by dimension

Dimension 1 Dimension 2

Benefíts/problems .381 .333
Nature/culture .107 .2

Knowledge/Ignorance .297 .042
Public/Private .131 .093
Health/Disease .483 .197
Risky/Safe .071 .146
Global/local .135 .361
Past/Present .293 .088

Figure 1 Projection of the first two dimensions yielded by the homals.

Paula Castro and Isabel Gomes

The second quadrant shows that discussions about Health also mention the
Benefits of genetic modification, for the Present, and the Public interest of the
technique. In other words, when the GMOs are linked to the domain of health,
they are located in a semantic space where the ideas of public interest for the
present are also invoked. In what concerns the third quadrant, it jointly displays
the terms Past, Natural and Local, thus organising a space opposed to that of
the fourth quadrant, where genetic modification is discussed as having to do
with Private interests and Globalization and as pertaining to the sphere of the
Cultural.

In sum, the first two quadrants are dominated by the Red discussion, mobilis-
ing the oppositions health/disease, risk/safety, benefits/problems, past/present.
The third and fourth quadrants, in turn, are dominated by issues that pertain to
the Green discussion, mobilising the oppositions natural/cultural, past/present
and global/local.

These conclusions are strengthened when the illustrative variables are exam-
ined. Occupying a central position in the Red discussion we find the anchoring
categories of Progress, Disease and Science. This means that in the

Red

context
the Genetic Modification is compared to other scientific discoveries, its effects are
compared to other illnesses ( plagues, Aids, for instance) of the past, and the
innovation they constitute is described as similar to other progresses and revolu-
tions of the past. It is also to be noticed that it is in the context of this discussion
that we find the articles with a favourable tone.

In turn, occupying a central position in the Green discussion, we find the
anchoring categories of Agriculture and Ideology. This means that in this context
the GMOs are compared to other past agricultural interventions over nature (like
hybrid corn), and to disaster scenarios, such as “brave new world” or “Pandora’s
box” or “eugenics”. Further indicators of the polemic tone of this discussion are
the presence of the Private term—indicating mentions to the interest of private
corporations—, the fact that Propaganda appears here, and the fact that the
clearly non-favourable articles are also located within this space.

Also worth noticing is the fact that from 1999 to 2001 the discussion has moved
along the first dimension, that is, away from problems and diseases, and to the
semantic space of health and benefits.

DISCUSSION

One aim of this paper was to link the recent themata developments in social
representations theory with the classical process involved in the construction of
social representations—anchoring—and with the communicative modalities that
are part of the theory since its inception. Another was to see how some general
trends of the Portuguese debate about biotechnology related to the main features
of the European wide one.

Genetically Modified Organisms

Studying the relations between the themata and anchoring seemed particularly
interesting in the field of genetic modification, since the terminology in this very
new field is still being moulded. And, as Moscovici (1984a) has remarked, as a
consequence of anchoring, when a new event must be understood its integration
is accomplished by moulding it in such a way that it appears continuous with
existing ideas (see Joffe, 2003). So, in sum, for a new issue, this type of analysis
would permit us to examine how the central meaning pairs—themata—would
articulate with the devices that carry the new into the very land of the old—the
anchoring categories—, transforming both in the process.

In relation to the comparative objective, it can be stated that the GMO debate
did not exactly set the Portuguese society on fire during these three years, con-
tinuing as tepid as before. Neither producers and mediators of science, nor the non
specialized public, invested much energy in the Press— during these three years
less than 10% of the 239 articles examined were authored by other people than
professional journalists.

As a society, we seem to have remained in a pre- symbolic coping state where
biotechnology is concerned, since a shared code for communicating and thinking
about this particular innovation, and the “calibration of minds” that people in
groups achieve through discourse ( Wagner, 1998) is still underdeveloped.

The examination of the relations between themata and anchoring yielded two
general semantic spaces. A first one structured by the oppositions of health and
disease, of risk and safety, of the benefits and the problems of Genetic Modifica-
tion and of present and past times and carried by the categories of science,
progress, contamination and illness. The second space, in turn, organised around
the opposition of culture and nature, of the local and the global and of the past
and the present, is resonant of the Green discussion, and presents a less favourable
connotation, since Propaganda is located here and the anchoring categories of
ideology and agriculture are central.

In general these results are in line with other studies around Europe (Bauer,
2002). But they also allow for some more speculation about the future. For
instance, it can be argued that, carried into the gravitational area of such potently
positive categories as Progress and Science, the applications of genetic modifica-
tion to the health area face the prospect of a more positive future than the Green
area. In this sense, the representational pattern around the health domain illus-
trates how the production of “domesticated worlds” ( Wagner, 1998) happens
through the extending of a net of anchoring categories over new domains, a net
that captures “brute facts” and renders them domesticated through linking them
to old meanings.

This same pattern seems also to corroborate the idea that in the concrete
depictions in the press of the controversial opinions about a subject, even when
all sides are given voice, the anchoring categories used for describing them are
different. This difference, in turn, is indeed a subtle way of giving partial renderings—
a partiality visible only through the joint analysis of several articles published

Paula Castro and Isabel Gomes

during a period of time. Since diffusion offers no general obvious integrative
frame, it is a seemingly innocuous, but very effective way of introducing new
themes and concerns into the flux of conversation. It is thus essential to develop
a better understanding of the oppositions and comparisons it mobilises as well as
finer-grain analyses of how these are patterned together and in time, a task this
paper could not do.

Finally, to be remarked is the fact that it is only in connection with the agri-
food polemic that the crucial pair nature/culture is to be found. It cannot be
overlooked that this is one of the most central oppositional pairs in humanity’s
history (Latour, 1994; Moscovici, 2001). That this is more characteristic of the
Green context is an indicator both of a more dichotomised discussion and of
more resistance in this area than in the Red domain, more shielded from this
crucial opposition, which also played a role in the nuclear energy controversies.
Manipulation in the health area is presented as having to do with progress, re-
volution and science, not with culture

versus

nature, or with the upsetting of nature’s
balance or of nature’s “natural” way of working. It is through this path more
easily striped of moral content and less resistance is to be expected.

If it is when plants are discussed that the nature/culture problematic emerges,
not when health-care issues are discussed, this may be because what happens in
hospitals, or in the health-care area in general, is being very successfully defined
in our society as unconnected to the realm of the natural. And thus the questions
of moral appropriateness are perhaps for many people immediately cut short by
concerns of the type “what if I, one day, need a cloned liver?”. Nowadays

Human
nature

is an expression that more easily evokes the “human psychological condi-
tion” than the human belongingness to the realm of the natural. Or put another
way, the health care area is very illustrative of how the individual and the indi-
vidual’s right to be re-paired is a pervasive value.

On the contrary, what happens in both our plates and in our soil is still more
clearly defined as belonging to the realm of the natural. We could even say that
soil, agricultural land, trees, vegetables, cereals, have been successfully framed in
the last years as the last preserve of “naturalness” we have left, and should not
spoil or contaminate. During the last three decades Green nature has had Green-
peace (and other environmentalist associations) to “speak for it” and against
Genetic Modification (see Levidow, 2002), and the release of GMOs into nature
was successfully framed as something morally reproachable, as controversial and
as a form of tinkering with “natural” nature. Humanity does not seem to have a
Greenpeace to act as a spokesperson—but, anyway, who would want health care
to conform to the limits of “natural” nature, whatever that is?

As Van der Daele (1993) has remarked, in our society the attempt to make
Nature inviolable “is bound to run up against interests and rights which are also
deemed

prima facie

to be legitimate in our society— especially the rights to health
and self-determination. Medicine in particular has legitimized higher and higher
levels of technicization of the human body, making the “unthinkable” thinkable:

Genetically Modified Organisms

for instance, artificial hearts or the transplanting of animal organs into human
beings. ( . . . ) The healthy with their call for naturalness are in no position to deny
the sick the use of such technologies. The use of technology is becoming a part
of the right to health.” (pg. 163). As a consequence, Red applications are evicted
from the nature/culture dichotomy and thus face a future more shielded from
reservations founded in certain central values.

And so, it seems that many of us are prepared to trade gloriously shiny toma-
toes and apples for small, wrinkled, pesticide-free, non-GM ones—in fact, wish to
do so. But who, when the time comes, will not succumb to the temptation to trade
a wrinkled and afflicted body for a glorious new one, like the character in Kure-
ishi’s story?

Paula Castro
Departamento de Psicologia Social
Instituto Superior de Ciências do Trabalho e da Empresa,
Av. das Forças Armadas,
1649-026 Lisboa
Portugal
Paula.Castro@iscte.pt

NOTES

This is hardly surprising, of course, since BT Maize and modified soybeans date from
1996 and Dolly was introduced to the public in 1997.

Perhaps this is not surprising, if we consider that it was only in 1999 that the
Environmental NGOs joined in a Platform against GM food, and the first study about
GMOs was published. It adds that the first Parliamentary discussion of a project of law
about GMOs only took place in 2000 (see Jesuíno et al., 2001).

The project for which the manual was first developed had the general coordination of
Celso de Sá, to whom the pioneer definition of several of the categories is owned.

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Culture & Psychology

2016, Vol. 22(1) 65–79

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DOI: 10.1177/1354067X15621478

cap.sagepub.com

Article

The impact of Islam
and the public and
political portrayals of
Islam on child-rearing
practices—Discursive
analyses of parental
accounts among Muslims
living in Denmark

Nina T Dalgaard
University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Abstract

With the rise of Islamist terrorist attacks in the US and Europe the impact of Islam on

child-rearing practices has become a matter of public attention and debate. Within the

political discourse in the Western world and in the mass media, Muslims are often being

portrayed negatively. Research has documented how Muslims living in the West are

adversely affected by the negative portrayals of Islam associated with the War on Terror.

The aim of the present study was to explore the impact of Islam on child-rearing

practices and parental identity formation among self-identified Muslims in Denmark.

Using a discursive approach to analyzing interviews with parents in 29 Middle Eastern

refugee families, six rhetorical strategies were identified: (1) minimizing differences,

(2) highlighting compatibility, (3) emphasizing positive aspects of Islam, (4) countering

common prejudice, (5) actively distancing oneself from terrorists/extremists, and

(6) separating Islam as a religion from cultural traditions. It is argued that the global

as well as national political discourse post 9/11 is reflected in all of the six rhetorical

strategies. Whether parents position themselves as having a high or low bicultural

identity or a Muslim parental identity, their positioning involves drawing on the

discursive resources from the mass media, the global and national political and public

discourse. Furthermore, it is argued that all rhetorical strategies can be seen as

attempts to counter the hurt associated with the negative portrayal of Islam.

Corresponding author:

Nina T Dalgaard, Department of Psychology, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark.

Email: nina.dalgaard@psy.ku.dk

http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1177%2F1354067X15621478&domain=pdf&date_stamp=2016-02-20

Keywords

Islam, child-rearing practices, discursive analyses, political discourse

Introduction

In the wake of the increased incidence of Islamist extremist terrorist attacks in
Europe and in the US, an increased public awareness of the impact of Islam on
child-rearing practices has arisen. Within the public debate and the mass media,
Muslims are often being portrayed very negatively (Jacobsen, 2013, 2015;
Jacobsen, Jensen, Vitus, & Weibel, 2012; Schmidt, 2004). Is Islam as a religion
the reason for the increased terror threat? Are the parents to blame when ordinary
young people decide to leave the West to join Islamist terrorist groups such as ISIS
or Al-Qaeda? Are all Muslim parents extremists? Or are increased racism, preju-
dice, and negative perception and portrayal of Islam the root cause of the radic-
alization of Islamic youth? These are the central questions asked within the public
debate in both Northern America and Europe.

Within the Danish context the Danish Newspaper Jyllands-Posten further inten-
sified the global political discourse related to the War on Terror after the publica-
tion of the cartoons portraying the Prophet Muhammad in 2005. The publication
of these led to an escalating series of events both nationally and internationally
which sparked off a political and public debate in Denmark which may be
described as vicious at times (Nielsen, 2011). Fear, mutual paranoia, and suspicion
are characteristics of the public discourse within the Danish context, whether it
takes place between politicians or laymen using social media. Furthermore, it may
be argued that the articulation of Islam in Danish political debates is constructing a
culturalistic relational antagonism in which the Danish collective identity ‘‘us’’ is
constructed through the delimitation of the Muslim ‘‘them’’ (Jacobsen, 2015). This
development may be seen as a larger rhetorical change within the European pol-
itical discourse, in which Islam has become a major political issue associated with
questions of security and terrorism. Yılmaz (2012) argues that this development
should be seen as a result of a hegemonic shift, in which the far-right populist
parties have succeeded in moving immigration to the center of political discourse
by presenting immigration and Islam as a cultural threat to the future of European
nations. As part of this political discourse second-generation immigrants are often
portrayed as a major threat to the Danish society, and parents of maladjusted
second-generation immigrants are often portrayed as either culprits or simply
incompetent (Dalsbæk, 2010; Khader, 2012).

This paper is an attempt to explore Muslim parental accounts of the impact of
Islam on their child-rearing practices within this discourse and to analyze how
global and national political discourse is reflected within Muslim parental identity
formation.

66 Culture & Psychology 22(1)

Background

Post 9/11 a number of studies have documented the negative effects of the
War on Terror on Muslim communities in North America and in Europe
(Abbas, 2005; Bayoumi, 2008; Ewing, 2008; Rousseau, Ferradji, Mekki-Berrada,
& Jamil, 2013). More specifically, a number of studies have explored how
Muslim children and youth in the West are negatively affected by the War on
Terror, the media representations of Islam, and by contextual characteristics of
their everyday ecology (Oppedal & Røysamb, 2007; Rousseau & Jamil, 2010; Sirin
& Fine, 2007).

Balsano and Sirin (2007) argue that discrimination in terms of religious, ethnic,
and physical profiling experienced by Muslim youth in the West seems to be
perceived by the general public as an acceptable ‘‘collateral damage’’ of the War
on Terror. The authors argue that these acts of discrimination are too often left
unchallenged and points to the association between unfavorable social and devel-
opmental outcomes and discrimination. Rousseau, Hassan, Moreau, and Thombs
(2011) explored the association between psychological distress and perceived dis-
crimination in newly arrived immigrants before and after September 11, 2001 and
found an increase in perception of discrimination and psychological distress among
Arab Muslim recent immigrant communities after 9/11.

In a study of the meaning systems evoked around 9/11 in two Pakistani com-
munities in Canada and Pakistan, Rousseau and Jamil (2008) found that regardless
of location, Pakistanis’ favor a conspiracy scenario which protects the Muslim
community from the responsibility of the 9/11 events. The study documents how
respondents refer to an argumentation process based on ‘‘proofs’’ thus mirroring
the political rhetoric used by the US government to justify the military interven-
tions in Iraq. The study shows how the subjective meaning of events such as 9/11
are mediated by cultural identity and global politics and how the perception of self
versus other (e.g. Pakistanis locally and Muslims globally versus America and the
West more generally) may lead to an internalization of a negative self-image within
minority groups.

In summary, various studies point to the association between global political
discourse post 9/11 including the negative portrayal of Islam within the mass media
and negative mental health characteristics, cultural identity, and self-image within
Muslim communities in the West.

Aim

The aim of this article is to explore Muslim parental accounts of the impact of
Islam on their child-rearing practices within the Danish context and to analyze how
global and national political discourse is reflected within Muslim parental identity
formation.

Dalgaard 67

Method

Research process

Interviews were undertaken with 29 refugee families from the Middle East with
school-aged children. The sample consists of 25 two-parent families and four
single-mother families. Countries of origin included: Iraq, Iran, Lebanon,
Palestine, Syria, and Afghanistan. The parents in these families all identified them-
selves as Muslim. The participants were recruited for the purpose of another study
using a nonprobabilistic sampling strategy in collaboration with five different
psychiatric treatments centers. At least one of the parents in all families was
referred for treatment of posttraumatic symptoms. The families all had at least
temporary residency status in Denmark. The interviews were carried out in the
participants’ native languages: Arabic or Farsi by the first author and a profes-
sional interpreter, except for three families who preferred to speak in Danish or
English without the presence of an interpreter. The interviews took place in the
family home or at the treatment center depending on the participants’ wishes. The
vast majority of interviews were conducted with both parents present, but in nine
cases only one parent was able to participate in the qualitative interview, this
includes the single-mother families. Of the five families where only one parent
was present for the interview, three participating parents were fathers and two
were mothers. The interviews took place between July 2013 and December 2014
and followed a semischeduled protocol structured around topic areas related to
parenting, family functioning, and the developmental history of one of their chil-
dren. Interviews lasted between 1 and 2 h. All interviews were transcribed in
Danish. For the purpose of this article, selected quotes were translated into
English by the author.

Analytical strategy

The approach to discursive analyses is inspired by discourse analysis in social
psychology (Potter & Wetherell, 1987). Inherent in this approach is the notion of
discourse as a form of social action and thus the focus within the present study is
on the way in which participants use discursive resources such as narratives, meta-
phors, and categories and with what effects. A basic assumption is that people use
language to achieve certain interpersonal goals within specific interactional con-
texts (Georgaca & Avdi, 2012). In addition to this, the approach assumes that
discourse is always situated and thus places emphasis on the sequential organiza-
tion of discourse, meaning that utterances must be understood in relation to what
precedes and follows them. Furthermore, the approach assumes that discourse is
institutionally situated, may be shaped and reshaped by local norms, and that
discourse is rhetorically situated meaning that it can be fashioned to resist attempts
to undermine or counter it. Third, the approach is characterized by a dual notion,
in which discourse is seen as both constructed and constructive, meaning that
discourse is both built from various resources and at the same time a way of

68 Culture & Psychology 22(1)

constructing versions of the world (McMullen, 2011; Potter, 2003). Finally, the ana-
lytical approach is based on the conceptualization of discourses as being wrapped up
with power as discourses make certain versions of reality and personhood available
while marginalizing alternative knowledge (Georgaca & Avdi, 2012).

In terms of epistemology this study assumes a relativist view, in which it is
assumed that there are no objective grounds on which the truths of claims can
be proven and that the value of knowledge should be evaluated based on other
criteria such as applicability, usefulness, and clarity (Nielsen, 2007; Potter, 1996).

Procedure

The first round of coding consisted of reading though all 29 interviews in their
entire length in an undirected fashion. During the second round of coding, the
incidents in which the parents talked about religion either spontaneously or in
response to the interviewer’s questions were selected, and initial incident-
by-incident descriptive codes were developed. The codes were based on both the-
matic content and discourse analytical concepts such as positioning of self and
others. During the third round of coding, the descriptive codes were combined
and organized, which led to the emergence of six rhetorical strategies aimed at
defining the participants’ parental identity and the impact of Islam on their
child-rearing practice.

Throughout the coding process reflections regarding the impact of the interview
context were taken into consideration. The fact that the initial contact between the
interviewees and the researcher was facilitated by the psychiatric treatment centers,
and that the researcher is ethnically Danish clearly influenced the interview mater-
ial. As will be evident in the ‘‘Analysis’’ section many of the parents present with
an almost apologetic approach to discussing Islam, and this may be due to their
perception of the researcher as a representative of the secular Danish norms and
society.

Analysis

Minimizing differences

A number of parents use a rhetorical strategy in which differences between Muslims
and Majority Danes are thoroughly downplayed, thus actively countering the pol-
itical discourse in which the notion of ‘‘Danishness’’ is constructed through the
delimitation of Muslims (Jacobsen, 2015). These parents spontaneously say
things like:

Mother: we are actually not that different from the way in which things are done here in

Denmark, there are some things that are important to me, for instance that the family

sticks together, the way I do with my siblings . . . a very important aspect is that the

family sticks together. There are certain traditions and celebrations that we keep,

Dalgaard 69

otherwise we do the same things that one does in Danish families. (Excerpt from

Interview with Family 4)

Furthermore, these parents often try to counter the view of Islam as being an
obstacle to being Danish and to being loyal citizens in Denmark:

Mother: . . . in the Koran it says that one should educate oneself, that one should respect

the elderly and that one should respect other human beings . . . yes all these things it says

in the Koran, and is really the same in Denmark and with the Danes, some of them have

exactly the same take on things as we do in Islam, especially all the good elements.

(Excerpt from Interview with Family 10)

The parents who use this strategy present Islam as just one aspect of their cultural
background. They portray themselves as not that different from ethnically Danish
parents, and they emphasize similarities that are exclusively positive in order to
minimize potential resistance. The parents employing this strategy position
themselves as moderate bicultural. They do not emphasize either of their cultural
identities, and other aspects of their parental identity are portrayed as equally
important or more important than the practice of Islam.

Highlighting compatibility

Another strategy used by Muslim parents is to emphasize how the practice of Islam
is fully compatible with being part of mainstream Danish culture and how the two
complement each other. Parents using this strategy position themselves as high
bicultural and place emphasis on the universality of wanting what is best for
one’s children, while stressing how this is an intrinsic part of being Muslim:

Interviewer: are there things from your own cultural background that you think are

important to pass on to your children?

Father: yes

Mother: yes of cause

Father: the traditions that we have; respecting others. We were born Muslim and we

were born Shia, so we teach them about religion, the way our parents taught us, so we

pass that on in a non-coercive manner, we don’t force it upon them, we tell them about it,

and then they accept this, and then they can capture the good things from both the Danish

and our culture

Mother: yes well, we teach them about how it is inherent in our culture to be respectful

towards others and that one should be polite towards others and about religion, we talk a

lot about that

Father: that things have to be right, that one must not cheat or behave badly. (Excerpt

from Interview with Family 11)

70 Culture & Psychology 22(1)

Thus, the parents who use this strategy seem to try to counter any resistance by
acknowledging differences but highlighting how all religions and cultures have both
positive and negative characteristics. These parents spend a lot of discursive
resources on positioning themselves as flexible, which could be seen as a subtle
response to the negative media portrayals of Muslims parents as being rigid.
Furthermore, it could be seen as a result of the interview context. Within the
dialog between the researcher and the parents it often appears as if the parents are
trying to convince the researcher of the universality of their personal perception of
Islam and of their cultural heritage. This can be seen in the latter excerpt in which the
father presents the notion of both Danish and Iraqi culture as static entities.
This notion is further strengthened when the mother says that being respectful
‘‘is inherent’’ in ‘‘our culture.’’ Rhetorically the static notion of culture seems to
serve the purpose of eliminating the credibility of alternative versions of Islam.

Emphasizing positive aspects of Islam

Emphasizing positive aspects of Islam is a very common rhetorical strategy.
This strategy involves abstaining from making comparisons and ignoring potential
similarities between Islam and mainstream Danish culture including Christianity.
Instead family cohesion, helping the poor, and respect for the elderly are high-
lighted as the key elements within the portrayal of Islam. These parents typically
position themselves as having a strong Muslim identity:

Mother: . . . we celebrate Eid after the Ramadan, it is important to me, that they under-

stand why we celebrate this, so that they can carry on with the tradition, when they

become adults, those are the kinds of things that I would like to pass on

Interviewer: so traditions and religion?

Mother: Well, yes in an age-appropriate manner, right now they aren’t old enough to

pray 5 times a day or to celebrate the Ramadan (fasting), but that will happen eventu-

ally . . . and then there is the way in which one speaks to one another, that one shouldn’t

say bad things to each other, and that one shouldn’t curse and that one should be polite,

those kinds of things I teach them from the start

Interviewer: so respecting other human beings?

Mother: yes respect for others especially old people, and that one should care for the

elderly. We have an elderly neighbor, and always when my son meets him, then he helps

him with carrying his bags, he helps the elderly man I mean, and when we have a cele-

bration, and they (children) are wearing their finest clothes, then they have to go and say

hello to him, because that is what one does when there is a celebration . . . (Excerpt from

Interview with Family 9)

Within the group of parents using this strategy, there are a few parents who expli-
citly position themselves as victims of racism and prejudice. One father reports

Dalgaard 71

feeling like a ‘‘second-degree’’ human being in Denmark and he is very angry with
the Danish authorities due to the fact that he and his children still haven’t obtained
Danish citizenship. This father was originally a medical doctor, and the Danish
Health authorities have not granted him permission to practice medicine in
Denmark, which he feels is very humiliating. In this case, it can be seen how the
father’s self-perception seems to be shaped by national politics. His parental iden-
tity is furthermore characterized by a rigid perception of Islam. Throughout the
interview this father only emphasizes positive aspects of Islam, and thus his pos-
itioning of himself as a Muslim father seems to serve the purpose of countering
what he perceives as the political and public discursive positioning of him as a weak
and incompetent parent unable to provide for his children.

What the parents using this strategy have in common is that their accounts lack
any kind of critical reflection on Islam and Islamic child rearing. This exclusively
positive portrayal of Islam seems to serve the rhetorical purpose of protecting a
strong (Muslim) parental identity, which is reflected in the following excerpt:

Interviewer: so what are your dreams for the future here in

Denmark?

Father: to take care of our children properly and raise then so they don’t need anything

and that they will get an academic education and be very good at what they do, and that

they are happy so that I can show the Danes that my children are an asset. (Excerpt from

Interview with family 15)

In the excerpt it can be seen how the father uses an identity distinction between the
‘‘Danes’’ and himself as a Muslim, which mirrors the rhetoric within the Danish
political debate (Jacobsen, 2015). Furthermore, it is interesting to note how he
states that he wants his children to do well, not because it brings him satisfaction
in itself, but because it would be away of proving his own worth to ‘‘the Danes.’’

Countering common prejudice

One of the strategies in which the influence of the negative representations of
Islam within the media and public discourse is most striking is the one in which
parents actively and explicitly try to counter common prejudice. As can be seen in
the following excerpt, the mother responds to the assumed prejudice of the
interviewer, by emphasizing that even though she defines herself as Muslim, this
doesn’t mean that she is strict or that she practices rigid behavior control over her
children. She even says to the interviewer ‘‘you mustn’t think,’’ reacting to her own
perception of what the interviewer might think, without the interviewer having said
anything:

Interviewer: are there things from your culture of origin, I mean like values, and trad-

itions and things like that, that are important for you to pass on to your children?

72 Culture & Psychology 22(1)

Mother: well yes, I mean we are Muslims and things like that, I am not very strict like

that or it is not like they are not allowed to do things . . .

Interviewer: so religion is important to you?

Mother: well yes, it is okay like that, I try to raise them in a good way like teach them

what our religion tells us, but I am not very strict as a mother, I mean you mustn’t

think . . .

Interviewer: uhmm yes, so are they allowed to take part in leisure time activities and

things like that?

Mother: yes yes they go on camps and school trips (. . .). (Excerpt from Interview with

Family 3)

This reaction on the part of the parents should be seen within the context of the
interview. The author/interviewer is ethnically Danish and thus the interview set-
ting becomes a context in which the global and national political discourse is both
constructed and reconstructed, as the parents try to position their parental identity
by both rejecting and at the same time acknowledging the existence of and even
drawing on the national and political discourse.

Father: If we are afraid to let the kids grow up in Denmark? Well, Yes, there are some

worries, off course, to let the kids grow up here, had we been in our home country, things

would have happened automatically with regard to how one looks up to one’s parents,

how one respects one’s parents and the elderly, these things are very different where we

come from. I am not saying that one cannot respect one’s parents in Denmark, but it says

in the Quran, how you are supposed to act with respect to your parents, and that is a part

of how you are raised, and in Iraq this happens automatically, but here we are lacking

that part . . . oh I hope I am not misunderstood, it is not my intention to say anything bad

about Denmark, it is a very civilized country, and it is developed in a way so there is a

basic respects for human beings and for human rights and I have a deep respect for that,

but I think, relations between each other, the emotional stuff, how we do things are

different, and with regard to that we do get worried about the children and we feel a

need to protect them’’

Extract from interview with respondent family 23

As can be seen from the last excerpt the father feels the need to emphasize his
secular worldview and his respect for human rights, which may be seen as a rhet-
orical strategy targeted at refuting nonverbalized prejudice in the interviewer. This
father is a very devout Muslim, who states that religion is the most important
aspect of his child-rearing philosophy. Immediately after this he also states that
he has seven children, and that ‘‘the police have never been to our house’’, meaning
that he has managed to keep his children out of any kind of trouble. This statement
can be seen as a direct reflection of the public and political debate in Denmark,

Dalgaard 73

in which the overrepresentation of ethnically minority youth within criminal stat-
istics is often pointed out by proponents of stricter laws on immigration.
Rhetorically the father highlights how his religious beliefs are not an obstacle to
responsible parenting, directly countering claims made by the political right-wing
in Denmark (Yılmaz, 2012).

Actively distancing oneself from terrorists/extremist

All interviews were carried out before the Charlie Hebdo shooting in Paris and the
February 2015 shootings in Copenhagen. However, some parents already use a
strategy of distancing oneself from jihadist extremists and from terror and violence
committed by Islamist extremists. The influence of the global political discourse is
easily seen when parents use this strategy. These parents emphasize how the
extremists are abusing and misinterpreting Islam:

Interviewer: are there things that worry you regarding your children’s future in

Denmark?

Mother: yeah I am really worried about the jihadist Islamist movements, they are

growing very strong here in Denmark, I am very afraid of them and I worry that

these Islamist extremist movements will influence the children. They are criminals, and

they behave in the most inhumane ways. Recently they (her children) showed me a video

of a young Christian girl, who was captured by the Jihadist movement in Syria, and they

tortured her . . . and then they shot her afterwards (becomes emotional) and at the same

time they were shouting ‘‘God is great’’, and I don’t understand that, how can God accept

things like that?

Interviewer: uhmm that is frightening

Mother: well but those people from the Jihadist movement they feel righteous, they feel

as if they have God on their side, and that others are infidels who have to be elim-

inated . . .. And I don’t believe that these things are accepted within Islam, I don’t believe

that God will love them. No. Islam is nothing like that. (Excerpt from Interview with

family 10)

Given the setting of the interviews (often the family home) it seems paradoxical and
almost absurd that parents in the study feel the need to specify their lack of hos-
tility toward the West and their disdain for terrorist attacks, but this was, however,
the case within a few families, where parents spontaneously mentioned Islamist
groups as something they are both afraid of and opposed to.

Separating Islam as a religion from cultural traditions

The last strategy identified in the study is the one in which Muslim parents seem to
mirror the political discourse within the Danish parliament. These parents position
themselves as moderate Muslims and emphasize how many practices are cultural

74 Culture & Psychology 22(1)

traditions rather than intrinsic aspects of Islam in a theological sense. These par-
ents furthermore position themselves as low bicultural favoring the Danish
national identity, and they are actively distancing themselves from anyone who
might practice religion in a way that may challenge the Danish national identity:

(. . .)a lot of Muslims don’t know the difference between tradition and the Koran, but

tradition is one thing, and the Koran is another, and it is like they confuse one thing for

the other. (Excerpt from Interview with F25)

As can be seen the rhetorical purpose of this extract is dual. The mother tries to
defend Islam by separating Islam from its traditional practice, but at the very same
time she draws upon the discursive identity distinction in which being Muslim is
delimitated from being Danish. The same phenomenon can be seen in the following
excerpt in which a father describes traditional Muslim parenting practices as a
‘‘culture of coersion’’:

When I think about refugees from the Middle East, and I am thinking those with a

Muslim background, then I consider their religious background to be an obstacle, based

on my own experiences that I have with meeting fellow Iraqi refugees who have come to

this country, you know, I lived in a refugee camp for 1,5 year, and I think that it is a very

small percentage of them who can really feel the effects of what they have been through

and of torture that they have been subjected to. I believe that most of the problems

experienced by these families are caused by cultural barriers, because I think that par-

ents, our parents or at least fathers they try to teach their children to become a copy of

themselves. That is how they want it, and it is like parents expect their children to

preserve these barriers, for instance with regard to sexuality even when they are living

in Denmark, but here relations between men and women are more open. So when parents

have this background from their country of origin it becomes highly problematic for the

children, so that’s why kindergarten is such a good thing, because when children go

to kindergarten they can feel that things are more free and open, they can play

freely and decide for themselves, but then when he or she comes home, then it is the

family who decide everything, even what kind of clothes you wear, even the color, it is the

parents who decide everything, and that doesn’t work. So this culture of coercion, which

our parents represented with regard to religion, they pass that on, and I think that has a

very negative impact on the children. Because they are trying to force the children to

be the same way they themselves were brought up to be’’. (Excerpt from Interview

with F19)

Parents using this strategy position themselves as well-integrated within Danish
society, and it is clear that their rhetorical strategy draws upon discursive resources
from the political discourse and debate in Denmark. These parents’ discourse
seems to reflect the positive attitude toward multiculturalism, which traditionally
is associated with the center-left and left-wing parties within the Danish Parliament
(Schumacher & van Kersbergen, 2014). However, interestingly enough they are

Dalgaard 75

also reflecting the negative cultural framing of integration, which is associated with
the populist right-wing parties (Yılmaz, 2012).

Discussion

As can be seen from the analysis, both the national and the global political
discourse post 9/11 are reflected in all of the six rhetorical strategies. Whether
parents position themselves as having a high or low bicultural or a Muslim paren-
tal identity, their positioning involves drawing on already existing discursive
resources.

Interestingly, all of the parental rhetorical strategies can also be seen as attempts
to counter the feelings of hurt associated with the negative portrayals of Islam.
Whether the disclaim is done by actively trying to counter common prejudice, by
emphasizing the positive aspects of Islam, by emphasizing similarities and com-
patibility, by distancing oneself from terrorists, or by using the rhetoric of the
Danish left-wing parties and thus separating Islam as a religion from cultural
traditions, the rhetorical strategies directly or indirectly serve the purpose of dis-
claiming negative portrayals of Islam. This finding confirms the notion of collateral
damage (Balsano & Sirin, 2007) and sheds light on the processes by which parents
self-identified as Muslim may position themselves in response to this. Interestingly,
a number of the parental rhetorical strategies not only counter but also reproduce
the political discourse in which being Muslim and being Danish are portrayed as
mutually exclusive categories.

From a developmental psychological perspective, these findings have important
implications on several levels. At a societal level the findings demonstrate the influ-
ence of political discourse on parental identity formation, which may warrant
political action toward the promotion of less stereotypical portrayals of Islam
within the public and political discourse.

At a family or an individual level the findings have implications for professionals
working with families such as these. One may argue that professionals need to
pay careful attention to the influence of Islam on child rearing, as this is clearly
important to the self-perception of this group of parents. Professionals working
with this group of parents need to be aware of the hurt associated with the
public discourse regarding Islam, and this issue should be addressed openly. The
findings from the present study suggest the need for a culturally sensitive approach
in which ethnic majority professionals need to continuously reflect on how to avoid
stereotyping while at the same time paying attention to the subjective meaning
of Islam.

Within the present study the rhetorical strategies may be seen as reflecting the
interview context, in which the parents address the researcher as a representative of
his/her perception of the secular Danish norms and society. This finding may apply
to other professional relations in which the professional is a member of the major-
ity culture. In such cases the professional need to reflect on the extent to which the
dialog is influenced by this interpersonal context.

76 Culture & Psychology 22(1)

Conclusion

The present study offers insight into the process of parental identity formation and
points to the influence of both public and political debate. In the case of Muslim
parents living in the West, parental identity is highly influenced by the negative
portrayals of Islam within the mass media and the hurt associated with this. The
study documents how Muslim parents’ discourse is characterized by a duality in
which rhetorical strategies are directed at countering the negative portrayal of
Islam within the public and political discourse and at the same time end up repro-
ducing central characteristics of this discourse. The implications of these findings
are multilayered, but the perhaps most important implication is related to the
notion of collateral damage. Findings from the present study may indicate that
Muslim children in Denmark are experiencing the same hurt as Muslim children
and youth living in Canada, the US, and Norway (Britto & Amer, 2007; Oppedal &
Røysamb, 2007; Rousseau et al., 2013; Rousseau & Jamil, 2010). Further research
should address this, and school-based interventions may be appropriate in order
to counter the negative impact of media portrayals of Islam on Muslim children’s
self-perception and cultural identity development.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, author-
ship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication
of this article.

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Author biography

Nina T Dalgaard, M.Sc. in Psychology, is a PhD student in the Department of
Psychology at Copenhagen University. Her research focuses on the transgenera-
tional transmission of trauma in Middle Eastern refugee families with exile-born
children. Her main areas of interest are clinical child psychology, attachment secur-
ity, intra-family trauma communication, and the cultural embedment of childhood,
child-rearing practices, and family coping.

Dalgaard 79

Feminism & Psychology

2014, Vol. 24(4) 479–499

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P

Article

Empowered victims?
Women’s contradictory
positions in the discourse
of violence prevention

Kathryn E Frazier and
Rachel Joffe Falmagne
Clark University, MA, USA

Abstract

Violence against women is a salient outcome of systemic gender inequality across the

globe. In the US, the societal discourse of violence prevention simultaneously frames

women in positions of victimhood and of empowerment. This study investigates the

ways women draw upon these contradictory constructions in their meaning-making and

practices related to violence prevention. Twenty women aged 18–62 discussed their

experiences of risk and safety around an urban university campus in an in-depth inter-

view. Women’s selective appropriation of victim and empowerment scripts produced

multiple and tension-filled constructions of risk, in ways inflected by gender, ‘race,’ class,

sexuality, and age. Themes included the endorsement of a “safety checklist” that func-
tioned to construct women’s risk as unmanageable and victimhood as inevitable; com-

plex generational differences in women’s willingness to identify fears of gendered bodily

harm as legitimate and in the ways they did so; and the creation and maintenance of

imagined communities of safety and danger, implicitly inflected by ‘race’ and class.

Keywords

discourse, empowerment, gender, risk, tension, violence

Violence against women is one of the most salient outcomes of systemic gender
inequality across the globe. For the past three decades, violence against women in
the US has been addressed by feminist and social justice-oriented campaigns
intended to raise awareness about the prevalence of violence, and to provide
women with the physical and psychological skills to avoid and combat their poten-
tial encounters with violence (Dahlberg & Mercy, 2009; Russell, 2003).

Corresponding author:

Kathryn E Frazier, Department of Psychology, Clark University, 950 Main Street, Worcester, MA 01610, USA.

Email: kfrazier@clarku.edu

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Accompanying the material reality of violence reflected in violence statistics
(although, of course, even this indicator is skewed due to the rates at which vic-
timization goes unreported; see, e.g., Langton, Berzofsky, Krebs, & Smiley-
McDonald, 2012; Stanko, 1992) are the ideologies through which societies interpret
this “reality” and which inform individual meaning-making. It is our contention
that the ideological assumptions that underlie the societal discourse around vio-
lence prevention must be interrogated critically, as this discourse relies upon prob-
lematic constructions of gender, ‘race,’

1
class, age, and sexuality. For example,

while popular discourse assumes that victims of violence are women, in part, due
to the rates at which women are subjected to violence, this assumption also reflects
longstanding problematic ideologies that equate femininity with passivity, vulner-
ability, and inefficacy (Cahill, 2000; McCaughey, 1997). In the present study, we
critically address such problematic assumptions, as well as the tensions and contra-
dictions inherent in the discourse of violence prevention.

As many have noted, a prominent feature of the discourse of violence prevention
for women is the ways in which violence is assumed to occur only in the public
sphere (Buzawa, Buzawa, & Stark, 2012). This construction is problematic for
many reasons (e.g. it ignores experiences of domestic and intimate partner violence)
and will be revisited in the final discussion. Although we focus our present study on
violence in the public sphere, contemporary societal discourse around “stranger”
violence (i.e. in the “public sphere”) and intimate partner violence (i.e. in the “pri-
vate sphere”) are intrinsically related: both instantiate the constructions of
women’s bodies as penetrable and vulnerable and reify the dichotomy of female
victims and male perpetrators (for further discussion, see Muehlenhard & Kimes,
1999). Another pervasive feature of the prevention discourse is the assumption that
violence against women overwhelmingly takes the form of sexualized violence (e.g.
sexual harassment, sexual assault, or rape). While this, in part, reflects the rates at
which women are subjected to sexual violence, women do experience many other
types of violence. Therefore, this study explores women’s constructions of risk of
violence broadly, as it occurs in the public sphere, including the ways that sexual
violence may or may not dominate discussions, and the ways other forms of vio-
lence may or may not be ignored.

By focusing on women’s capacities for preventing and avoiding violence, the
tone of the prevention discourse is one of self-empowerment. However, by focusing
on women’s roles as potential victims, the discourse implicitly relies upon prob-
lematic assumptions equating women with weakness and vulnerability. In other
words, the positions of empowerment offered to women through the prevention
discourse are contingent upon constructions of women as potential and perpetual
victims. In this way, the discourse of prevention creates contradictory subject-
positions for women, simultaneously framing them as empowered and victimized.

While the discourse of violence prevention has received a great deal of critique
for its problematic treatment of women as perpetual victims responsible for their
own safety (e.g. Cahill, 2001; Hall, 2004; Marcus, 2002; Stanko, 1995), less work
has focused on the specific tension between women’s subject-positions of victim-
hood and of empowerment that are produced throughout this discourse. Even less

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work has addressed the ways in which women actively draw from these tension-
filled constructions in their everyday experiences. The current study aims to address
this gap in the literature by investigating the ways in which women draw upon these
contradictory constructions in their everyday meaning-making and practices
related to violence prevention in the public sphere.

The construction of women as victims

A large body of literature has pointed to the ways that the institutions and practices
related to violence prevention rely upon and operate through constructions of
women as vulnerable, frail, and in need of protection (e.g. De Welde, 2003a;
Hollander, 2001; McCaughey, 1997; Murphy, 2009; Pain, 2000; Stanko, 1995,
1997). For example, women are often advised to restrict their access to public
space at night and to walk in groups in order to minimize the risk assumed to
accompany their presence. At the same time, even as the discourse of prevention
positions women as inherently vulnerable and at risk for victimization, intersecting
discourses of ‘race,’ class, sexuality, and age construct some women as more vul-
nerable than others. This construction is concretely reflected in recruitment efforts
made by self-defense courses. Practices such as charging expensive fees for sessions,
and recruitment that targets women in higher education, work both to systematic-
ally exclude women of color and working-class women from self-defense training
and to overlook and marginalize the personal safety concerns specific to these
groups of women (De Welde, 2003b). Further, racist discourses construct black
and Latino men as hypermasculine, hypersexualized, and as a danger to (white)
women (Hall, 2004; Roberts, 1998)—assumptions which are often reproduced in
self-defense courses that portray perpetrators as racialized strangers, despite the fact
that most assaults on women are perpetrated by acquaintances (Hollander, 2001;
Jackson, 1993; Pain, 2000). Also, importantly, violence is overwhelmingly identified
as an event that takes place between a male perpetrator and a female victim (Stanko,
1995). This construction is particularly explicit for sexual violence, reflecting the
pervasive ideology of compulsory heterosexuality (Gavey, 2005; Rich, 1980).

In light of the construction of violence as predominantly sexual, elderly women
come to occupy a peculiar place in the discourse of prevention. In US society, as in
many other societies, women’s bodies are sexualized differently across the lifespan:
young women’s bodies are hypersexualized and older women’s bodies are increas-
ingly desexualized across the lifespan (Pain, 2000). Therefore, with regard to sexual
violence, viable subject-positions for elderly women do not exist. Yet, as women
age, their bodies (already assumed to be delicate and weak) are viewed as increas-
ingly frail and vulnerable. Women’s position within the discourse of prevention is
therefore inflected by age: women’s vulnerability is constructed differently across
the lifespan, as are the types of violence for which they are considered at-risk.
Faced with this constant expectation of risk and victimhood across the lifespan,
albeit expectation inflected by age, women are compelled to prevent or avoid the
victimization that is assumed to befall them and turn to the safety practices man-
dated by the prevention discourse.

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Compulsory prevention practices and the production
of the empowered victim

Largely supported by neoliberal ideology born out of US political, economic, and
social activity in the 1970s and 1980s (Harvey, 2005), the problem of gender-based
violence, among many other effects of systemic power and oppression, has become
individualized and attributed to personal choice and responsibility. However, indi-
vidual “choice” in the context of misogyny, sexism, and racism proves to be an
illusion as neoliberal logic denies the systemic nature of oppression and privilege
(Gavey, 2012). As Nancy Berns (2001) explains in her analysis of media represen-
tations of gendered violence, neoliberalism has the dual effect of degendering vio-
lence (i.e. obscuring the role gender and power play in the production of violence),
while gendering the blame (i.e. placing the responsibility for avoiding violence on
women’s shoulders). Within this context, not only are women held responsible for
avoiding violence, but women who do fall victim to violence are viewed as person-
ally responsible for their victimization. Women are then compelled to prevent or
avoid the position of victim (and instead occupy the position of the self-determined,
empowered citizen) via the enactment of a number of personal safety practices.

Some feminists hold that these safety practices and the discourse of prevention
challenge conventional constructions of femininity as vulnerable and weak, and
instead create new spaces for women’s subjectivity, characterized by increased
agency and empowerment (e.g. McCaughey, 1997). Further, having obtained the
knowledge necessary to defend themselves, some argue that women may reclaim
their bodies from fear and potential danger (e.g. Jackson, 1993). A large body of
literature has explored the role of self-defense courses, in particular, in increasing
women’s likelihood of resistance along with other positive psychological outcomes
(e.g. Brecklin & Ullman, 2005; Ullman, 2007) and in challenging traditional scripts
of femininity and women’s status as potential or perpetual victims (Cahill, 2009;
De Welde, 2003a; McCaughey, 1997).

Alternatively, others have critiqued the prevention discourse, arguing that it
perpetuates a dualistic, gendered understanding of violence, inscribing women as
victims and men as perpetrators (e.g. Campbell, 2005). This persistent focus on
women as potential and perpetual victims, others suggest, frames violence against
women as inevitable and frames all forms of resistance or intervention as reactive
to a violence that is assumed will or has already occurred (Hall, 2004). Finally,
some critics highlight the ways the discourse relies upon and reproduces a con-
struction of women and women’s bodies as vulnerable such that the empowerment
rhetoric of self-defense is contingent upon problematic constructions of women’s
bodies as frail and in need of reform (Cahill, 2000; Hollander, 2001; Mardorossian,
2003; Martin, 2002; Stanko, 1997). In this way, women’s bodies are maintained as
perpetual danger sites and “rape spaces” that need to be managed or trained in
order to avoid victimization (Cahill, 2000; Hollander, 2001). Women-centered pre-
vention approaches, from this perspective, signal that women are responsible for
their own safety, and thus may be held to blame for “poor risk management”
should they fall victim to violence (Lamb, 1996).

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From tension-filled discourse to subjectivity: The current study

The current study is guided by a systemic perspective in which individual meaning-
making is understood to be in a dialectical relation with local and macro-social
processes. Gender is seen as a social formation that includes material, discursive,
institutional, symbolic, and psychological elements, indissolubly linked and system-
ically related, and that intersects with social formations of ‘race,’ class, sexuality,
and age in structuring the social world at all levels. The politics and structuring
functions inherent in macro-social processes of gender, ‘race,’ class, sexuality, and
age both constitute the individual as a social actor and configure the local discur-
sive processes through which meaning is co-constructed in local interaction.
Embedded in this system, individuals construct their identity and meaning-
making by appropriating, rejecting, transforming, or interpreting available societal
discourses in ways that are both agentive and constrained (Falmagne, 2004, pp.
822–828, 838–840). Women’s lifelong process of identity construction (consisting of
ongoing negotiations of discourses of gender, ‘race,’ class, and sexuality), as well as
their earlier experiences with violence, adds further complexity to the ways women
mediate societal discourses of violence in their perceptions and practices across the
lifespan (Pain, 2000).

Guided by this theoretical framework, the present study extends a focus on the
ways in which women occupy the tension-filled position of the empowered victim:
enabled as individuals to take charge of their own safety, while destined to victim-
hood by virtue of their gender. Tensions in discourses, subject-positions, and mean-
ings of social phenomena can be met with ambivalence, and the tensions may be
reproduced, ignored, or negotiated in a variety of complex ways throughout indi-
viduals’ meaning-making (e.g. Abbey & Falmagne, 2008; Abbey & Valsiner, 2005;
Billig, Condor, Edwards, Middleton, & Radley, 1988). The current study investi-
gates how women draw from the empowered victim construction to inform their
safety practices and in making meaning of their everyday experiences around vio-
lence and risk. Of particular interest will be whether women reproduce the tension
between empowerment and victimhood in their meaning-making of everyday
experiences, and the extent to which they selectively draw upon constructions of
victimhood and empowerment in discussing their own experiences relating to
safety, risk, and violence.

Methods

Participants

Twenty women aged 18–62 years participated in an in-depth, flexible-style inter-
view (described further below). All participants were members of a small, private
university located in an ethnically mixed, poor urban neighborhood in the
Northern US. Participants included undergraduate students (N¼14), as well
as staff and faculty (N¼6), who were recruited through email list-serves, in-
person solicitation of university classes, and convenience sampling. Participants

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were told that the researchers were interested in women’s experiences walking on
and around the university campus and that their participation was entirely volun-
tary and confidential. Each participant scheduled an interview with the researcher
that lasted approximately 45 minutes.

Most participants identified as Caucasian and middle to upper class (one woman
identified as Asian-American and middle class, and one woman identified as
African-American and working class) and all indicated in the course of their inter-
view that they were heterosexual. While the demographic of the sample is fairly
homogeneous and reflective of the university at which the data were collected, it
also represents the demographic of women who are the primary focus of the dis-
course of violence and violence prevention—and therefore most clearly subjected to
its tension-filled positions and contradictory terms. Paired with the fact that most
of the city residents immediately surrounding the university campus are from non-
Caucasian ethnic/racial groups of lower socio-economic status, mainly of
Latino or African descent, conducting interviews with these predominantly
white, middle- to upper-class women provided an ideal lens to examine the inter-
sectional ideologies of ‘race,’ class, and gender that infuse constructions of violence
and perpetrators.

Interview procedure

In order to situate each participant’s responses in her social context, the interviews
included detailed explorations of each participant’s social and cultural background.
For example, participants were asked to discuss the organization of their family
life, the neighborhood in which they grew up, and the social contexts in which they
live their life. Following the biographical portion of the interview, all participants
were prompted with “Can you tell me about your thoughts and experiences walk-
ing around the [university] campus and the surrounding neighborhood?” Pilot
interviews conducted with the intention of establishing an effective interview
vocabulary and protocol suggested that this prompt was broad enough to elicit a
diverse array of responses applicable to the research question, without limiting the
type of responses participants may find relevant to discuss.

In both the biographical and the safety-content portions, the interview followed
a flexible format in that participants’ responses directed the content of the inter-
view, including subsequent follow-up questions. This flexibility allowed the discus-
sion to follow the strands and topics that each woman found meaningful. However,
the interview was not open-ended, in that special attention was put on participants’
experiences and thoughts regarding safety in their daily lives. Tape-recorded inter-
views were transcribed verbatim and read for accuracy. All names reported below
are pseudonyms that participants selected or that were assigned by the authors.

Data-analytic approach

Data analysis was informed by a discourse-analytic perspective in which language
is not understood to be a transparent vehicle of meaning, but rather a cultural tool

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through which social phenomena are constituted and (re)presented (e.g. Wetherell,
1998). The ideologies participants draw upon are systems of meaning that produce
understandings of the social world and are always inflected by power systems
(particularly in relation to gender, ‘race,’ class, sexuality, and age). As discussed
above, individuals are understood to construct meaning around their experiences
by appropriating, rejecting, transforming, or interpreting available societal dis-
courses in ways that are both agentive and constrained (Falmagne, 2004).
Therefore, participants were analytically approached as social agents actively
and selectively engaging with societal discourses in their construction and (re)pres-
entation of their experiences of safety and risk.

The interviews were analyzed interpretively to identify women’s engagement
with the societal discourses of violence, risk, and victimhood, following coding
procedures based on thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006). Constructs were
developed from a quasi-inductive orientation, with the language and perspective of
feminist theory and the conceptualization of the discourse of violence providing
sensitizing lenses without confining the process (Falmagne, Iselin, Todorova, &
Arner Welsh, 2013). Participants’ positionality with regard to ‘race’ and class
were used interpretively in analysis, but without imposing these categories as
causal determinants of any aspect of the woman’s meaning-making and without
implying any group-level generalization (Falmagne, 2006). With regard to age,
analysis highlighted the ways a woman’s age informs her position within the dis-
course of violence, as well as the role of women’s life experiences in their meaning-
making of violence and risk.

The development of themes followed an iterative process. Transcripts were first
read for understanding, and initial codes were developed to mark instances in
which women’s discussions were read to be reflecting the logic of the discourse
of prevention or to be reflecting sites of tension between understandings of women
as empowered or as victims. Patterns among these codes were generated based on
their context and the ways we understood women to resolve, reproduce, or other-
wise modulate any tension-filled constructions. These patterns were reread and
refined into potential themes, which were then reviewed to check for conceptual
consistency and theoretical meaningfulness before the final themes were estab-
lished, defined, and named.

Findings

Women’s selective appropriation of the victim and prevention scripts reflected and
(re)produced many of the tensions and contradictions of the prevention discourse.
This occurred not only across participants, but often within individual interviews.
In terms of the broad concerns of this study, the themes presented here were
selected as important sites of tension in women’s construction of their experiences
as gendered bodies and beings in social space. These included: (a) the endorsement
of a “safety checklist” that functioned to construct women’s risk as unmanageable
and victimhood as inevitable; (b) generational differences in women’s willingness to
identify fears of gendered bodily harm as legitimate and in the specific forms this

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identification took; and (c) the creation and maintenance of imagined communities
of safety and danger implicitly inflected by ‘race’ and class. Each of these themes is
addressed in detail in this section and their theoretical relevance is elaborated in the
final discussion.

Risk management and the “safety checklist”

Across age, women voiced a view of safety as a checklist of things “to do” and
“not do” in order to manage the risk of becoming a victim. As reflected in
women’s discussions, the endorsement of this “safety checklist” also produced
a compulsory obligation for women to adhere to it in order to avoid blame for
victimization. At the same time, participants’ statements reflected a view of vio-
lence as unpredictable and inherently unmanageable, suggesting that the “safety
checklist,” while being a compulsory obligation for women to follow, is denied
any genuine effectiveness. This situates women in an impossible position: women
are held responsible for violence prevention despite its construction as unpre-
dictable and predetermined. This juxtaposition occurred often throughout inter-
views and even within the same utterance, as illustrated by Amy’s (age 20)
comment:

“If you don’t take precautions, like walking by yourself, it won’t—. It may not happen

that night, but something could eventually happen so there’s no point of putting

yourself at risk. You never know what’s going to happen.”

Amy’s comments imply the assumption that women are inherently at risk for vio-
lence. While acknowledging the precautions women can take to manage the risk of
victimization (and lending them a certain degree of efficacy), she simultaneously
suggests a constant fear of attack, firmly inscribing women’s victimization as
unpredictable, yet inescapable. In other words, Amy’s logic reflects the empowered
victim tension: the “safety checklist” empowers women to help manage their risk of
victimization; however, women’s risk is assumed to exist, framing violence and
victimization as inevitable. Becky’s (age 52) comments throughout her interview
reflect this same juxtaposition:

“[Girls] are very exploited, they’re preyed upon and they have to understand that.

There’s nothing you’re going to do to change it . . . that’s how it is. Just be savvy.

Try to outwit them, you know?”

Like Amy, Becky also assumes that women are inherently at risk for victimization.
As she frames female vulnerability and victimhood as inevitable, she also draws
upon the empowerment rhetoric of the risk management discourse, suggesting that
women are capable of outsmarting the attackers they will inevitably face, yet that
they will succeed only if they devote enough effort to it. Becky again reproduces the
empowered victim tension, assuming women will fall victim to violence and
“there’s nothing you’re going to do to change it,” while still indicating that

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women are expected to take steps to try to do just that. Similar trends are seen in
Annie’s (age 62) account of a past experience with sexual assault:

“I was assaulted when . . . I was a senior in college . . . I was a secretary and uh was just

warm and welcoming to people. And I was newly married so I wasn’t out on the hunt

or anything, or dressing provocatively. . . . It was terrible.”

In recounting this experience Annie highlights her role in the assault, detailing her
behavior (i.e. “warm and welcoming” but not “on the hunt or . . . dressing provoca-
tively”) to illustrate that she had fallen victim to assault despite the fact that she
had taken the appropriate precautions. While Annie does not explicitly position
herself as responsible for the potential attack, she simultaneously implies that her
behavior should have prevented the assault from occurring. Mirroring the victim-
centered discourse of prevention, Annie’s narrative foregrounds her own actions as
leading up to the assault, rather than those of the attacker. Thus, all three women’s
statements illustrate a belief that many women endorsed, that is, a belief that there
are things women can and should do to manage their risk of victimization, despite a
simultaneous construction of violence as inherently unmanageable, and something
that “could eventually happen,” because “that’s how it is.”

As suggested by Annie’s narrative, often hand-in-hand with an endorsement of
the “safety checklist” and women-centered violence prevention is an unspoken
mandate that women who fail to fulfill the “safety checklist” are at fault for what-
ever victimization or risk they may encounter. This mandate can manifest itself in
victim-blaming rhetoric and even in self-blame. Examples of this pattern are
reflected in Ashley’s (age 20) interview:

“Like, so if I’m drunk walking around like going from party to party, [safety is]

something I never think about [laughs], which is stupid because that’s probably

when you’re most vulnerable . . . so I didn’t take [the safety] escort but I was kind of

like, ‘oh you know, maybe this will teach me one day when something does happen,

I’ll take escort from then on’ [laughs].”

Ashley’s construction reflects an understanding of women as inherently at risk for
violence, and following the logic of the “safety checklist,” assumes that the respon-
sibility for preventing victimization is solely hers. She implies that not engaging in
prescribed safety behaviors is “stupid” and any victimization that follows would be
her own doing—a punishment for not appropriately managing risk.

(De)Legitimizing gendered fears

Concerns about safety can include threats to one’s body as well as threats to one’s
possessions. We characterize the former type—bodily threat—as gendered because
it involves an invasion of or interaction with the body—an entity that is inherently
gendered. The latter type can then be understood as non-gendered, as threats to
one’s possessions do not involve a targeting of the body or gender in a

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meaningful way. Although, of course, there is risk for bodily harm during a mug-
ging, for example, participants spoke about bodily threats and threats to one’s
possessions as mutually exclusive. With this delineation in mind, a salient pattern
across women’s interviews has to do with the ways in which fears of gendered
threats were or were not acknowledged and how, when acknowledged, they were
subsequently constructed as legitimate or illegitimate. While older women freely
spoke about their concerns of gendered threats and emphasized their immediacy
for women, younger women only indirectly referenced bodily violence and down-
played the relevancy and legitimacy of fears of gendered threats.

Directly acknowledged fears were those that women would explicitly articulate
when asked about their safety concerns. For younger women, fears of gendered
threats were not identified explicitly, but instead were actively delegitimized in
favor of possession-related threats. This active delegitimization is clear in Amy’s
(age 20) interview:

“I guess the only thoughts that cross my mind when I’m walking there is like—.

Hearing someone walk up behind me makes me nervous . . . those kind of things,

I guess. I’m afraid that someone’s going to want to take my stuff. I never feel like

I’m going to be attacked or hurt or anything.”

Rather than articulating any fear of bodily harm, Amy actively delegitimizes its
validity: she explicitly denies a concern over getting “attacked or hurt,” focusing
her narrative exclusively on a concern over losing her possessions. Young women’s
delegitimization of concerns about bodily violence are also illustrated in Grace’s
(age 20) response to a question about what she fears:

“I don’t know. I just don’t want to get robbed [laughs].”

Megan’s (age 19) similar response to the same question also illustrates this:

“I think I’d probably be more at risk for like being mugged or like robbed or you

know, that kind of thing, than like anything else. Yeah. . . . Actually I haven’t really

thought about it. [laughs]”

While neither young woman explicitly denies fears of bodily threats, their off-
handed dismissal of all fears outside of being robbed highlight their rejection of
concerns over bodily violence, and about violence more generally, as legitimate
concerns. That both women’s dismissal of these fears is compounded by laughter
gives further insight into how they are positioning themselves as immune to threats
of bodily harm. Often used as a conversational device to avoid uncomfortable
topics, laughter here may signal, beyond a mere dismissal of fear, an active dis-
comfort with its discussion. This discomfort may tentatively be interpreted as
reflecting at the same time the young women’s desire to distance themselves from
discussions of bodily harm and their implicit fear of this type of violence.

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This tension is discussed next in terms of the ways women indirectly acknowledged
threats of bodily violence even while undermining them explicitly.

Overwhelmingly, the only way that young women evoked threats of bodily
violence was through what can be characterized as indirect identification.
Threats of bodily violence were not explicitly articulated as such, nor were they
identified in response to direct questions about fear or risk. Rather, they were
identified indirectly through the spontaneous mention in the interview context of
particular, putatively benign incidents of a gendered nature. Catcalling (whistling
or comments of a sexual nature made, usually by men, to a passing woman) was
frequently brought up in this way. However, each time it was brought up, young
women then actively worked to delegitimize it as form of danger, as gendered
violence, or as an occurrence warranting any feelings of fear or discomfort. For
example, Andrea (age 20) downplays the discomfort of being catcalled by stressing
its banality:

“I feel like no matter what you look like, or like, what—I don’t know, time of day it is,

there are always people catcalling from their cars . . . so, it’s not a big deal and it’s

almost like humorous, but, it’s just—. It’s so silly. I feel like it’s almost guaranteed

that someone’s going to whistle outside of their car or just say something.”

That Andrea implicitly identifies catcalling as fear-inducing is signaled by the fact
that she spontaneously brings it up in an interview where she has been asked to
share her thoughts about danger and risk. However, by continuing on to insist on
its triviality, she simultaneously constructs catcalling as comical. By specifying that
catcalling occurs “no matter what you look like,” Andrea denies its relevancy to
gender or sex—although women do get catcalled more than men, the fact that it
happens regardless of your physical appearance indicates for Andrea that it is not
considered gendered or sexual harassment.

Sara (age 21), after also spontaneously mentioning catcalling in her interview,
immediately delegitimizes it as a fear-inducing event by appealing to what she views
as the non-threatening intentionality behind it:

“Yes, it’s insulting, but you just can’t really take it seriously, because it’s not serious.

You can’t ask yourself, ‘Are they expecting to get my number by yelling, “You’re

sexy” at me?’ you know? That’s not the point. It’s just to get your attention. And

I think some people don’t understand that and take it too seriously.”

Although Sara directly marks catcalling as insulting, she undermines this reaction
through her explicit construction of catcalling as an act not intended as harassment
or assault, but instead aimed at attention grabbing. In contrast to Andrea, Sara
does acknowledge the relevance of gender and sexuality to catcalling, suggesting
that some view it as kind of sexual advance. Yet, even though she draws this
connection, she goes on to discount it, again returning to her construction of cat-
calling as solely aimed at attention grabbing.

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While young women’s dismissal of catcalling could be read as an empowering
act—removing agency from the catcallers by labeling them “silly” and the like—it
became clear throughout women’s discussions that what was actively being dis-
missed was not the catcallers, per se, but women’s own emotional and experienced
discomfort with the situation. Indeed, even as both Andrea and Sara implicitly
identify catcalling as a phenomenon that makes them uncomfortable, they actively
work to delegitimize it as a valid concern for women’s safety. This move effectively
delegitimizes women’s own feelings of discomfort and implicit appraisal of the
situation as threatening or offensive—a discursive strategy that maintains catcal-
lers’ behavior as mundane and that devalues women’s experiences of this behavior.

Thus, across a number of interviews, younger women spoke of the irrelevancy of
gendered fears and avoided any direct endorsement of them. Even when their
discussions turned to fears contingent on gender and sexuality, young women
consistently avoided, and at times actively undermined, the acknowledgement of
these fears as valid. In this way, young women strategically worked to distance
themselves from the logic that identifies gender as a relevant factor in producing
inequality or subordination in their everyday lives. This trend is reflective of a
broader shift in the popular imagination in which gender inequality is assumed
to no longer be a social issue. “Postfemininsm,” the term often used to describe this
ideology, will be discussed in greater depth below as a lens through which young
women may be constructing their experiences of (non-)risk and violence.

In contrast, the older women in the sample consistently and directly acknowl-
edged gendered violence-based fears as legitimate. Becky (age 52) identifies rape
and sexual assault as something she fears specifically with regard to her college
daughter’s safety:

“The sexual thing of course, you know rape or whatever . . . naturally. I think I worry

about it more with . . . date rape, you know someone slipping something into

her drink.”

Becky’s focus on her daughter reflects dominant gender ideologies that hypersex-
ualize young women’s bodies and desexualize older women’s bodies, and that direct
women’s perceptions of who are at risk for sexual violence, as will be further
discussed below. By identifying and discussing rape as the fear she is “naturally”
most concerned with, Becky’s articulations perpetuate the naturalization of sex-
ualized violence against women. However, in identifying date rape as one of her top
concerns for her daughter, Becky challenges the “stranger danger” myth and
instead acknowledges the reality of date- and acquaintance-initiated violence.

Patricia (age 41) identifies violence as something that should be of central con-
cern for women of all ages:

“I think [awareness is] important, especially anti-violence, partner violence or

anything. . . . I think it’s great to have students learn those skills—staff too. I just

wish they didn’t have to.”

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Like Becky, Patricia challenges the “stranger danger” myth by stressing the import-
ance of raising awareness around partner violence. Patricia also acknowledges
violence, broadly, as a legitimate fear for women, by recommending that women
should be equipped with the “skills” to avoid victimization. At the same time,
throughout her discussion, Patricia constructs violence as an inevitable occurrence,
wistfully adding to her recommendation for violence awareness education that she
“just wish(es)” it was not necessary.

The contrast between younger and older women’s treatment of violence-based
fears poses an interesting paradox. Young women distance themselves from fears
of bodily and sexual violence despite discursive constructions that paint young
women as hypersexualized (and therefore most vulnerable for sexual violence)
and statistics suggesting that women under 35 are the most at risk for these
forms of violence (Berzofsky, Krebs, Langton, Planty, & Smiley-McDonald,
2013). On the other hand, perhaps informed by a larger fund of life experience,
older women are more likely to discuss violence as a relevant and pertinent concern
for women. This sentiment also reflects the ideology in circulation when many of
the older women were raised—an ideology that recognized gender inequality as a
prominent social and political concern. However, by only identifying young women
as potential victims and sexual violence as the only legitimate fear for women, older
women ignore their own risks and potential experiences of violence (sexual or
otherwise). The complex ways in which violence and risk are discussed across the
lifespan will be elaborated further in the final discussion.

Imagined communities

The delineation of borders between insiders (i.e. members of the university com-
munity) and outsiders (i.e. residents of the city surrounding the campus) was fre-
quently mentioned in women’s discussions of ways to augment safety. ‘Race’ and
class were implicitly central to these discussions: as mentioned, most members of
the university community are white and middle to upper class, while most of the
city residents surrounding the campus are from non-Caucasian ethnic/racial groups
of lower socio-economic status, mainly of Latino or African descent.

Megan (age 21) illustrates this construction in her suggestion that crimes against
members of the university are always instigated by members of the surrounding
community:

“I’ve always been personally curious about what the community thinks of [the uni-

versity] and how, if it’s negative, how do we improve that relationship? Because then

maybe they’ll stop mugging us.”

Like most of the younger cohort, Megan identifies danger as manifested in crimes
threatening one’s possessions (not one’s body). She also assumes that all perpetra-
tors of such crimes are “outsiders,” members of the surrounding neighborhood
communities (i.e. “others”). Discursively, by using the terms “community,” “they,”

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and “us,” Megan makes it clear that whether a person is a perpetrator or a (poten-
tial) victim of crimes is contingent upon their membership in the university com-
munity (“us”) or the surrounding neighborhoods (“them”). Chloe (age 21)
explicitly refers to her construction of outsiders as perpetrators and insiders as
victims in her recommendations for campus safety:

“I think it’s less likely for another student to walk into your room and steal some-

thing, than someone from the outside. So in theory, closing off more of [the university]

would be better.”

Thus, while Megan’s thoughts of improving the relationship between the university
and surrounding community is seen by her as one route to building safety in the
context of an insider–outsider dichotomy, Chloe recommends strict maintenance of
the boundary between the groups.

The racialization of the insider–outsider dichotomy is highlighted by Ashley’s
(age 20) recollection of a past experience while meeting a friend in his predomin-
antly black neighborhood that contributes to her current understanding and behav-
ior in the university context:

“So he [her friend] was from [a suburb], which is predominantly black . . . like some

parts are considered the ghetto, like not that safe . . . I was this white preppy girl

walking by herself in this neighborhood where I didn’t belong. Um, so I

guess coming to [college] I kind of um just sort of kept that in mind, that I needed

to just mostly be conscious of my surroundings, um but I’ve been prepped for it a little

bit.”

The connection that Ashley draws between her experiences in a predominantly black
neighborhood and her experiences at her current university indicates that the bound-
ary constructed between the university and surrounding neighborhoods is not neu-
tral. Rather, this division is predicated on an assumption that outsiders are racialized
and, therefore, dangerous, an assumption illustrated by Megan’s and Chloe’s com-
ments as well. Ideologically, this construction is supported in large part by the stran-
ger danger myth—according to which perpetrators are most often strangers who are
overwhelmingly male, non-white and of low socioeconomic standing—a notion that
circulates throughout the societal discourse of violence.

The older cohort also relied on an insider–outsider delineation in their discus-
sions of safety. Becky (age 52) recounts an instance in which an undergraduate was
approached by a member of the surrounding community. In her telling, the iden-
tification of the outside community member as inherently dangerous is clear:

“One day [an undergrad] was approached by somebody, just out here! . . . and she

knew enough to just run away, you know? She knew he wasn’t like a campus person.”

Becky’s story aligns closely with Chloe’s recommendation for insider–outsider
boundary maintenance. Becky’s telling inscribes members of the outside,

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surrounding community as people who are inherently dangerous and should be
feared. Her endorsement of the student’s choice to run away rather than engaging
the community member reflects her felt necessity of maintaining the boundary
between the two groups. This “us” versus “them” or “othering” mentality operates
both to perpetuate dominant assumptions equating dangerous people and potential
perpetrators of violence with men of color and to conceal the reality of violence,
which overwhelmingly occurs not between strangers, but between acquaintances.
The ways this “othering” supports each of these outcomes will be discussed further
in the next section, as will the broader effects of “othering” on social understand-
ings of violence and of ‘race.’

Discussion

Societal discourses inform our understandings of social phenomena, and contradic-
tions within these discourses can produce tensions in meaning-making. In the case of
violence, the tensions within the prevention discourse complicate women’s relation-
ship to violence. Women’s discussions of violence across age reflect the pervasive
tension inherent in the discourse of prevention: women are compelled to occupy the
empowered non-victim position, while simultaneously facing the construction of
violence as an inevitability for women. Within the terms of this discourse, it is
impossible for an individual woman to construct a cohesive narrative that does
not at times position her as immune to violence, while at other times condems her
for ignoring the risks she faces. Many tensions evident in women’s discussions
instantiate this paradox. One tension, reflected in several participants’ responses,
was the construction of violence as being simultaneously manageable and unman-
ageable by women. For example, Amy stressed the importance of “taking precau-
tions” to avoid violence, while simultaneously acknowledging that when it comes to
violence, “you never know what’s going to happen.” Participants’ reproduction of
this construction of violence suggests that the alleged empowerment that accompa-
nies the fulfillment of precautionary measures is perpetually eclipsed by the ideo-
logical maintenance of violence and women’s victimization as inevitable.

The ease with which this tension translates into victim blaming is cause for
attention. Women across the lifespan were aware of the prevention measures
they were expected to take and often framed their failure to enact these measures
as inviting or deserving of violence, as when Ashley mused that “maybe this [failing
to enact prevention measures] will teach me one day when something does hap-
pen.” Traditional violence prevention programs are largely informed by this victim-
centered discourse, and this popular conception of violence is instantiated through-
out other social institutions as well. In particular, legal rulings in rape cases often
perpetuate victim-blaming ideology in the US and abroad, such as the widely
publicized case in which Italy’s supreme court overturned a rape case on the
grounds that the young woman involved was wearing form-fitting clothing, a
fact that was taken to implicate her responsibility (Calavita, 2001), or the
New York Police Department’s recent efforts to prevent rape by advising women
to stop wearing skirts and dresses in public (Noel, 2011).

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Another tension, present specifically in the young women’s interviews, was the
contrast between their indirect acknowledgment of gender-based violence and their
direct and active delegitimization of these fears. Many young women recognized
catcalling as a gendered phenomenon, as indicated by their unprompted discussion
of it alongside remarks about fears of bodily violence, yet simultaneously dismissed
it as a cause for concern. Young women struggled to reconcile the realities of their
experiences with the assumptions of the prevention discourse. Specifically, young
women who are compelled to position themselves as empowered through the terms
of the discourse are denied the space to voice or legitimize their concerns and their
feelings of discomfort and fear.

In contrast to young women’s dismissal, older women were more likely to expli-
citly identify gender-based fears as valid. Several interpretations may help account
for this generational difference. Older women in the sample came of age in a very
different historical moment when conversations about gender and feminism were
centered around gender inequality. Younger women, on the other hand, have come
of age in a time when a single, dominant feminist movement does not exist and
many believe that gender inequality is no longer a social issue. The “postfeminist”
agenda highlights young women’s agency and empowerment through economic
consumption, and ignores gender as a structural and discursive formation
(Aronson, 2003; McRobbie, 2004). In highlighting individual empowerment and
agency, claims of discrimination based on gender are delegitimized and instead
viewed as “offensive and inappropriate for the current era” (Showden, 2009, p.
168). Young women therefore would be less likely to identify gender as a factor
that should inform their ideas about risk and violence (Gardner, 1995; Kelly &
Radford, 1996). This generational difference could also be based in life experience.
Older women have had more opportunities to personally experience occurrences
such as pay discrimination in the workplace, or unequal treatment after having
children, and hence may be more likely to identify gender as a legitimate justifica-
tion for heightened fear of bodily violence.

Importantly, older woman’s discussions of safety and risk focused solely on
younger women as potential victims, as in Patricia’s and Becky’s discussions of
undergraduates, Becky’s discussion of her daughter, and Annie’s reflections on
herself, but as a younger woman. Additionally, when discussing young women’s
victimization, older women referred to violence almost exclusively as sexual vio-
lence (e.g. sexual assault, sexual harassment, and date rape). This exclusive focus
on young women as victims and on sexual violence works to deny older women a
place in the prevention discourse and ignores the violence for which older women
are at risk. This is problematic as older women are, of course, subjected to violence
in sexual and non-sexual forms. Constructions that reference only sexual violence
as a concern for (young) women ignore these other forms of violence for which
older women may be more at risk.

Finally, there was a tension between women’s fears and those occurrences for
which women may actually be at risk. Women positioned their university commu-
nity as one that is inherently safe, in contrast to the adjacent community neigh-
borhoods, and even went on to recommend safety measures that would heighten

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this boundary, as in Chloe’s recommendation to close off the university. Women
equated outsiders with danger and constructed them as irrational, unpredictable,
and unmanageable. It follows, then, that the violence they commit is equally seen
as unmanageable, rather than a phenomenon to critically interrogate and interrupt.
This, of course, parallels the prevention discourse in which, as argued above, vio-
lence is constructed as inevitable.

In the university context where this study was conducted, who is an insider and
who is not is heavily reliant on dimensions of ‘race’ and class, as many residents of
neighborhoods surrounding the university campus are mainly of Latino or African
descent and of lower socio-economic status. This construction is fully fueled by the
stranger danger myth, where the “stranger” in question relies on a racialized and
class-based construction of danger (De Welde, 2003a; Madriz, 1997). While the us–
them dichotomy discussed here refers to the context of the particular university
campus where data was collected, the dichotomy and the “othering” processes that
underlie it have a broader significance. The discourses of ‘race’ and class reflected in
women’s discussions about risk and violence are constitutive of “othering” pro-
cesses emergent in the contexts of imperialism and racialization, as well as through
historical and contemporary political rhetoric in the US and other countries
regarding domestic social and economic inequalities (Said, 1978).

The delineation of insiders as being inherently safe and outsiders as being inher-
ently dangerous is also problematic for a number of other reasons. First, research
demonstrates that intimate partner violence is the leading cause of injury to
women. It affects 1–3 million women a year in the US, making it more common
than muggings, stranger rapes, and car accidents combined (Tjaden & Thoennes,
1998). By acknowledging all university members as safe and all non-university
members as risky, women’s fears do not align with the reality of their risks
(Nurius, 2000). As we and others have noted, violence is prominently constructed
as occurring only in the public sphere and maintains the home as a safe space for
women (Cahill, 2000; Pain, 2000), despite statistics suggesting that many forms of
violence against women occur at higher rates among acquaintances and other
occupants of the “private sphere” (e.g. Berzofsky et al., 2013; Tjaden &
Thoennes, 1998). Critical inquiries of women’s meaning-making around intimate
partner violence and acquaintance-initiated violence would be fruitful in exposing
additional contradictions within the discourse of prevention, and, by extension, for
furthering efforts to legitimize the experiences of women (and men) who experience
these types of violence.

In conclusion, problematic assumptions regarding gender, ‘race,’ class, sexual-
ity, and age, which underlie the discourse of prevention, infuse the everyday
meaning-making and experiences of the social agents who draw upon them.
Specifically, in the present study, women across the lifespan drew upon the empow-
ered victim construction, reproducing the expectation that women are inherently at
risk for victimization and simultaneously capable—and responsible—for avoiding
this victimization. In this way, the discourse of prevention functions not to offer a
position of empowerment for women, but actually to reinscribe women as ineffec-
tual victims (a construction this discourse directly aims to challenge).

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The aim here is not to demonize self-defense courses or similar components of
the prevention discourse: violence against women, after all, is not a purely discur-
sive phenomenon. The very serious material effects of violence can be effectively
attenuated by self-defense courses. Rather, we argue that women’s appropriation
of the prevention discourse is not sufficient for fully addressing the problem of
violence against women. In fact, as our interviews demonstrate, women’s selective
appropriation of the discourse can actually reproduce and perpetuate problematic
constructions of gender, ‘race,’ class, sexuality, and age. Primarily, by focusing
exclusively on women, violence prevention is constructed as a women’s problem,
and as individual women’s responsibility. Further, the prominent constructions of
risk function to “other” perpetrators, thus discounting violence occurring between
acquaintances and violence occurring in the private sphere. From this standpoint,
confronting and intervening in all forms of violence against women requires a
continued critical interrogation of these constructions at all levels of society—in
prevention practices and social ideologies and in the interpersonal and individual
patterns through which these ideologies are enacted and lived.

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the women who volunteered to share their perspectives and

stories and for the purposes of this research. The authors also wish to acknowledge the
Francis L. Hiatt School of Psychology for providing funding for this research. Many thanks
to Nicola Gavey for her feedback on an earlier version of this manuscript, and to Rose

Capdevila and to anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions and comments that
helped to strengthen this manuscript.

Notes

1. Throughout this work, ‘race’ is placed in scare quotes in line with the usage within the
critical literature and as a move to distance the term from an epistemology of biological
difference and refocus it as a discursive construction that has material effects and that is

used socially to make up and perpetuate social systems of power and oppression through
discursive and material means.

2. The first author, who conducted the interviews, is a member of the university community

(though not a peer of the undergraduate participants, nor a colleague of the faculty or
staff participants) and occupies the same demographic as most of the participants (i.e. she
is a white, middle-class woman). As with all interviews, it is likely that the identities
shared by the interviewer and participants, and those not shared, facilitated some areas

of discussion and acted to block or restrict others.

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Author Biographies

Kathryn E Frazier is a doctoral student in psychology at Clark University in
Worcester, MA, USA. Her research interests involve societal and feminist
approaches to cultural discourses of gender, particularly as they relate to individual
experiences of and meaning-making around interpersonal violence.

Rachel Joffe Falmagne is Professor of Psychology at Clark University, USA, and
former President of the International Society for Theoretical Psychology. Her
interests include feminist theory, critical psychology, and methodological and epis-
temological issues for the social sciences. She has published on the gendered foun-
dations of thought, culture, and development, on the systemic, intersectional social
constitution of “self” and “mind,” on the dialectic of the particular and the general
in qualitative research, on subverting theoretical dualisms, and on the affective
roots of thought. Books include Mind and social practice: Selected writings by
Sylvia Scribner (with Ethel Tobach and Mary Parlee) and Representing reason:
Feminist theory and formal logic (with Marjorie Hass).

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Areas of Expertise

Although you can leverage our expertise for any writing task, we have a knack for creating flawless papers for the following document types.

Essay

Thesis

Presentation

Dissertation

Term Paper

Research Paper

Book Review

Assignment

Report

Case Study

Letter

Article

Coursework

Speech

Q & A

Critical Thinking

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From brainstorming your paper's outline to perfecting its grammar, we perform every step carefully to make your paper worthy of A grade.

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Areas of Expertise

Essay

Thesis

Presentation

Dissertation

Term Paper

Research Paper

Book Review

Assignment

Report

Case Study

Letter

Article

Coursework

Speech

Q & A

Critical Thinking

Areas of Expertise

Essay

Thesis

Presentation

Dissertation

Term Paper

Research Paper

Book Review

Assignment

Report

Case Study

Letter

Article

Coursework

Speech

Q & A

Critical Thinking

Trusted Partner of 9650+ Students for Writing

Preferred Writer

Grammar Check Report

One Page Summary

Plagiarism Report

Free Features $66FREE

Our Services

Academic Writing

Professional Editing

Thorough Proofreading

Thorough Proofreading

Delegate Your Challenging Writing Tasks to Experienced Professionals

Check Out Our Sample Work

It May Not Be Much, but It’s Honest Work!

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Happy Clients

0+

Words Written This Week

0+

Ongoing Orders

0%

Customer Satisfaction Rate

Process as Fine as Brewed Coffee

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See How We Helped 9000+ Students Achieve Success

We Analyze Your Problem and Offer Customized Writing

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