Citation

Seymour K (2012). Geelong, Vic., Australia: Deakin University, School of Health and Social Development, 288 pages.

Abstract

This thesis engages in critical policy analysis in order to examine the ways in which certain representations of violence are problematised in and through social policy. Underpinned by an understanding of policy as discourse based on the recognition that social, or policy, problems are created in and through discourse, particular attention is directed towards the ways in which discourses of violence rely upon and reproduce particular constructions of gender. Policy analysis, then, is used here to interrogate the presuppositions about gender and violence which shape the political/policy agenda, thereby limiting ‘what is talked about as possible or desirable, or as impossible or undesirable’ (Bacchi, 2000, p. 49). Focusing on the key federal policy areas of violence against women and children, health, and education, this thesis highlights, both, the extent to which discourses of gender and violence overlap and interrelate in policy constructions of violence and the implications that this has for Australian government responses to ‘violence’.

The extent to which (policy) constructions of violence reflect, embed and reinforce gender(ed) discourses represents a key finding of this thesis. The thesis further highlights the ways in which the naming of some violence(s) as ‘problem violences’ enable other violences to be represented as ‘understandable’ or unremarkable and, therefore, unproblematic. As argued here, gender, difference and identity, whilst key contexts for the construction, explanation, and experience of violence, are largely unacknowledged and undertheorised in current Australian policy approaches to ‘problem violence’. Dominant discourses of violence, gender and power thus enable violences to be represented as the problem of (gendered, classed, raced) ‘others’, providing a crucial means by which certain groups and behaviours are responsibilised and targeted for intervention. Discourses, then, also produce subjectivity/ies and it is in this sense that violence can be understood as the ‘site at which genders are produced’ (Shepherd, 2007, p. 249): the violence of gender.

© Copyright Kate Seymour, 2012