Gender-Based Violence in the Caribbean: Historical Roots, Contemporary Continuities - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 9766580286 ISBN 13: 9789766580285

Publisher: University of the West Indies Press, 2025

Synopsis

Since the 1990s, Gender-Based Violence (GBV) has been contextualized as one of the primary endemic developmental issues affecting the lives of Caribbean people. Physical, verbal, sexual, emotional and financial violence against persons as a result of prevailing harmful gender norms has been recognized by Caribbean feminist scholars as crippling, particularly to women and girls who face the brunt of GBV’s frontal assault. The contemporary situation is even more grim with rising cases of deadly violence against persons which are rooted in unequal power relations steeped in gender. However there exists no comprehensive academic text which delves deeply into the historical roots of these occurrences and frames them as a critical and deliberate part of the violent history of the region. European contact with the region was deliberately curated in violence. Mass slaughter of the Indigenous Peoples, vile atrocities under the system of chattel slavery that are yet to be fully acknowledged, indignities suffered by indentured immigrants and continued brutalities in the 21st century are well explored by numerous scholars. However, few are framed within the context of gendered analysis with the specific aim of tracing contemporary violence with their historic antecedents. A well needed intervention into the historiography of the region, the text will be organized thematically and chronologically and explore topics related to violence against women, men and children framed within discourses of gender, decoloniality, race, class, culture, disability studies and sexuality.

About this title

About the Authors

Dalea Bean is Head of the Institute for Gender and Development Studies, Mona Campus Unit. She has researched extensively in the areas of women and gender in Caribbean history. Her first single-authored book: Jamaican Women and the World Wars: On the Front Lines of Change was published in 2017 by Palgrave MacMillan. She was also commissioned by the RJR Gleaner Communications Group to write Jamaican Women of Distinction: Holding up Half the Sky in 2020.

Verene A. Shepherd is Professor Emerita of History and Gender Studies at the University of the West Indies. She researches Jamaican economic history, slavery, reparations and gender discourses in Caribbean history. She is the author of several books, including Livestock, Sugar & Slavery: Contested Terrain in Colonial Jamaica and I Want to Disturb My Neighbour: Lectures on Slavery, Emancipation and Post-Colonial Jamaica.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of the West Indies Press
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 9766580286
• ISBN 13: 9789766580285
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 300
• Editor: Dalea Bean, Verene A. Shepherd