Introduction: Conceptualisations of Violence

Abstract

Feminist legal scholarship has long been concerned with the subject of violence. In fact, some of the core contributions of feminist legal scholarship in Australia and worldwide have been to identify and examine the specific forms of violence faced by women – and critically, to move beyond perceptions of such violence as being comprised of discrete and private acts between individuals to illuminate its structural impacts and causes. However, prevailing scholarly and legal conceptualisations of ‘violence’ continually frame it as a phenomenon that is predominately direct and physical. There is a need to challenge and expand on these conceptualisations of violence. This special issue seeks to fulfil this aim by drawing together feminist scholarship relating to structural violence and women’s lived experiences of violence, as well as philosophical and phenomenological accounts which challenge established and widely accepted understandings of violence. Our call for papers was launched during the COVID-19 pandemic, when important questions were being raised concerning the treatment of marginalised members of our community, and during the growing backlash to movements such as #MeToo which saw an upswing of what has been called ‘an asphyxiating vortex of litigation’. We saw a need to complicate the notion of ‘violence’ as being direct and predominantly physical in