ABSTRACT
In response to public comments made by U.S. researchers and practitioners at a 2008 conference about the intense competition for grant money needed to support various types of work on sexual assault, a colleague of mine based in Ohio sarcastically stated that, “We should all relax. Th ere is enough violence in this world for everyone to share.” Certainly, there is much support for her claim. For example, in Canada where I live, citizens repeatedly hear, see, or read media accounts of gang-related shootings, muggings, soldiers either dying or being injured in Afghanistan and Iraq, and a myriad of other forms of interpersonal violence (e.g., bank robberies). As Renzetti and Edleson [2008:xxxiii] correctly point out, such violence:
However, not everyone is at equal risk of being the victim of violent crime, and some victims get more attention than do others [Currie, 2008]. For example, although stranger-to-stranger murders are relatively rare, they receive much attention for weeks and sometimes years in daily Canadian newspapers [Mennie, 2008]. Consider the case of Jane Creba. On December 26, 2005, a stranger shot and killed this 15-year-old girl in downtown Toronto, and this murder was still frequently described 3 years later in the widely read and cited newspaper Toronto Star [Contenta et al., 2008]. However, this is not to say that Ms. Creba’s untimely, violent death should be trivialized. It is, to say the least, deeply disturbing, and the pain and suff ering experienced by her family and friends are immeasurable. Still, how oft en do the media report sexual assaults that routinely occur in university/college dating relationships? How frequently are male-to-female beatings in marital/cohabiting relationships featured on the televised evening news? And, how oft en do the media and politicians address the plight of women killed by male ex-partners during or aft er the process of separation or divorce? Th ese and other victims of what Stanko [1985] refers to as “intimate intrusions” greatly outnumber the victims of predatory violent crimes that occur on the streets and in other public places (e.g., taverns), but the media generally characterize male-to-female assaults in intimate relationships as either “exceptional incidents” or as the “result of a man’s suddenly having ‘snapped’’’ [Myers, 1997:110].
