Introduction

Violence is simply part of the landscape, the background of everyday life—especially in the communities that suffer it the most. To demonstrate to students in his undergraduate Violence Against Women classes that women, in the words of Elliott Currie, “factor relative risks of violence in many of basic decisions in life”, Walter DeKeseredy uses an exercise developed by Jackson Katz. Under the heading “Women,” he writes down a long list of responses, including avoiding night classes, not walking alone at night, carrying whistles and alarms, calling the campus foot patrol for escorts to the bus or a car, and a host of other preventative measures. Another means of adjusting to violence noted by Currie is to avoid reading online and offline newspapers and watching televised news because “the news is so grim”.