ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how the continuum of mens intrusive practices play a key role in women's experience of their embodiment as contradictory and ambiguous leading to the enactment of a habitual modality of alienated embodiment, alienating both body and world. It focuses on developing a deeper understanding of the inter-relation between women's embodiment and mens violence against women and girls. In policy and legal frames, where experiences of intrusion in public space are acknowledged as important, it is still with a focus on criminal and criminalising behaviour often with a view to increasing women's willingness to report intrusion to the police. For Merleau-Ponty this is a process of bodily habituation that in turn informs perception, impacting on our experience of the present. The chapter explains rape and other forms of contact sexual abuse and mens intrusion in their early childhood, and some could not remember experiences of mens intrusive practices before their early adulthood.
