28 | Australian Institute of Family Studies Kirsty Duncanson caught up with Dr Adrian Howe, Associate Professor of Social Science at RMIT University, Victoria about her book, Sex, Violence and Crime: Foucault and the “Man” Question. Kirsty inter- viewed Adrian about the continuing challenges in pre- venting sexual assault. Kirsty: Can you describe the major themes of your book? Adrian: The book is based on a 20-year engage- ment with criminological texts and a range of other cultural representations of interpersonal violence, violence against women and children, particularly men’s violence. I came to it as a feminist when I was appointed in criminology. There were really only two areas that feminist criminologists would go into back then and that was women prisoners/women offenders or violence against women. And I was astounded at what I came across in terms of repre- sentations of violence against women beyond the feminist literature. There was a lot of feminist work looking at problematic violence against women, but when you looked at mainstream criminology it was just astonishing at how men’s violence against women would disappear very quickly. I came across an article by Hillary Allen (1987) about women committing violence against children/ other women and how violent acts got disappeared. She coined this term “discursive manoeuvres” that had the effect of disappearing the very violent acts that these women had committed. This was very uncomfortable for feminists, as feminists were try- ing to keep women out of prison. But in fact Allen was saying that they were not taking into account that these were actually very violent women. So I adopted the method of spotting discursive manoeu- vres and that’s the method I’ve been using for 20 years—of spotting how men’s violent acts get disap- peared. The point is looking at the methods through which violence gets disappeared, which is absolutely crucial to policy because it gets to how we name social problems and how we name this—men’s vio- lence against women. So that’s why I wrote in the book: basically to talk about what happens when you try to make men’s violence the topic of conversation—in casual conversation, or as the subject of a university course or a policy: all hell breaks loose. And the thesis of the book is that I believe that it is still not socially permissible to name men’s violence against women as men’s violence in any non-feminist forum. And I’ve experienced that debate right up till now. It’s still a very powerful thing that people have prob- lems with —both men and women. The conclusion I’ve come to after about 20 years of reading policy, criminological and other kinds of popular and cultural texts about violence against women is that it’s still not permissible to name it as such. People will still resort to discursive manoeu- vres—states of denial, disavowals; it’s a very hard analytical object to keep in focus. Kirsty: Throughout the book you identify a tradition of de- sexing or de-gendering male violence against women in both the language and practice of criminological research and policy. Could you elaborate a little more about what you mean by this (and any examples that you think espe- cially illustrates this)? What do you see as the implications of this de-gendering? Adrian: I call it sexed violence rather than gendered violence because it seems to me that you’re playing on the concept of sex, as in having a sex rather than a gender (whatever that is). The whole distinction between sex and gender was blown out of the water a long time ago. It’s also coming from a critique of what counts as sex crime. What is usually counted as a sex crime is usually very narrowly defined as rape or as mur- der followed or during rape or sexual assault. It usually focuses very much on public events. You don’t refer to domestic killings or violence as a sexed crime. So there was something problematic and very exclusionary about the category of sex crimes. It was problematic in one case that I studied about 10/15 years ago, the headline in the paper was was “sex crime”. It was the murder of a young woman in Frankston, but when you read the report it said that the police found no evidence of a sex- ual assault. So why was this a sex crime? The only reason that one could deduce from that was that a partially nude body was found. So a partially nude On theorising the un-naming of men’s violence against women Interview with Adrian Howe Kirsty Duncanson