Grabe, S. (Ed.). (2018). Women’s human rights: A social psychological perspective on resistance, liberation, and justice. Oxford University Press.
Abstract
At a United Nations conference in 1995, nearly 200 countries adopted the Beijing Platform for Action, an international agenda for women’s equality and a major statement of treating women’s rights as human rights. Since that time, violations of women’s human rights have become a widely documented problem across many academic disciplines, international organizations, and activist social movements. Further, violations against women occur unabated despite widespread international commitments to draw increased attention to women’s experiences. Given that a focus on women’s rights was first put forth over two decades ago, the question remains: why do egregious violations of women’s rights continue today? Edited by Shelly Grabe, this volume contributes to the discussion of why women’s human rights warrant increased focus in the context of globalization. Further, it also explores how psychology can provide the currently missing—but necessary—links between transnational feminism, the public discourse on women’s rights, and neoliberalism. Unique to this edited collection, this volume takes a radically different approach to women’s human rights than other disciplines (such as law, for example) by using social psychological theory and, as a result, offers new ideas for the actualization of these rights. In doing so, Grabe and her contributing authors make clear for readers how activist scholarship can make a compelling contribution to the defense of women’s rights. Rather than using examples that have been sensationalized throughout academia and advocacy (i.e. genital mutilation), each of the contributing authors uses examples of specific human rights relevant the world over (rape, sexual orientation, homelessness, civic participation, violence) to make the relevance of psychology to this topic more visible to readers everywhere.