Book Review: Gender and Violence in Haiti: Women’s Path from Victims to Agents by Benedetta Faedi Duramy

Abstract

Over the past two decades, international law has made great strides in recognizing and addressing gender-based violence. Sexual violence has become the dominant lens through which international law views gendered harms. In international criminal law, rape and sexual enslavement have been criminalized and prosecuted. Sex trafficking has become a global concern, and the topic of proliferating international and national legislation. Though these harms are real and powerful, the narrow focus on sexual and gender-based violence can obscure other harms experienced by women and similar harms experienced by men.

The title of Prof. Benedetta Faedi Duramy’s book, Gender and Violence in Haiti: Women’s Path from Victims to Agents, demarcates a more nuanced approach that explores the roles women play not only as subjects but also as perpetrators of violence. The book contextualizes sexual violence, situating it within a cycle of inequality that begins by requiring young girls to be household servants and ends with the nearly complete exclusion of women from politics. Prof. Duramy’s in-depth case study contributes both substance and method to the burgeoning literature on gender violence and international law.