Scars Across Humanity: Understanding and Overcoming Violence Against Women

Christianity Today 2019 Book of the Year Award, Politics and Public Life

Across the globe, acts of violence against women produce more deaths, disability, and mutilation than cancer, malaria, and traffic accidents combined.

The truth is that violence on such a scale could not exist were it not structured in some way into the very fabric of societies and cultures themselves. It could not continue if it were not somehow supported by deep assumptions about the value of women, or some justification of the use of power. In many cultures such assumptions are reiterated every day in the absence of legal protection for women, or indifference toward issues of human rights.

In Scars Across Humanity, Elaine Storkey offers a rigorously researched overview of this global crisis. From female infanticide and child brides to domestic abuse, prostitution, rape, and honor killings, violence against women occurs at all stages of life, and in all cultures and societies. How and why has this violence become so prevalent? It seems ambitious to hope that we can find an answer to this question, but if violence to women is ever to be eliminated, we need to know what we are up against.

Elaine Storkey is a philosopher, sociologist and theologian, having held posts at the Open University, King's College, London, and the University of Oxford. In 199,7 she became President of Tearfund, and has since been involved in monitoring aid,relief and advocacy work in countries of the Global South. In 2010, she and her husband Alan became founder members of Restored, an organization committed to advocating against violence to women.Her writings include The Search for Intimacy and The Origins of Difference. Her last book, Scars Across Humanity: Understanding and overcoming violence against women, won the Christianity Today 2019 Book of the Year Award, Politics and Public Life.