Developing measures of multiple forms of sexual violence and their contested treatment in the criminal justice system

Sylvia Walby is Professor of Sociology and holds the UNESCO Chair in Gender Research at Lancaster University UK. She has worked with Jo Armstrong and Sofia Strid in the Gender Research Group on several projects including gender-based violence against women, the measurement of equality, the comparison of gender equality policies in the EU in the context of intersecting inequalities, and the gendering of the financial crisis, with funding from the EU, the Equality and Human Rights Commission and UNESCO. She has worked with the Home Office in the development of the measurement of domestic violence, sexual assault and stalking in the British Crime Survey, with the Women and Equality Unit in the measurement of the cost of domestic violence, and with the UN in the development of indicators of violence against women. In her book, Globalization and Inequalities: Complexity and Contested Modernities (Sage 2009), she argues that it is important that social science theorises violence as a fourth institutional domain alongside the economy, polity and civil society, in recognition of its importance in structuring inequalities and social relations.