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Diana E. H. Russell, Ph.D.
Videos and Audio

VIDEOS AND AUDIO RECORDINGS 

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VIDEOS

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THE VITAL RELEVANCE OF FEMICIDE TO DOMESTIC VIOLENCE

This is a 25 minute video of my speech at the first plenary session on femicide at the annual National Coalition on Domestic Violence (NCADV) in Denver, Colorado, in July 2012. Speeches by two others have been omitted. My goal was to urge the members of NCADV to adopt the term femicide.
 
"Femicide" is the term that I first publicly advocated in 1976 to refer to the killing of females by males because they are female as a feminist alternative to the terms homicide and murder -- that invisibilize these lethal crimes. Just as the phrase "racist murders" -- as opposed to "racial" murders -- highlights the racism involved in some homicides, resulting in stiffer sentences for the perpetrators, adoption of the terms "femicide" and "intimate partner femicide" should mobilize activists to insist on laws to effect a similar result..
 
Although all who work in movements to combat domestic violence have included the murder of women by their partners in their conception of these crimes, calling them femicides would more effectively highlight these mens' misogynist motivation when they commit these hate crimes. When feminist activism in Chile resulted in the Government legislating against femicides, the number of intimate partner femicides decreased significantly because husbands and male partners felt fearful of being accused of committing femicide.
 
It is important to recognize that femicides are also perpetrated by strangers, acquaintances, neighbors, employers, johns, and other family members. "Intimate partner femicides" are the most extreme form of domestic violence. They are also on the extreme end of a continuum of the sexist terrorization of women and girls including rape, torture, mutilation, sexual slavery, incestuous and extrafamilial child sexual abuse, and physical and emotional battery. Whenever these forms of terrorism result in death, they become femicides.
 
This herstoric session of the NCADV devoted to "intimate partner femicide" will hopefully be the first of many more as this term is increasingly recognized as the powerful political organizing strategy that it has proven to be in many Latin America countries.
 
 
 

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FEMICIDE AND ITS CONNECTIONS TO DOMESTIC VIOLENCE

This is the same video as above, but it includes at the begining a 15 minute speech by Dr. Robert Brannon awarding me the NOMAS BrotherPeace Award for 2012. The full text of his speech is below the video.  (This is a 43 minute video.)

 

 

2012 BrotherPeace Award: Dr. Diana Russell
-- Presented by Dr. Robert Brannon
 
The Ending Men's Violence Network of NOMAS is concerned with all forms of violence by men, particularly in the context of sexism and patriarchal privilege. The EMV periodically awards its National BrotherPeace Award to an individual who has made significant lifetime achievements in combating Men's Violence.
 
We are proud this year to name as the 2012 BrotherPeace recipient a woman who truly personifies those words:  whose entire career, of 40 years and continuing, has been focused on combating violence against women; a radical feminist scholar, and a world renown scientist, Dr. Diana Russell.
 
Born is South Africa in 1938, she was educated first there, then in London, then in the US at Harvard for graduate study.  Her first book, 37 years ago in 1975 was on rape, and made a key theoretical contribution.  Rather than being “deviants,” she argued that rapists were actually going-along and conforming, to deeply established misogyny and male sex role dynamics.  It was a ‘figure - ground’ kind of insight, which helped to transform how social science understood rape.
 
Much more was soon to come.  In 1977 she began planning, and applied and received funding, and in 1979 carried out, what would later be recognized as one of the best and most important empirical studies in the history of social science.  It was an interview survey of a perfect random sample of all the adult women of all ages in a large city, with carefully trained female interviewers, closely matched to the respondents.  The interviews approached the issues of rape, and other transgressions, in the most thoughtful, careful way that had ever been attempted, with numerous careful probes, without using the chilling word “rape”, which so many avoid and mis-understand... and only later deciding if a rape had occurred, by matching what each woman said happened with the exact legal definition.
 
The results were startling. Twenty-four percent of all the women reported at least one experience which matched the legal definition of rape. Only seventeen percent  of the rapes had been by total strangers; eighty-three were by men whom the victim already knew.  Less than ten percent of the rapes had ever been reported, and almost none had resulted in an arrest.
 
The original report of this unique study was in 1982 , and over the next four years followed three exceptional full length books detailing the results of the research.  Rape in Marriage in 1982 was the first scholarly book ever published on this subject.  In 1984 came a volume that summarizes all the basic findings and methodology, one of the best accounts of rigorous feminist social science ever published, and the book to look for to best understand  this historic scientific work: a Sage paperback titled: Sexual Exploitation: Rape, Child Sexual Abuse, and Workplace Harassment.  In 1986, this unique and unmatched data-set would yield still another treasure. The Secret Trauma: Incest in the Lives of Girls and Women was the first scientific study of incestuous abuse ever conducted.  In recognition of both its topics significance and the impeccable quality of the research,  The Secret Trauma was awarded the C.  Wright Mills Award, perhaps the most prestigious prize in all social science.
 
Incredibly, even now, many years after these data were collected, because of the unprecedented quality of this study of sexual assault in a large natural urban population, they remain our best-available scientific estimate of the prevalence of rape in women’s lives.
 
It is remarkable that more than 40 years after Dr. Russell conducted this innovative research, of no other scientist, anywhere in the world, has conducted an empirical rape-prevalence research study of equal methodological rigor and thus, factual validity.  That is true even of the U.S. government, which still cannot conduct interviews as well as Russell and her team did decades ago, and in fact spends vast sums of money, disseminating false and misleading statistic about rape, which harm women by vastly underestimating and distorting the problem.
 
For most scholars these theoretical and empirical triumphs would be more than a lifetime’s achievement, but Diana Russell was just getting started.  In a series of new articles and books, she fearlessly attacked the complex issue of pornography.  Her 1983 Anthology Making Violence Sexy: Feminist Views on Pornography was the best collection since Take Back the Night, and contains a gem by Russell herself, “The Experts Cop Out”, detailing how the scientific evidence of pornography’s harms was minimized, and obfuscated, by the male researchers who testified to Congress.
 
Russell’s wide-ranging analysis of violence, and of movements to combat it, have led her into many new directions, always with first-rate scholarship.  Her book on how patriarchy fuels the nuclear arms race, Exposing Nuclear Phallacies, was named an outstanding contribution in 1986.  Having been an activist in Africa in her youth, Diana returned to South Africa in the 1980’s and interviewed anti-Apartheid women, resulting in her book, Lives of Courage: Women for a New South Africa, of which Desmond Tutu said “I fairly burst with pride that South African soil has produced such indomitable women, and not least, the author herself.”
 
The subject of the Plenary session this morning is the concept of Femicide.  Russell first spoke this term publically in 1976, and then in 1992 co-edited the first-ever anthology on the subject, Femicide: The Politics of Woman Killing.  This was followed in 2001 by Femicide in Global Perspective.  The term femicide, which has still not been widely used in the United States, has electrified the front-line feminists in many other countries, and led already to new legislation against the nightmare of woman-killing in eight different countries around the world.
 
Many scholars of Dr. Russell’s fame and eminence tend to remain a bit “aloof”...  from the grimy, grass-roots struggles against sexism and its agents, which front-line feminists must fight day by day.  It especially heartening that such a celebrated social scientist as Dr.  Russell is also a radical feminist, which she has demonstrated in street marches and militant non-violent protests.  Her feminist activism, she reports. has so far led to being arrested three times in the U.S. and twice more in other countries.
 
Catharine MacKinnon has said:  “None of the... advances in understanding, documenting, and opposing violence against women is this country, including my own work, would have been possible without her ground-breaking studies and scholarly publication.”
 
NOMAS is delighted to award this tangible memento of the 2012 National BrotherPeace Award, for outstanding lifetime achievement in combating violence against women, to Dr. Diana Russell.  
    

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THE ORIGIN AND IMPORTANCE OF THE TERM FEMICIDE

This video starts with Professor Esther Rothblum's Introduction of me on Dec 1, 2011, before I delivered my 22-min speech on "The Origin & Importance of the Term Femicide." I wrote this lecture for a Conference in Amsterdam on Dec 10, 2011, titled Stop Femicide! that was organized by Kurdish women (now postponed til Feb 2012), and for the first Women's Hearings in Cambodia titled "True Voices of Women under the Khmer Rouge Regime on Sexual Violence," on Dec 7 & 8, 2011. 

I began my speech by describing the origin of the feminist term femicide, how I defined, then later redefined it. I provided the titles of two anthologies on femicide that I co-edited as part of my largely one-woman campaign to urge feminists in the US to adopt the term femicide.  While my efforts were largely unsuccessful, I was invited to speak about femicide at a seminar in Juarez, Mexico, in 2004. There reknowned Mexican scholar and Congresswoman Marcela Lagarde, who had initiated the seminar,  declared "Sometimes a book comes along that changes history, and Dr. Russell & Jill Radford's book Femicide: The Politics of Woman Killing (1992) is such a book!" Together with other women leaders, she succeeded in disseminating this term in other regions of Mexico, as well as in other Latin American countries. Adoption of the term femicide there inspired many Latin American feminists to found organizations to combat the epidemic of femicides perpetrated there. Lagarde translated the term femicide into Spanish as feminicide & feminicidio. In 2005, she changed her definition of feminicide. I provide several criticisms of her redefinition of this term in my speech.

 

 

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Prof. Diana E. H. Russell Explains Her Theory of the Causal Relationship Between Pornography & Rape

This is a six minute video of me explaining my theory and some of the scientific evidence that substantiates that the viewing of pornography as a cause some males to rape women and/or girls on the Penn & Teller TV show. I also explains my theory at length in my book, Against Pornography: The Evidence of Harm (available from Amazon.com). I risked being sued by pornographers for breech of copyright laws by including over 100 examples of porn in Against Pornography for which I didn't get permission to publish. Check it out!

 

 

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AUDIO RECORDINGS

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AUDIO INTERVIEW OF DIANA E. H. RUSSELL ON GENDERTALK.COM'S WEB RADIO DISCUSSING THE LAKIREDDY BALI REDDY SEXUAL TRAFFICKING CASE

hosted by 

 Nancy Nangeroni  &  Gordene O. MacKenzie

Program # 264, June 26, 2000 

http://www.gendertalk.com/real/251/gt264.shtml

TIME

TOPIC

 

The 23-minute interview with Diana E.H. Russell is at 1:09 to 1:32. 

(Instructions on how to listen to the radio show are below this introduction.)

 

1:09:00

 

MP3
~20MB 
LISTEN 
Rt-click to download
RealAudio 
DOWNLOAD
~5MB
     

Diana Russell, is an internationally renowned feminist scholar, author, speaker, and activist who has dedicated her life to stopping violence and sexual abuse against women and girls. Her many authoritative books on these topics include Against Pornography: The Evidence of Harm, "Making Violence Sexy", "The Secret Trauma: Incest in the Lives of Girls and Women" (winner of the most prestigious award in Social Sciences), and "Sexual Exploitation: Rape, Child Sexual Abuse, and Workplace Harassment".

In the following radio program on Gendertalk in June 2000, Dr. Russell is interviewed about her role in initiating and maintaining a boycott of the Berkeley restaurant owned by Mr. Reddy -- a wealthy trafficker and sex salver of girls from India for 15 years.

Lakireddy Bali Reddy, 62, the richest landlord in Berkeley, after UC Berkeley, was arrested in 1999 after being prevented by police officers from escaping the crime scene with 3 of his sex slaves. Two of his sex slaves had been rendered unconscious by carbon monixide poinsoning in one of his apartments where he kept them in one room. Had Reddy called an ambulance in a timely fashion instead of trying to escape, one of these girls, who was pregnant, would almost certainly have survived. Reddy was free on 10 million dollars bail at the time of this interview. Learn  Learn more about this horrendous case by carefully following the instructions below.

1:32:00

End

MP3
~20MB 
LISTEN 
Rt-click to download
RealAudio 
DOWNLOAD
~5MB

INSTRUCTIONS TO LISTEN TO THIS INTERVIEW:

LEFT CLICK ON THE "MP3 LISTEN" TEXT BOX TO THE LEFT.

(If a single click doesn't work then double-click on it.)

A page will open on which a narrow oblong panel appears, with a grey bullet at the beginning. An interview of another guest will begin. Click on the bullet and drag it over to the right about 3/4 of the way over to listen to Dr. Russell's interivew.

Make sure your computer speakers are turned on and that your volume is up high enough to hear the interview. Enjoy!

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Full information & updates on this case are on this site DianaRussell.com. Click HERE.

Link to original interview: http://www.gendertalk.com/real/251/gt264.shtml

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