Introduction to the suite: violence against women and girls and the education of voice

Abstract This article introduces a suite of articles on ‘Violence Against Women and Girls and the Education of Voice’. The suite developed from a one-day conference funded by the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain’s Development Committee. The aim of the suite is not to resolve or settle the problem of violence against women and girls, but rather to acknowledge the difficulties of thinking about sexual violence and to dwell within this difficulty. To do this, we turn to work in the humanities, drawing together four articles that examine questions of sexual violence through history, drama, literature, and philosophical thinking. A theme that echoes through the articles is that of the voice, and the education of voice. As this introduction and the ensuing articles will demonstrate, issues of language—of voice and silence, listening and refusal, harm and denial—are of central importance. Yet these are also at risk of being distorted in the more prominent ways that society is responding to sexual violence. This distortion extends, notably, to ways sexual violence is being responded to in schools and other institutions. For the articles in this suite, education is not to be understood simply as a means of ending sexual violence; and much is lost when we do think in such instrumental terms. Rather, here, the ‘education of voice’ that we propose requires remaining with the space that violence opens and attending to what that space may yet demand of us.