Rannie Hanhardt

In Hanhardt’s book, I found the use of the neighborhood as a unit of analysis quite interesting. Scholarship in general often focuses on the level of individuals, and fails to consider neighborhood effects, trends and changes over time. In my field, Community Psychology, scholars commonly try to connect the individual and system levels of analysis to better understand behavior. Neighborhoods can be conceptualized as a community (though not always). Strategies such as GIS are growing in the field, because they can help understand various community characteristics and complex processes that happen within communities. GIS can be used to examine census data and connect to other data sources. For example, I have been working on a project where we connected police crime data to census data to evaluate effects of a community intervention. Though the police data will always be somewhat biased if the police officers are racist, sexist and homophobic in who they target, examining this data may be a good starting point. GIS is an example of a more modern approach to researching neighborhoods in general to understand the processes that are going on there.

This was my first time reading work explicitly addressing violence against the LGBT community, but in the trauma literature, community violence is becoming an increasingly important construct. In this way, people and especially youth and young people, may be traumatized by the ripple effects of community violence. This is an interesting concept because often violence is conceptualized as being interpersonal, but in this case, violence exposure can be indirect but still be strong enough to influence the psychological outcomes of community members. In the Hanhardt readings, the violence that is discussed is a combination of direct and indirect violence against LGBT populations and the spaces that they occupy.

Hanhardt uses history as a methodology, which is an approach that I am not familiar with from studying violence against women from a Psychological perspective. Perhaps this is because even though such violence has probably always existed, it was not constructed as a social problem until fairly recently. Also, I think there is less of a push towards such an analysis because there is a heavy emphasis in the field to understand what is the state of affairs with violence against women right now and what needs to be done about it.

Hanhardt does quite a good job of examining and trying to unpack complex concepts such as safety, violence and risk. A lot of assumptions that come with these, and as Hanhardt shows, these can change over time. The concept of safe spaces is also an interesting one for women in general, as terms such as safe spaces and violence free zones are becoming more common. Of course, making women both be and feel safer is an admirable goal, but most are assaulted by friends and family and incidents rarely happen in the street or other public spaces. Therefore, even though the streets become more safe for women, it is unclear what effects that would have on violence against women as a whole.