MSW 521 MODULE 7 (DISCUSSION 1)

Module 7 Role of Social Worker by Mass Violence and Setting Explain how situated action can be used as a framework for understanding the

categories of women who were perpetrators in the Rwandan genocide.

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situated action Understanding women's participation in genocide places greater emphasis on women's socialization and the social situations in which they act rather than the biological or

psychological determinants of participation. Specially, we focus on women's perpetrator's

constrained agency, meaning that we consider both their decisions to violence as well as social

structures and other external limitations to participation. For instance, many of the women

perpetrators mentioned in the previous section exerted agency in their decisions to act. Some

killed more than others, and some participated solely of their own volition. Yet, this agency was

constrained by entrenched gender norms and expectations that limited women's exposure the

violence and, in turn, opportunities to perpetrate harm. Structural constraints facing women in

1940sGermany. Who was expected to devote the majority of their efforts toward raising

patriotic Aryan enactment children. Likewise, hierarchical gender norms in 1994 Rwanda

socialized women to spend the majority of their time in and around the home, tending to their

farms and overseeing the housework and childcare. a model of situated action informs our

analysis of women perpetrators of genocides in Rwanda. To be clear, situated action

frameworks have typically been applied to understanding women's participation in crime. For

instance, it highlights and extends previous work to illustrate how women's involvement in

street crime should be construed as situated action, suggesting that theories of women's

participation in criminal activity must account for womens agency and their structural

positionality. Specifically, Miller argues that men and women choose to perform one of several

masculinities and femininities to which they are exposed. Differing social contexts, such as gang

membership or genocide, allow for, encourage, or preclude the enactment of particular gender

norms. Recognizing gender as fluid and context-dependent is critical to account for the nature

and diversity of women's criminal offenses. Further, it allows for concept and disaggregation of

agency and structural constraints. Women do not commit fewer violent criminal acts because

they are the passive recipients of static, deterministic gender roles. Rather, with every social

act, women draw from a multitude of gender schemas that are limited by restricted occupancy

of hierarchical social position and unequal access to resources. In this sense, gender is a

powerful factor that structures all social action, including the perpetration of crime and, in our

case, the crime of genocide.Thus, we argue that is particularly productive to exmine how

gender differently influences the ways men and women participate in genocide. Gender norms

in every country articulates, reflect socially assigned, expected roles on the basis of perceived

membership in implicitly natural sex groups. To asses how notions of gender in Rwanda may

have uniquely affected womens opportunities to participate in the genocide, we turn to a brief discussion of women's status in the country in the years leading up to the violence.