What Do We Talk about When We Talk about Violence Against Women? The Institutionalisation of Depositing Violence Against Women into Social, Economical, Political and Cultural 'Boxes'

During humanitarian responses to violence against women in the Democratic Republic of Congo, representations of this issue have often used the phrase “the rape capital of the world”. In 2011 Romania, following the closing of the two governmental agencies domestic violence, a Romanian MP stated that: “this is how the government is acting in order to transform Romania in a Third World country”. The connection between these instances is, in my opinion, a much used and abused practice of addressing violence against women on the public agenda by framing its’ production through references to what I am calling “repositories of violence”. Thus, discourses on this issue become structurally and culturally violent, instrumentalizing gendered, social, political, cultural, economical categories. In this context, the question we need to ask, is: what do we actually present when we represent violence against women? And, why do we institutionalize repositories of violence?