BiblioVault - Books about Victims of violent crimes

Disabling Relations

Wounded Bodyminds and Transnational Praxis

Sona Kazemi

Temple University Press, 2026

How do we learn to defetishize disability in our everyday lives? In Disabling Relations, Sona Kazemi probes this and other questions that consider how processes and relations of patriarchy, imperialism, and religious fundamentalism, as well as class and ideology, rework the dialectics of disability in transnational contexts.

Kazemi focuses on the disabled dissidents who were incarcerated and tortured by the Islamic regime in the aftermath of the 1979 revolution in Iran, the disabled veterans and civilians wounded during and after the Iran–Iraq War, the disabled survivors of state-sanctioned punitive limb amputation, and the disabled women survivors of acid attacks as a form of gender-based violence. Disabling Relations explains how disabled bodyminds are produced and sustained through the violence of patriarchal, capitalist-imperialist, nationalist, and theocratic social relations. Kazemi uses the theoretical concept of “wounding” as a historical process of becoming and remaining disabled mediated by unequal power relations and “disability consciousness” to show how these survivors come to terms with their disability.

Thinking about critical disability theory in a new way, Kazemi investigates how disability is produced transnationally and the impact that this new theorization can make globally.

In the series Dis/color

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Hogg

A Novel

Samuel R. Delany

University of Alabama Press, 2004

A fearless descent into the darkest corners of human desire and violence.

First written thirty-five years ago and completed days before the Stonewall riots in New York, award-winning author Samuel R. Delany’s Hogg is one of America’s most famous “unpublishable” novels. It recounts three days in 1969 in the life of truck driver and rapist-for-hire, Franklin Hargus. Narrated by his young accomplice, Delaney’s novel portrays an exploration of erotic depravity, a capacious landscape of sexuality that transgresses social and erotic boundaries.

While testing readers’ tolerance, what transfigures the novel into a work of literature is Delany’s refusal, faced with moral anxieties and revulsion, to mutilate or disown his creation. Hogg’s characters wear recognizable human faces, possessing intense loyalty, perverse admiration, and a kind of integrity. Hargus fascinates. He is the embodiment of what society can turn people into, the decaying condition of the human soul.

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Phoenix Zones

Where Strength Is Born and Resilience Lives

Hope Ferdowsian, MD

University of Chicago Press, 2018

Few things get our compassion flowing like the sight of suffering. But our response is often shaped by our ability to empathize with others. Some people respond to the suffering of only humans or to one person’s plight more than another’s. Others react more strongly to the suffering of an animal. These divergent realities can be troubling—but they are also a reminder that trauma and suffering are endured by all beings, and we can learn lessons about their aftermath, even across species.

With Phoenix Zones, Dr. Hope Ferdowsian shows us how. Ferdowsian has spent years traveling the world to work with people and animals who have endured trauma—war, abuse, displacement. Here, she combines compelling stories of survivors with the latest science on resilience to help us understand the link between violence against people and animals and the biological foundations of recovery, peace, and hope. Taking us to the sanctuaries that give the book its title, she reveals how the injured can heal and thrive if we attend to key principles: respect for liberty and sovereignty, a commitment to love and tolerance, the promotion of justice, and a fundamental belief that each individual possesses dignity. Courageous tales show us how: stories of combat veterans and wolves recovering together at a California refuge, Congolese women thriving in one of the most dangerous places on earth, abused chimpanzees finding peace in a Washington sanctuary, and refugees seeking care at Ferdowsian’s own medical clinic.

These are not easy stories. Suffering is real, and recovery is hard. But resilience is real, too, and Phoenix Zones shows how we can foster it. It reveals how both people and animals deserve a chance to live up to their full potential—and how such a view could inspire solutions to some of the greatest challenges of our time.

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Squatter Life

Persistence at the Urban Margins of Buenos Aires

Javier Auyero and Sofía Servián

Duke University Press, 2025

In Squatter Life, sociologist Javier Auyero and anthropologist Sofía Servián detail the diverse and often precarious strategies that Argentina’s urban poor rely on to survive. Blending three years of ethnographic fieldwork and anthropological theory with personal narratives of Servián’s experience growing up and living in a squatter settlement, the authors examine how Argentina’s squatter communities contend with violence and secure necessities like food, land, and housing despite inadequate state support and protection. Auyero and Servián recount the bricolage of tactics these individuals employ to make ends meet, such as relying on highly exploitative jobs, patronage, and networks of reciprocal exchange that can involve illicit activities. Analyzing how these survival strategies intersect with class, gender, and political domination, the authors present a nuanced account of marginality in Argentinian squatter settlements while maintaining a deeply human portrait of survival and persistence.

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Violence and Activism at the Border

Gender, Fear, and Everyday Life in Ciudad Juarez

By Kathleen Staudt

University of Texas Press, 2008

Between 1993 and 2003, more than 370 girls and women were murdered and their often-mutilated bodies dumped outside Ciudad Juárez in Chihuahua, Mexico. The murders have continued at a rate of approximately thirty per year, yet law enforcement officials have made no breakthroughs in finding the perpetrator(s). Drawing on in-depth surveys, workshops, and interviews of Juárez women and border activists, Violence and Activism at the Border provides crucial links between these disturbing crimes and a broader history of violence against women in Mexico. In addition, the ways in which local feminist activists used the Juárez murders to create international publicity and expose police impunity provides a unique case study of social movements in the borderlands, especially as statistics reveal that the rates of femicide in Juárez are actually similar to other regions of Mexico.

Also examining how non-governmental organizations have responded in the face of Mexican law enforcement's "normalization" of domestic violence, Staudt's study is a landmark development in the realm of global human rights.

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The Walking Wounded

Festering and Ricocheting Trauma After Gun Violence

Jooyoung Lee

University of Chicago Press, 2026

A sobering encounter with lives transformed by gun violence and an urgent call to build more comprehensive systems of care for wounded people.

Gun violence is a plague in the United States; even survivors experience suffering that wreaks havoc on their lives and our communities. Although excellent emergency trauma care means that 80 percent of shooting victims do not die from their injuries, surviving is only the first step. Most survivors then find themselves trapped in health care and judicial systems that only amplify their pain, trauma, and uncertainty.

In The Walking Wounded, Jooyoung Lee invites readers into the hospitals, courtrooms, and homes where gunshot victims struggle to rebuild their lives. Drawing from years of fieldwork in Philadelphia, Lee shows how victims’ injuries fester into new problems over time in the absence of meaningful follow-up care. Attempting routine tasks with a wounded body reminds survivors that they are no longer who they used to be—both physically and socially. Lee shows how trauma ricochets through victims’ worlds as their injuries also affect their family and friends. To make matters worse, Lee argues, existing government safety nets place victims into ever more precarious circumstances that compound their suffering.

In the face of health care and judicial systems that fail wounded people, Lee urges a sensible and sensitive rehabilitative process aimed at equipping the walking wounded with ongoing care that aspires for more than mere survival: the regaining of independent lives.

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Youth Violence

Sex and Race Differences in Offending, Victimization, and Gang Membership

Finn-Aage Esbensen, Dana Peterson, Terrance J. Taylor and Adrienne Freng

Temple University Press, 2010

Violence by and against youth continues to be one of the most challenging subjects facing criminologists. In this comprehensive and integrated analysis of the interrelationships of youth violence, violent victimization, and gang membership, Finn-Aage Esbensen, Dana Peterson, Terrance J. Taylor and Adrienne Freng seek to understand what causes youth violence and what can be done about it. Using the results from an inclusive study they conducted of eighth-graders in eleven American cities, the authors examine how the nature, etiology, and intersections of youth violence are structured by both sex and race/ethnicity.

Youth Violence is pertinent to juvenile justice policy considerations. The authors frame their discussion within the public health perspective, focusing on risk factors associated with violent behavior. Thefindings address prevalence and incidence, as well as the demographic correlates and cumulative effects of the risk factors associated with engagement in violence. Ultimately, the theories and research methodologies here are essential for understanding the dynamics of youth violence.

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