For children, domestic and family violence (DFV) involves exposure to violence between important adults in their lives, as well as directly or indirectly experiencing abuse. While DFV adversely affects children, policy and service responses have traditionally rendered children invisible, focusing instead on adult victim/survivors and perpetrators of DFV. Working effectively with families requires recognising children as victim/survivors in their own right, with needs and experiences separate to those of their caregivers. In Australia, and internationally, terms such as ‘intimate partner violence’, ‘domestic abuse’, ‘domestic violence’ and ‘family violence’ are used to explain violence and abuse in intimate, family and ‘family-like’ relationships (e.g. carers, kinship relationships). Throughout this chapter, we use the term domestic and family violence, which brings together ‘domestic violence’ and ‘family violence’ to recognise the range of relationships in which these forms of violence may occur.

By analyzing the topography of Selinous, a colonial foundation of the late seventh century BC, the chapter explores the way in which temple building and sacred architecture became subordinated to urban design. From the sixth century BC onward, Greek cult places and temples were increasingly seen as an expression of the urban rather than the natural landscape. This holds true for altars and temples at the center of cult places, but also for fountain houses that replaced or were built over natural fountains. The sacredness of a place was increasingly represented and communicated through monumental stone architecture. At the same time, the novel use of man-made images in Greek sanctuaries contributed to a radical change in which the presence of the gods was imagined and experienced. All this went along with a shift of power and agency from local groups to urban elites, who had the means to control the restructuring and reorganization of sacred landscapes. The violence of this shift is reflected in the iconography that tends to rationalize and sublimize violence against the non-Greek, non-urban, and non-male.

In Chapter 8, Farahbakhsh’s Zendegi-ye Khosusi (Private Life, 2011) also draws on ways that the political becomes personal. Farahbakhsh not only focuses on the political environment of Iran in the 2010s, but he also highlights the inherent double standards found within government-endorsed sigheh. Highlighting the importance of sigheh marriages and the unsettling balance of the political and the personal, the manipulation of religion, double standards, and gendered inequality, Zendegi-ye Khosusi demonstrates the inimical power of patriarchy to protect and maintain male dominance. The film calls attention to women like Parisa, who are desired and lusted after initially, but as they pose threats and demand equal rights, they have to be eliminated. To complete her eradication from his life and keep his moral corruption a secret, Ebrahim, who initially lusted after Parisa, now uses his agency as an autonomous subject to objectify, victimize, and ultimately murder Parisa. Similar to Afkhami, Farahbakhsh depicts the politicization of the female body and sexuality in the context of sigheh under the Islamic regime. He uses the figure of Parisa to lay bare the religious and political hypocrisy and gender-related double standards inherent in the practice of sigheh.

In Chapter 7, I examine Behruz Afkhami’s Showkaran (Hemlock, 2000), set in 1995. Showkaran depicts Mahmud, a happily married man who finds himself stuck at the junction of religiosity and modernity. Afkhami exposes some key social problems, including sigheh marriages, and how religious regulations are used as a façade to justify social injustice. He sheds light on the double standards that dominate sigheh marriages and dramatizes how the political becomes personal as individuals strive for morality. Through the character of Sima, Afkhami pushes back against the social and moral corruption of the time, which is mapped onto a woman’s body that must ultimately be eliminated. By highlighting the role of sigheh marriages in maintaining the precarious balance of religiosity and modernity, the manipulation of religion, the societal and religious double standards imposed on women, marriage as an institution versus an intimate relationship, and politicization of the personal, Afkhami displays the complex aspects of sigheh marriages and the detrimental effects the practice has particularly on the personal lives of women, but also on society as a whole. Afkahmi portrays Sima who is “socially peripheral” as “symbolically central,” for she poses a grave threat to Mahmud's nekah marriage, and therein lies her power.

Chapter 2 examines Morteza Moshfeq-e Kazemi’s Tehran-e Makhuf (Horrid Tehran), which portrays the corruption of the sociopolitical structure of the country and its impacts on female sexuality, particularly in the context of sigheh and sex work, at the end of the Qajar and early Pahlavi eras. In this novel, we hear the life stories of four female sex workers, among whom two, Ashraf and ‘Effat, reference their sigheh marriages. I argue that Moshfeq-e Kazemi pushes back against the political and social system that supports the practice at that time. By foregrounding the vulnerable socioeconomic status of women, Moshfeq-e Kazemi illustrates the ways that sigheh marriages stigmatize women and allow society to exploit them. I postulate that while these sigheh/sex-worker women are socially marginalized and stigmatized, they occupy a significant space in the social imaginary of Iran that points toward their symbolic and sexual power. I focus on the ways the female body can be a subject of reclaiming power and countering discourses of oppression. Through the embodiment of these sigheh/sex workers, I explore how the female body simultaneously fluctuates as an object of power, a site of social inscription, and a threat to the status quo concerning women’s subjectivity and autonomy.

Chapter 6 explores Sadeq Chubak’s Sang-e Sabur (The Patient Stone), which reflects the chaotic social conditions of the 1930s and includes a criticism of the institution of sigheh. Sang-e Sabur, too, explores the relationship between sigheh and the clerics, and how clerics exploit sigheh women as an income source. Chubak depicts the decadence of the social and religious systems of the country by hinting at the abundance of women contracting sigheh in pilgrimage zones to alleviate the conditions of their poverty. Chubak criticizes the way sex work is disguised under the façade of religion and sigheh. By exposing Gowhar to social violence and subsequent murder at the hands of a psychopath who has decided to purge society of sex workers, Chubak also indicts the social stigmatization and ostracization of sigheh women in Iranian society. This exposure to violence indicates that the patriarchal world in which Gowhar lives is hesitant to grant working-class women, especially sigheh women, the right to control their own sexuality and thus their subjectivity. Hence, Gowhar’s murder can be viewed not only as an act of gendered and sexual discrimination, but also a class-based one – and altogether a violation of her rights as a human.