An Eye for an Eye: Gender Revanchisme and the Negation of Attachment in Domestic Violence Policy

Abstract

Domestic violence policy and practice occupy a unique, complex, and often paradoxical cultural and legal space. The criminalization of domestic violence stands in stark contrast to greater social tolerance for violence among other family role sets, particularly those involving children. Debates concerning the role of gender in domestic violence emphasizing either male perpetration toward females or broadening the analysis to include mutuality of violence, female perpetration, and same-sex partner violence miss both key latent sociopolitical functions of policy and the greater complexity of gender across other forms of family violence. Harsher criminal penalties for offenders and current Duluth model inspired treatment approaches have not produced any evidence of commensurate declines in domestic violence. We have substituted vengeance for efficacy in our zeal to displace societal responsibility for domestic violence to scapegoated "batterers." KEYWORDS: domestic violence; gender politics; criminal justice; attachment . . .the state has forbidden to the individual the practice of wrong-doing, not because it desires to abolish it, but because it wants to monopolize it, like salt and tobacco.-Sigmund Freud, Thoughts for the Times on War and DeathDomestic violence policy and practice occupy a unique, complex, and often paradoxical cultural and legal space. The criminalization of domestic violence ("domestic violence" in the sense of violence between cohabiting, married, or intimate partners) stands in viewpoint