“It’s an Ethical, Moral and Professional Dilemma I Think”

Abstract

This article investigates the experience and construction of women's use of violence in relationships by domestic violence workers in Sydney, Australia. Most workers contextualized women's violence within a critique of the structural powerlessness faced by women in violent relationships. However, the issue of violent women's agency remains an unresolved dilemma for workers. This article recommends the use of a psychosocial approach to understand the social, biographical, and psychodynamic dimensions of women's violence.Keywords domestic violence, empowerment, human rights, research categories, social justice, social work practice, qualitative Women's violence against men in relationships has been the subject of sustained controversy and competing discourses in Australia (Tyson, 2013) with direct impacts on policy and service responses to women in violent relationships. Reflecting its origins in the women's movement (Murray, 2002), the domestic violence sector in Australia has articulated a strong commitment to a sociocultural explanation of DV. This includes acknowledgment of gendered differences in motivation, severity, frequency, and outcomes in relational violence (Braaf & Meyering, 2013) and the differential burden of DV on women than men 1 (National Council to Reduce Violence Against Women and their Children [NCRVAWC], 2009). The current national policy focus on preventing violence against women also emphasizes the disproportionate impact of DV on women within a sociocultural perspective (Our Watch, 2014). However, the proposition advanced by men's rights groups that DV is a gender neutral phenomenon committed by women as often, or to a greater extent, than men has been Downloaded from received sympathetically by conservative legislators (Flood, 2010). Recent DV reforms in the state of New South Wales have included the redirection of funding from feminist to ''gender neutral'' service providers with instructions that DV services accommodate male as well as female DV victims (Browne, 2014). However, there is no evidence of a significant population of battered men denied care by feminist services (Flood, 2010) nor has there been any reported increase in female-perpetrated violence against male partners (see Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2012). Instead ongoing debates over women's use of violence in relationships are indicative of the multiple competing interpretations of DV, with implications for victimized women, the DV sector and community understandings of DV. Recent shifts in Australian public attitudes toward a view of DV as gender neutral suggest that the feminist sociocultural model is less influential than it has been in the past (Webster et al., 2014).Social work practice with victimized women who have used violence therefore remains a highly contentious area of DV work, with pro-arrest DV policies increasingly criminalizing victimized women (Braaf & Sneddon, 2007) particularly in Indigenous communities (Bartels, 2010), despite DV research emphasizing the retaliatory and self-defensive nature of mu...