The Nexus of Domestic Violence Reform and Social Science: From Instrument of Social Change to Institutionalized Surveillance

Abstract

This review examines the relationship between social science research and domestic violence activism. It explores how the feminist conception of domestic violence, as formulated early in the movement, has had a resounding influence on the development of both theory and practice. The review demonstrates how social science research has often followed uncritically the path set out by anti-domestic violence activists. It provides an examination of how studies of the efficacy of legal sanctions fail to raise questions about the consequences of these interventions into private lives. The review also considers how the feminist conception of domestic violence has led to unresolved scholarly debates about the frequency and attributes of women's violence as compared to men's. In addition, it shows that the failure of feminism's explanatory framework to guide theory and practice has contributed to the triumph of a gender-neutral understanding of the problem and its reformulation as intimate partner violence. Consequently, the field has seen the growth of applied social science that has adopted a gender-neutral framework and relied upon the mechanisms of universal screening and risk management to address domestic violence. Finally, the value of ethnographic approaches are considered, particularly in regard to their potential to open the field to broader issues about social control, local culture, and inequality and their relation to the persistence of domestic violence as a social problem.

How Violence Constitutes Order: Consent, Coercion, and Censure in Tanzania

“…However, as more powerful actors incorporated VAW into their agendas, VAW research was increasingly instrumentalized toward the goals of those agendas, rather than the social scientific goal of understanding VAW as a social and political phenomenon (Bumiller, 2010). Practical consequences of the inattention to the ordering nature of VAW are evident in interventions that, ironically, increase the controlling of women (Bumiller, 2010) and re-enforce traditional gender orders (Stanko, 1996). This article builds on, and seeks to contribute to, efforts to restore the sociopolitical to our understanding of VAW.…”

Intimate Partner Violence and Gender A/Symmetry: An Integrative Literature Review

“…4) Articles that meditate on the differences in feminist and family studies (Goicolea et al, 2012), understanding that the feminist explanatory framework, failing to contribute to the theory and practice, made room for the triumph of "gender neutral" approaches (Bumiller, 2010).…”

From sexualized torture and gender-based torture to genderized torture: The urgent need for a conceptual evolution

“…hierarchies as well as its relation to the experience, embodiment and performance of gender (Bumiller, 2010;Jakobson 2014). 4 Rape as an act of torture, a maximum form of aggression, is thus constituted by: an attack on the body whose limits are broken (sexual torture); an attack on the woman, man, or non-binary person in their gendered identity and possibly their sexual orientation (gender-based torture); and, a specific aim to demolish the human being by using multilevel (i.e.…”