Elsevier

Aggression and Violent Behavior

Volume 16, Issue 4, July–August 2011, Pages 289-296
Aggression and Violent Behavior

Gender and types of intimate partner violence: A response to an anti-feminist literature review

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.avb.2011.04.006Get rights and content

Abstract

This article presents a feminist perspective on domestic violence that is rooted in an explication of the differences among three major types of intimate partner violence (Johnson, 2008). Theory and research from this perspective is then reviewed to rebut recent attacks on feminist scholarship and policy regarding intimate partner violence.

Research highlights

► IT, VR, and SCV differ dramatically in almost all respects. ► Dutton, Hamel, and Aaronson (2010) seriously misrepresent this feminist perspective. ► Dutton et al.’s literature review distorts the implications of IPV research. ► The empirical literature in fact strongly supports a feminist perspective.

Introduction

The most recent of a series of anti-feminist attacks from Dutton, Hamel, and their colleagues is “The gender paradigm in family court processes: Re-balancing the scales of justice from biased social science”(Dutton, Hamel, & Aaronson, 2010), an ironic title, given the panoply of biases with which it itself is riddled. In this particular article they claim to expose two recent papers (Jaffe et al., 2008, Kelly and Johnson, 2008) as biased and unsupported by research evidence. Responding to this particular attack is useful in itself, but their article also serves as a good example of the substance and tactics of their more general anti-feminist critique. In the process of responding here to their allegations about feminist theory and research, I hope to accomplish two goals. First, I will present a feminist perspective on domestic violence that is rooted in an explication of the differences among the major types of intimate partner violence (Johnson, 2008). Second, theory and research from this perspective will be used to rebut the Dutton et al. claims about what they call “the gender paradigm,” which includes my own work.

Section snippets

A feminist perspective on domestic violence

It is probably useful to begin by saying that there is more than one feminist understanding of the nature of domestic violence, more than one “gender paradigm,” just as there are multiple feminist perspectives on anything. What I will present here is my feminist perspective on the nature of intimate partner violence, a perspective formed primarily from a wide reading of over thirty years of research on “domestic violence,” and informed by feminist perspectives from my home discipline of

The anti-feminist backlash

The Dutton et al. (2010) paper to which I am responding exemplifies all of the general strategies of recent attacks on the progress of the battered women's movement and on the research that confirms that the feminist analysis of “domestic violence” (intimate terrorism) is largely correct.2

Conclusion

So, what's up with these authors? Why the comic book caricatures of the feminist analysis? Why the gross misrepresentations of what Joan Kelly and I wrote in our 2008 article? Why the single-minded focus on alleged evidence that women are as bad as men? In their determination to see what they want to see, they seem to have missed the obvious implications of the call for differentiation among types of intimate partner violence that is the heart of the Kelly & Johnson and Jaffe et al. articles.

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