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.