“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 men¹ (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 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 much of this violence (Johnson, 2010). Perhaps most controversial have been those cases where women inflict serious injury or kill a partner in an attempt to defend themselves and bring DV to an end (Tyson, 2013). Although the subsequent court cases have attracted attention from legal scholars, there is relatively limited research into how women’s violence is understood and responded to in other contexts, such as frontline DV services. Documenting the views and experiences of DV workers with these clients may therefore provide useful insights not only into the response of DV services to the complexities of women’s violence but also into the way that competing discourses and understandings of women’s violence are being negotiated in DV practice. In this article, we examine how eight DV workers and managers in Sydney, New South Wales, reflect on and conceptualize their encounters with clients who disclose violence and their views on the significance of women’s violence in the context of DV. The article begins with a critical review of the academic literature on women’s use of violence in relationships. This will lead to a thematic analysis of interviews with the DV workers who spoke at length about their understandings of women’s use of violence in relationships and their experiences of the responses of the police and legal system. The article concludes by reflecting on the implications of these findings for policy and practice responses to women’s violence and the need for an expanded understanding of women’s agency in the context of violence.

Debates Over Women’s Use of Violence in Relationships

DV is a major public health and human rights issue and a leading cause of injury and death to women in Australia (VicHealth, 2004) and internationally (García-Moreno, Jansen, Ellsberg, Heise, & Watts, 2005). Approximately one third of the Australian women report being struck by an intimate partner in their lifetime (Mouzos & Makkai, 2004). The cumulative social, economic, and health impacts of DV have been estimated to cost US$13.1 billion per annum in Australia (NCRVAWC, 2009). In their overview of the health burden of DV, state public health agency VicHealth (2004) concluded that it is the “leading preventable contributor to death, disability and illness in Victorian women aged 15-44” (p. 10). The study found that DV is responsible for more ill-health and premature death among Victorian women under the age of 45 than other well-known risk factors including high blood pressure, obesity, and smoking.

Violence is also major cause of injury and death to men; however, the perpetrators of injurious violence against men are overwhelmingly other men (Polk, 1999). A representative survey of 17,050 Australians found that men were most likely to be physically assaulted by a male stranger, acquaintance or neighbor, typically in a public place or an outside location (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2012). In contrast, women were most likely to have been physically assaulted by a known person, most often a previous partner, and usually in their own home (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2012). Only 5.4% of the men reported violence from a current or former partner compared to 17% of women. The evidence suggests that male perpetrated relational violence is considerably more injurious in comparison to female perpetrated violence. VicHealth’s literature review (2004) found that women are three times more likely to be injured, five times more likely to need medical attention or hospitalization, and five times more likely to fear for their lives than male victims of relational violence.

In the well-known typology of relational violence offered by Johnson (2010), women’s violence is most often categorized in terms of “situational couple violence” (violent arguments triggered by specific situations and problems) or “violent resistance” (in which a woman reacts violently to protect herself from ongoing battery). Although this may include serious violence, Johnson (2010) explains that it is rare for women to be perpetrators of “intimate terrorism,” which is characterized by power and control as well as violence. These asymmetrical gender patterns in DV prevalence, motive, frequency, severity, and impact have generally been explained by DV services in Australia according to a feminist model, in which male violence is situated within larger structures of gender inequality (Murray & Powell, 2009). However, since the mid-1990s, the feminist grounding of DV services in Australia has come under sustained challenge from neoliberal policy and funding frameworks that have individualized and pathologized DV, deprioritizing the need for social change or whole-of-community responses (McDonald, 2005).

In this policy context, competing discourses and explanations for DV can be attributed legitimacy out of proportion to their evidence base (Hammons, 2004). A number of men’s rights groups in Australia continue to argue that relational violence is not gendered and men victimized by female intimate partners lack adequate recognition (Flood, 2010). This argument finds support in the considerable body of literature claiming that women perpetrate as much, if not more, relational violence than men (Braaf & Meyering, 2013). The evidence for such claims derives from behavioral checklists such as the Conflict Tactics Scale that provides figures on the number of violent acts in relationships (Hamby, 2014). This literature has been criticizing for failing to address the gender differences in the intent, impact, and consequence of relational violence that are consistently found by other research methodologies (Hamby, 2014). Another body of research argues that women’s aggression is more likely to manifest via emotional and verbal rather than physical violence (Muñoz-Rivas, Graña, O’Leary, & González, 2007). However, these are not equivalent public policy or health concerns, since the harms of emotional and verbal aggression are negligible compared to the injuries caused by male physical violence (Muñoz-Rivas et al., 2007).

The context of DV service provision in Australia is characterized by contradictory explanations of DV that attribute different levels of culpability to women known to have engaged in violence in their relationship (McDonald, 2005). A feminist perspective is likely to locate a woman’s violence in the context of her experiences of victimization and gender inequality while a gender neutral perspective sees her as equal in moral and legal culpability with the male partner. This introduces considerable complexity into DV service provision with women known to have used violence. The remainder of this article examines the controversy over women’s use of violence from the perspective of Australian DV workers. It examines how workers situated their experiences of clients who use violence within the broader public debate over DV and negotiated the different meanings attributed to violent women by a range of agencies.

Method

This article is based on semistructured interviews with eight DV workers from four different specialist DV services in New South Wales, including refuges and DV support centers. This was a pilot study undertaken in preparation for a larger project on women’s violence currently under way. All interviewees were female, with six of Anglo-Australian background and two of Middle Eastern background. The women interviewed for the project included DV managers, caseworkers, and counselors.

They had worked in the DV sector for between 5 months to 25 years although most workers had extensive experience (10+ years) in the sector. Participants were recruited via an e-mail that was circulated within participating DV services. The interviews ran for an average of 40 min and were digitally recorded and transcribed by the first author. Participants were asked about their experiences with female clients who have used violence in their relationships and their views on the most appropriate response to this violence. During transcription, all potentially identifying information such as names and places were removed or changed so that it was not possible to identify the participant or the participating service from the transcript. Pseudonyms were assigned to all participants. The transcriptions were analyzed by the first author using thematic analysis, that is, the extraction of common themes in interviews in order to identify patterns, similarities, and differences (Boyatzis, 1998). The process of analysis was informed by a feminist critical realist approach (see Ussher, 2011) that situates the subjective experiences and understandings recounted in the interviews within their social and political contexts, and recognizes the influence of prevailing discourses on violence and gender. This study is based on a relatively small sample of eight participants and this has necessarily limited the scope of the findings of this study, which, given the small sample size, should not be considered indicative of the range of views of all DV workers in Sydney. As a group of DV workers and manages, interviewees were speaking from a specific vantage point within the larger DV response, and it is likely that other responders such as police, child protection workers, or legal professionals would provide different and useful perspectives on women’s violence. So too would women who have used relational violence, who have not been engaged in qualitative research to date and will be interviewed as part of the larger follow-up study. This study provides an important but relatively narrow viewpoint on service responses to women’s use of violence and its findings may not be generalizable to other stakeholders.

This was not a study of women’s violence but rather of the way that DV workers constructed and understood women’s violence, based on their own views and experiences. Hence, the analysis adopted a social constructionist approach that considered how workers’ views were drawn from a range of sources, including personal experience but also their exposure to media and professional discourses. Parton (2003) argues that social constructionist approaches enable social work researchers to examine the relationship between professional practice and dominant discourses in the context of ongoing interactions between workers, clients, and their respective contexts. Such an approach accords with the feminist critical realist framework of the study and problematizes scientific assertions about the “truth” of women’s violence. Instead, this approach emphasizes how the multiple meanings that attend women’s violence are constructed via social processes characterized by differentials in power that impact on social work in direct and indirect ways.

Research Findings

This section reports on how interviewees constructed and articulated their understandings of women’s violence and the key themes that emerged from their interviews. As is evident in other research with DV workers, speaking about women’s use of violence was a sensitive issue for participants (McPhail, Busch, Kulkarni, & Rice, 2007). However, all workers reported at least some contact with women who had disclosed using violence. They described female violence as rare; however, they indicated that, where it occurred, it sometimes challenged their normal moral lens on DV. Felicity discussed how some incidents of violence could prompt herself and her colleagues to check their own reactions when encountering women’s violence:

So [at our service] we generally acknowledge that the person using violence could be either [victim or perpetrator]. But we do, interestingly, have to keep re-checking our thoughts and keep—sometimes we see a police event [where the woman has been violent] and we have to say “Would we think that [the violent person is also a victim]if it was the other way around [and the man had been violent]?”

McPhail, Busch, Kulkarni, and Rice (2007) suggests that women’s use of violence is a poor fit within current feminist explanations of DV, in which violence is normally characterized as an expression of male power. However, this discrepancy was less apparent in this study, where workers distinguished between different kinds of violence according to context and motive. Nonetheless, women’s violence was an issue that was continually being negotiated by workers in their practice as they sought to reconcile a moral stance against violence with an understanding of the background factors that contributed to women’s violence.

Understanding Women’s Use of Violence

The ways in which workers described DV generally conformed, without being prompted, to key distinctions in the literature between coercively controlling violence typified by male perpetrators and women’s retaliatory and defensive use of violence in abusive relationships (e.g., Johnson, 2010). Participants typically distinguished between men’s use of violence from women’s by focusing on the role of power and control. For example, Nina said:

Because I do have clients where, you know, they’re using violence just as much [as their male partner]. But at the end of the day, women’s use of violence is not about abusing the partner and controlling them. It’s about trying to get control of that particular situation, for him to back off and leave her alone.

Some workers stated that women may use nonphysical forms of abuse found in DV, such as emotional abuse. Others recalled female clients who were violent or aggressive in their relationships, although this generally involved “pushes and shoves” rather than the use of violence to intimidate or control. For workers, attempts to control another partner without violence or violence without elements of power and control (what Johnson [2010] called situational couple violence) may be serious relationship issues, but this kind of aggression did not catalyze the crisis situations such as imminent homelessness or threats to life that faced their female clients. Donna said:

So we don’t probably see an awful lot of that [situational couple violence] because usually people come to a service like this when they are fearful and they are unsafe and they want to know what they can do to escape it or one of those sorts of things. But I’ve certainly rung people that we’ve got referrals from the police for where they’ve [the woman] said “Oh no, that’s just something that happens, we just push and shove each other and no I’m not fearful, no I don’t think I’m going to be seriously hurt.”

In this account from Donna, situational couple violence involving both partners could at times come to the attention of police, resulting in a referral to a DV service. She does not dismiss or minimize the problematic nature of this violence or the potential risk to either partner, but she emphasizes the relatively high threshold of intervention for DV services—that is, when the woman is feeling “fearful,” “unsafe,” and looking to “escape.” DV services were generally not resourced or tasked to intervene in violent relationships that did not meet this threshold. This relied, in a potentially problematic way, on women’s subjective evaluations of the severity of their victimization and their sense of culpability for it. Although research on women’s assessment of their own DV risk suggests it is as likely to be accurate as standardized risk assessment measures (Weisz, Tolman, & Saunders, 2000), women may also underestimate their level of risk (Campbell et al., 2003).

When workers spoke about women’s use of serious violence, it was almost always in the context of what they called “fighting back” or the “fight or flight” response. Nina explained:

I think for women, it [violence] is about them taking control of that situation. You know, to prevent him from doing something, to protect herself. So it’s that fight or flight response. You know, they’ve hid and run away or cowered in the corner for so long that they finally think “I’m not going to do this. When does it stop?”.

It has been observed by researchers that women’s use of violence against their partner in self-defense often results in a dangerous escalation of violence (R. P. Dobash & Dobash, 2004; Downs, Rindels, & Atkinson, 2007; Johnson, 2010). This was confirmed by workers. Nina stated that she would never encourage fighting back, as this heightened the risk of further physical harm:

I don’t say that to my clients [to fight back]. I would never put them at further risk, because I know it’s likely to escalate. I know, if she’s trying to control the situation by trying to get him to back off, he’s just going to up the ante, and the likelihood is he’s going to harm her quite seriously.

When workers were asked the reasons why women commit violence, they usually answered by describing the helplessness these women felt due to a lack of family, community, and service support. Women’s violence was therefore framed by workers within the structural dimensions of gender inequality as well as gender norms that stigmatized women who are either victimized or violent. They emphasized how women’s violence should be understood as a last-ditch defense in the absence of protective options or support, driven by broader structural and normative patterns of gender inequality. However, as the following section shows, women’s violence had an important subjective element involving the psychodynamic interplay of various factors within women’s lived experience against a broader backdrop of victimization and disempowerment. The way in which women’s own histories, mental health, and coping strategies informed their responses to abuse and powerlessness appeared to distinguish those women who used violence from those that did not.

Violence as a Resource in the Absence of Alternatives

The constraints and obstacles that victimized women faced to their well-being and safety featured prominently in workers’ explanations of female violence. For example, Donna described clients who had walked for hours to reach a refuge since there were none in their local area, as well as clients who were refused crisis accommodation due to a lack of beds, or because the services did not accommodate older male children or pets. The transition from a refuge to longer term accommodation could involve women relocating to geographic locations with high levels of poverty and social disadvantage, which in turn has an impact on their children. Felicity noted that clients’ children often have behavioral problems as a result of witnessing or experiencing DV and these can be exacerbated by relocation to public housing and schools in low-income areas with other children with similar histories. The poverty that often faces women who chose to leave a violent relationship could, in and of itself, render the woman vulnerable to revictimization. Helplessness and exhaustion set the context for women’s violence in the accounts of workers.

Violence at times featured as a resource that some clients drew on when it was clear that no external agency would intervene to protect themselves or their children. Elizabeth suggested that women’s “protective violence” was often triggered by a threat to children:

That’s often when it happens, if the children are threatened, a woman will often use violence where she’s never used it before to gain back some control.

Workers suggested that women could also use violence in an attempt to impose some semblance of order upon a situation in which they might otherwise feel powerless or out of control. For example, Elizabeth indicated that some clients would use violence to “trigger” a violent response from their partners, since the anxiety of living with the threat of inevitable violence could be diminished by “provoking” the attack. At least, through this act, the woman controlled when the attack took place. She said:

They’re at that point in the escalation of the violence, the cycle, that they know that a violent outburst is going to happen but they don’t know when and they almost provoke—and I don’t want to use that word ‘provoke’—but they feel like that they, they can’t stand the anxiety of not knowing when it’s going to happen anymore and they might, you know, a small argument might start and they might sought of lash out because it’s almost like they want it over and done with.

Such behavior was contextualized by workers within women’s histories of trauma and potentially a lack of emotional or relationship skills. DV clients are disproportionately likely to have histories of childhood neglect and abuse, which increases their vulnerability to abusive men and shapes their coping mechanisms (Kimerling, Alvarez, Pavao, Kaminski, & Baumrind, 2007). Nina suggests that female violence in relationships is often the product of an accumulation of neglect and violence in clients’ lives until they “snap”:

I’ve had other experiences of women where they’ve perpetrated violence, and a lot of these women could be women who’ve gone through our child protection systems. You know, they might have a long history of DV with different partners, so, they get to a point where they do break. They get angry, they’re retaliating, they think that’s how they can manage their safety. I’ve had other clients—like I’ve got a client now, where she threatens to harm him, again she’s threatening violence, because there’s sexual abuse, so she’s had enough of it, so she’s threatening to do something about it. I’ve had women retaliate in violence, so you know, both couples have gone at it at each other, and again that’s been about women trying to take control back off the situation that they’re in, you know, he’s pushed her too far, she’s finally snapped.

The conceptualization of female violence perpetration in terms of “snapping” is a potentially contentious one given the tendency of male DV perpetrators to characterize their violence as a temporary and inexplicable loss of control (Anderson & Umberson, 2001). However, while male violence is linked to notions of male honor and entitlement, workers suggested that women “snapped” in the context of ongoing powerlessness informed by a history of trauma and abuse. Violence was seen as a response to an intolerable sense of crisis that developed in the woman who felt, due to current circumstances and her own past experience, that she had no other opportunities to protect herself or assert control over a dangerous situation. This foregrounds the importance of understanding the subjective as well as biographical and structural factors that inform women’s use of violence in relationships.

Legal Implications of Women’s Use of Violence

When asked about the legal implications of women’s violence, workers articulated anger and frustration about the responses of police and courts. Although not all workers agreed on what the solutions were, most agreed that the approach of the criminal justice system to women’s use of violence was highly problematic. Their responses focused on some key points to be outlined further subsequently, in particular, (a) police attitudes, (b) the over-policing of women’s violence, (c) the backlash against women who use violence, and (d) the unavailability of legal defences.

(a) Police attitudes

Workers indicated that the history of victimization that usually led up to women’s use of violence was often not acknowledged by the court or police without documentation. On this basis, workers said they encouraged their clients to report violence to the police. If the client is then in a situation where they do need to fight back physically, there is an official record of DV, which can protect the woman from criminal charges. For example, Elizabeth discussed a case where her client was jailed for grievous bodily harm when she injured her partner in self-defense. Although the woman had sustained serious injuries on a number of occasions, she had never seen a doctor or reported the assaults to anyone but friends. When she injured her partner while defending herself, she was jailed, as there was no evidence to support her claim that she had previously been seriously harmed. Millicent emphasizes:

… the really, really, great importance of women reporting violence because it’s ok to stand there [after you have defended yourself] and say,‘Well I did it because he’s been bashing me for years’ but there’s no record anywhere else that she’s ever said anything about it to anybody so reporting at it time after time, at least there’s a trail of ‘yep, she’s been putting up with it for so long.’

Although all workers stressed the importance of reporting, they were also underwhelmed by the response of the police and the courts to those reports. Most workers, at some point of the interview, expressed their concern about police attitudes to women’s use of violence and their approach to DV generally. Although some workers believed that police responses to victimized women had improved over time, others indicated that police attitudes were a major obstacle faced by women escaping DV, and therefore one of a contributing factor to women’s use of violence. Kate said:

I find very often that women who do try and make a report, it’s because of the police attitude towards them and their own personal judgment that really puts them off making that report.

If police don’t respond to reports of an abusive relationship, or see the violence in the relationship as mutual, women were faced with few options and may resort to violence in the absence of a protective police response. For example, one worker described a client who lived in fear of an emotionally abusive and threatening ex-partner who eventually did attempt to kill her. The worker felt that, had the woman gone to the police wanting to file a complaint about the death threats she received from him, she would have been turned away for lack of evidence, as it was “only” emotional abuse. However, a sizable proportion of DV homicides are not preceded by an escalating pattern of violence against the woman (R. E. Dobash & Dobash, 2009). Without an adequate police response to prehomicidal threats by the perpetrator, such women are forced to protect themselves.

(b) The over-policing of women’s violence

Workers explained how their clients would find themselves in trouble with police over their violence when they were fighting back against the violence they were receiving. Such police responses were seen by the workers to be excessive, especially when compared to the lack of sanction experienced by the violent partners. Nina described one particular incident in which a client used a knife to threaten her partner after he began assaulting their son, only to have the police support the perpetrator to take an apprehended violence order (AVO) out against her.

I can remember this woman who came through the service with a 10-year-old boy. You know, the police had been called out to the property numerous times for DV, perpetrated on her, on violence against her and her child. But then they responded to a call out, one particular incident, where she picked up a knife and threatened to stab him [her husband], because he was physically laying into her, but he was actually laying into the boy this time, and using that to punish her. So she picked up a knife and literally held it to his throat and threatened him. I think the anger took over and she finally just snapped. She didn’t do anything, but she threatened it, and when the police called out, they took out an AVO against her … when they took her back to the police station to charge her, they saw that there was a DV history there. So they didn’t charge her, but they did take an AVO out against her.

For Nina, the AVO was an overreactive response to women’s use of violence that contrasted with the lack of police responses to the violent male partner. Two other workers, Elizabeth and Nina, spoke passionately and at length on this issue. Elizabeth explained that in her 25 years working in women’s services, she has only seen two men jailed on AVO breaches, one of these after seven breaches and an attempted murder. Even then, he only served 6 months of a 1-year jail sentence. Nina stated that she has never seen a violent offender sentenced to prison where his lawyer has not had him released within the hour. Nina spoke of cases involving multiple AVO breaches, along with other charges such as drink driving and other aggravated assault charges. These men generally received community service orders or good behavior bonds. Neither of these measures are supervised and, since a good behavior bond is not a criminal conviction, it doesn’t go on the offender’s record. Nina explains that this teaches these men that they can “get off scott-free,” and she questions: “Why wouldn’t they do it?”. For Millicent, male violence has been normalized by police in a way that women’s violence has not, leading to asymmetrical policing of women’s retaliation that makes male perpetration invisible:

Most of the time my experience has been because they’ve [the woman] had enough or he hits her and they hit back and often get into terrible trouble over it … and if you retaliate then you’ll get charged, you know, regardless of whether the perpetrator’s charged or not, you’ll get charged if you retaliate.

(c) The backlash against women who use violence

Most workers were of the opinion that the over-policing of women’s violence is part of a social backlash faced by women who fight back against violent partners. Workers felt that women who breached norms of femininity by resisting male violence were particularly likely to be the target of negative police or judicial responses. Nina reflected that:

Not all of our DV victims are the meek, quiet woman who doesn’t speak up for herself, you know. And I think sometimes police struggle with that because they think,‘Well you hit him. You threatened him. Why did you pick up that knife or that axe? You know, why did you do that?’ but it doesn’t say that just because they’re a victim of violence they actually have to put up with it. And that’s the hard part, and I don’t think our laws kind of recognise that or support that.

Workers found it frustrating that women are criticized for staying in violent relationships and not fighting back at all, however, when they do fight back, they are seen as offenders. Donna linked this back to a misguided notion of female equality, explaining that police see arresting women who use violence as “an equality thing.” Donna also had concerns surrounding how this backlash will continue to affect the help available to women:

[After she’s arrested for violence] then they’re [the police] much more reluctant to provide a supportive service to that [woman]—and particularly if the next time around she’s the victim. They go “Oh yeah, she’s the victim this time, but what about last time?”.

Feminist criminologists have long observed the “double deviance” that adheres to violent women in contact with the police and criminal justice system (Heidensohn, 1991; Smart, 1976), who are liable to be seen both as law-breaking citizens and as unfeminine or perverse women. Carlen (1990, p. 110) explains that prevailing gender stereotypes can result in violent women “being judged less on the seriousness of their offences and more on the extent to which their lifestyles violate conventional notions of women’s proper place.” In the case of women who use violence in their relationships, workers in this study explained how this process of gendered stigmatization could, for the police, obscure and even eclipse the threat that the male partner posed to her.

(d) The unavailability of legal defences

Many of the attitudinal issues that workers identified among police and courts were seen to be encoded in the available legal defences to violence and homicide (see Tyson, 2013). The terms “provocation” and “self-defence,” which are both legal defences to murder, were often referred to by workers without prompting. Although some workers referred to self-defence in a more general way, others spoke specifically about the legal defence, and it’s unavailability to women who are forced to use violence in their relationships. Catriona remarked:

You know, the defences we’ve got is either a self-defence and if there’s no imminent threat at the time that she does that then she doesn’t meet that criteria, but nobody’s taking any account that like, this woman who nearly 60 years of her life was subjected to that, that she finally lost the plot!

Although there is not the space in this article to address the complexities of women’s access to legal defences against homicide, it is the subject of a burgeoning body of research and scholarly debate in Australia (e.g.,Tyson, 2013). It is, however, important to note that the gender neutral and decontextualized model of violence which effaces many of the practical challenges faced by victimized women, as described by workers in this study, has been codified in Australian law and legal practice, despite long-standing recognition in DV practice of the specificities of women’s violence against men. Workers suggested that the operation of the criminal justice system continued to legitimize the stigmatization of their clients as unfeminine, unhinged or even predatory and malicious.

Service Responses to Women’s Violence

When asked about the appropriate response to women’s use of violence, workers usually gave a deep sigh before answering. Different workers had different views on the degree of women’s culpability for violence, and the typical response was a conflicted one. Workers understood that many women were only committing violence out of desperation and that they did not have access to helpful or protective services. Many of the workers commented on the lack of understanding found in the criminal justice system and that this needed to be increased dramatically. However, workers also felt that women who commit serious violence such as murder should be held accountable. Felicity’s response was typical:

And so it, the most appropriate response is to understand the psychological impact of the abuse they’ve lived with, and then determine I think what, capacity she had to make another choice … I think what else can you do when you have a Crimes Act that says you don’t kill people? And it’s like us saying to [male perpetrators] “Violence is wrong and is absolutely not ok and you must stop doing it”, and knowing that he’s been sexually abused and had his head put through the door by his father or his mother and grown up with all of this trauma. So it’s us also saying to him, you know, “There needs to be some accounting for that [the history of trauma], but it’s not ok to do that [DV]”. So how do we say to women, “Ok, we need to account for that [the history of trauma], but it’s not ok to kill him”. So it’s incredibly, it’s a dilemma. It’s an ethical, moral and professional dilemma I think.

In effect, Felicity argued that violence could not be condoned in any circumstance but nonetheless it was circumstance that often made violence explicable and understandable: for female as well as male perpetrators. One worker, Anisa, was something of an outlier of the study, in that she strongly believed that men and women commit equal amounts of violence in relationships and are equally responsible for that violence. Unlike the other workers, she did not believe that background factors, such as prior victimization, should have any bearing on the prosecution of a woman who has used violence or killed an abusive husband. To the contrary, Anisa stated that a woman who could kill her husband was surely strong enough to have left him:

If she has been suffering domestic violence for many years, and if she’s got the strength to do something like that [murder the perpetrator], I’m pretty sure she’s got the strength to try and escape and, you know, live a life free from him.

Anisa was the youngest worker to be interviewed in the study and had the least experience, having recently graduated from university with a degree in psychology. Given the contrast between her views and those of other workers, her statements illustrate how the “professionalization” of DV work is drawing in a new generation of workers without a background in the women’s movement to a gender neutral model (see also Hammons, 2004; McDonald, 2005). Other workers in the study voiced concern about the type of assistance that women living with DV may receive from workers whose focus on individual culpability and “gender neutrality” overlooked the serious and systemic issues facing victimized women. Felicity commented:

We still consistently hear people [DV workers] say “Why doesn’t she just leave? I offered her a refuge, she didn’t go” … If I said to you “Pack up everything you own in two hours, and you may never see any of your other belongings again, and just get out”, would you go? Would that be a challenge?”.

Discussion

Women’s use of violence was necessarily a difficult issue for DV workers to speak about. Their practice and professional judgment was informed by a prevailing anti-violence sentiment that linked violence to the wrongful exercise of power; a sentiment that came under challenge when disempowered and victimized women used violence. This apparent contradiction has been foregrounded by men’s rights groups and advocates of gender neutral approaches to DV to undermine feminist service frameworks. However, for the workers in this study, women’s violence did not disqualify a gendered understanding of DV, but rather prompted them to examine the shifting role of violence as an expression of both power and powerlessness. This leads away from purely structuralist accounts of DV in terms of male power toward a more nuanced understanding of how inequalities between men and women can shape women’s life histories, circumstances, and subjective experience in a manner that can give rise to women’s violence.

This is a different model of violence than what prevails in policing and the criminal justice system or in sociological frameworks that tend to explain violence in terms of masculine conflicts over status and honor (i.e., Messerschmidt, 1993). Female-centric models of violence such as those developed by Swan and Snow (2006) have tended to synthesize the sociological and the psychological, emphasizing how women’s violence is shaped by their history of victimization, subsequent coping strategies, present life situation, and factors such as race and class. Johnson (2010) also provides an expanded gender framework that explains women’s violence through an integration of sociological and psychological factors. Workers in this study drew extensively on these frameworks to make the links between women’s violence and feminist accounts of DV more broadly. They found Johnson’s (2010) typologies, in particular, useful in discriminating between the gendered differences in violence perpetration.

However, the question of agency, and the fact that many women don’t resort to violence despite the presence of multiple precipitating factors, is not resolved by these sociological and/or psychological models. This remained a troubling issue for workers in this study who were unclear why some women turned to violence in circumstances that others did not, which raised but did not resolve questions about violent women’s culpability. For one worker, Anisa, violence was a choice freely made by women who must be held responsible for that decision regardless of their background or history. A similar stance was evident in many of the police and court interventions described by workers. Such individualized notions of responsibility and decontextualized understandings of “choice” tended to stigmatize violent women in multiple ways; as women who “chose” a violent relationships but then chose to use violence instead of leaving, thus breaking the law but also breaching stereotypes of appropriate femininity and ideal victimhood.

Research with male DV perpetrators has addressed the question of why some men turn to violence but most don’t, even where multiple risk factors are present (Jefferson, 1994). Theorists such as Jefferson (1994) and Gadd (2000) advocate the use of a psychosocial framework, in which sociological and psychological accounts of violence are supplemented by subjective and psychoanalytic perspectives. Using a psychosocial approach, Gadd (2000) examines how men’s experiences of the internal contradictions and anxieties of masculinity and sexuality, against a backdrop of gendered, classed, and racialized structures, can lead to violence against women for some men but not others. He situates the psychodynamics of violence within the interplay of subjective, biographical, and social factors. Psychosocial theory has not been applied to women’s use of violence in relationships, but it may offer new insights into women’s pathways to violence and provide a more detailed account of violent women’s agency than is currently offered by prevailing feminist models, or abstract and punitive notions of individualized responsibility. In particular, a psychosocial approach to women’s relational violence may offer an integrated perspective on the interaction between structural “background” risk factors for violence and the subjective “foreground” of victimized women’s lived experience. The larger research project for which this study was a pilot will be interviewing women who have engaged in relational violence with the aim of understanding their experiences from a psychosocial perspective.

The relatively small sample size of this study limits its generalizability but our findings provide insights into the way that DV workers construct their understanding of women’s violence. The workers’ accounts documented here emphasized their critical but constructive engagement with various discourses on violence to formulate their explanations for women’s violence and articulate their experiences as practitioners within a reflexive feminist framework. Workers described a set of concerns that must be worked out in practice on a case-by-case basis, in which theory and practice retained a constructive relationship with one another. For DV workers, this was indicative of a stance that aimed to prevent violence by understanding the factors that contribute to it, in order to encourage women affected by violence (as victims, perpetrators, or both) to pursue violence-free lives.

Nonetheless there was a stark contrast between the complexity and depth of need evident in the circumstances of women who used relational violence and the relatively constrained budgets and therefore service options of many DV services. Workers described the distorting effects of gender oppression and cumulative trauma on women’s subjective experience and decision making, which for some women prompts a violent response to abuse. This foregrounds the need for longer term care and support options for women with histories of complex abuse as an important supplement to the practical and crisis-orientated assistance provided by the DV sector. At a time when specialist women’s health and welfare services in are being defunded in New South Wales, we would argue that more investment and expertise are required to meet the long-term needs of victimized women to address the psychological impacts of abuse and powerlessness. Gender neutral frameworks that do not recognize the specificity of women’s needs are therefore not “neutral” at all but rather have targeted and negative impacts on women whose needs are excluded from recognition within the paradigm. This remains an endemic problem for women with complex histories of trauma within health and welfare systems that are generally unresponsive to them, resulting in ongoing vulnerability and repeated presentations to services (Salter & Breckenridge, 2014). This article argues that, far from being ideological, an expanded and flexible feminist approach, integrating psychosocial approaches and longer term support options, emerges as the most appropriate and effective response to women’s use of violence in relationships.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Note

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