Abstract
Violence against women is an area of feminist criminology so active that it has its own journal and is seen as an anchor issue in the field. That said, is there a need for another volume to review and integrate the literature in this area with literally dozens of books, some classics, already published on this topic? Reading DeKeseredy’s monograph, Violence against Women, the answer is a definitive yes. This volume is a unique addition to the field. First and foremost, it focuses on what is known about the men who perpetrate violence against women. Second, after exploring the horrific dimensions of this abuse, he points to the normalized but astonishing lack of urgency about violence against women, particularly in the mainstream media and among local and national policy makers, and asks why.
For starters, despite the huge volume of research in this area, most of the work focuses on the extensiveness of victimization, the consequences of victimization, and gendered issues of prevention and intervention. As important as these issues are, DeKeseredy correctly notes that people, particularly in the United States, which he dubs the “world capital of psychological-mindedness” (p. 61), psychological explanations tend to dominate discussions of crime causality, particularly in the area of violence against women. DeKeseredy believes these individual-level explanations (think “anger management”) tend to trump sociological explanations that focus attention on larger structures and beliefs that support (and encourage) violence against women. Like Bowker (1987) before him, he points to the pornography industry as a key example of cultural support for violence against women, since so many women’s accounts of abuse include efforts of abusive partners to “get them to imitate pornographic scenarios” (p. 66). This industry has grown exponentially since the arrival of the internet and boasts revenues (estimated at $97 billion in 2006) topping those of Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and eBay (p. 64). DeKeseredy contends that pornography supports a “strikingly cruel culture” and “often serves as a training manual for assault” (p. 66). He is perplexed by a culture that would prohibit the abuse of animals in video and film but sees no problem providing hotel guests across North America with access to violent misogynistic pornography for a discrete room charge.
Exploring the critical role played by “male peer support” in the abuse of women (p. 70), he focuses on how having friends who “verbally encourage” the abuse of women supports woman abuse. DeKeseredy places violence against women in a patriarchal context, noting that the “ideology of family patriarchy” (p. 73) provides vital cultural support to abusive men. A part of this ideology, for example, is the notion that masculinity is “damaged” by separation or divorce, which allows abusive men to “lash out” at women they can no longer control. These angry expressions have shown up in a number of mass homicides of women, including the 1989 Montreal Massacre.
DeKeseredy keenly understands the politics of defining and measuring violence against women. He focuses particular attention on the widely used Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS), which he contends “situates abuse only in the context of settling disputes or conflicts” (p. 50). Used in literally hundreds of studies, the original CTS failed to measure forms of violence that abusive men use against their partners such as stalking, isolation, strangulation, and sexual assault (p. 49). More importantly, the scale, even in its revised form, cannot measure the “context, meaning and motive” for any violent act, despite volumes of evidence indicating that men commonly use violence to control, whereas women use violence in self-defense.
These seemingly arcane methodological disputes about a measurement scale are extremely consequential, as this volume documents. For example, Statistics Canada reported that 7% of women and 6% of men reported committing “at least one incidence of intimate partner violence” in 2004 (pp. 46-47). “Symmetry” findings like these have used to justify shifts to degendered phrases like “intimate partner violence” or “domestic violence.” More importantly, they are a staple of larger political backlash against feminism (and the movement for women’s equality). By constructing women as just as “violent” as men, conservative politicians, often egged on by “father’s rights” groups, begin dismissing any further need for gender reform and have successfully lobbied against initiatives such as the Violence Against Women Act in the United States and defunded advocates for battered women in Canada.
Finally, this provocative monograph ends with a call to other men to become more actively involved in combating violence against women at both the micro and macro level. Like other men engaged in this issue, DeKeseredy understands that violence against women is ultimately a human rights issue and that both men and women will benefit from gender equality.