Abstract
Domestic violence as state crime is presented by its publishers in their webpage as a ‘provocative challenge’ to the current understanding of domestic violence and indeed it works as such.
The book develops the argument that domestic violence should not be understood as an interpersonal crime by individual men to their female partners, but it is instead a state crime. The global prevalence of this form of violence can only be explained, according to the author, because the same state institutions purported to address and prevent it do indeed create, perpetuate, legitimate and in the worst cases endorse domestic violence. The state is thus a generator of violence that functions as no mere bystander.
The book is divided into three parts. The first part (chapters 1 and 2) serves as an introduction, with an overview of the main arguments of the book and, more importantly, an explanation of the author’s experiences as a survivor of domestic violence and a discussion of the feminist and ethical principles on which this work is grounded. Here the author also explains the radical feminist and structural perspectives on domestic violence and the state, which work as the basic building blocks of her argument.
The second part of the book develops the conceptualization of domestic violence as a state crime through different lenses. The chapters in this section all are structured in a similar way: they first contain a theoretical discussion of the specific perspective used in the chapter, using insights from international law, human rights, state crime and feminist literature, followed by evidence from various jurisdictions (mainly, Australia, New Zealand, the US and the UK) to illustrate and support her arguments empirically.
Rose first she shows how domestic violence can be understood as a state crime against humanity. As a crime against humanity domestic violence produces extreme harm and is perpetrated in a mass scale in both national and international contexts. This framing helps us situate specific instances of violence committed by individual men on individual women in a more systemic and collective context (chapter 3).
The author then addresses domestic violence as a micro-state crime (chapter 4). Using a radical feminist stance, Rose identifies the family as a ‘microcosmos of the nation-state’ (p. 60) or a ‘diminutive patriarchal state’, p. 78) with the individual patriarch as sovereign and his wife and children as his subjects. As the family both reflects and reinforces the patriarchal nation-state, the author argues that domestic violence can be understood as a crime perpetrated in a state territory (the family) by a sovereign (the patriarch). In this context, domestic violence functions an instrument of governance in the private sphere.
In this framework, the ideological support provided by what Rose terms micro-state ideology (i.e., ‘the framework that establishes and upholds patriarchal micro-sovereignty as morally, culturally, and legally defensible’, p. 60), normalises patriarchal authority and justifies its enforcement through violence. This ideology is supported by the nation state and is reflected in the practices of state institutions: in family and criminal law, the courts or the working of social services. Despite progress in addressing domestic violence in various states, these institutions still provide support for the patriarchal family, and thus contribute to perpetuate domestic violence.
The author then goes on to argue that domestic violence is a structural state crime. Sexual inequality is at the basis of domestic violence, and the state has an active and fundamental role in the creation and the sustaining of the structures and conditions that underline sexual inequality. By producing and reproducing sexual inequality, the role of the states in the production of domestic violence is revealed. Just as the structural harms of capitalism and colonialism have been understood as state crimes, Rose sustains that the structural harms of patriarchy should also be considered as such (p. 86): according to the argument, the state creates the socio-economic, industrial, cultural, ideological and epistemic structures that constitute structural violence state crime against women and which are directly linked to the perpetuation, justification and normalisation of domestic violence against women.
This framing makes it easier to understand the epidemic persistence of domestic violence, even in states that officially condemn and develop policies to address and prevent it. Only by addressing the structural harms from which it emerges can effective progress be made.
The two following chapters construe domestic violence as a state crime committed specifically by state institutions. First, the author argues that domestic violence is an omissive institutional state crime. This is because, in spite of their obligation to defend human rights and equality and to actively prevent domestic violence, liberal democratic states fail these obligations and negligently enable this crime. The author points at a series of systematic omissions and failures by state agencies and institutions in policing, family law and socials services that allow the operation of domestic violence. So, incongruously, the very apparatus meant to prevent and protect women from domestic violence facilitates it (p. 128).
Then, Rose identifies domestic violence as an agentic institutional state crime: state institutions and officials play not only an omissive, but also a direct and active role in the production and reproduction of state violence (chapter 7). This agentic role is developed in three ways: (a) productively, where institutions such as family law, family courts or social services provide opportunities for new violence; (b) reconstructively, where domestic violence is officially re-framed by police or courts’ narratives in such a way as to erase or decriminalises perpetrator’s violence; and (c) abusively, where the state actively participates in abusing victims, through the secondary victimization and revictimization of domestic violence survivors.
Part III of the book functions as a conclusion, by bringing together the previous perspectives into a coherent whole and considering its practical implications. In chapter 8, Rose presents the five lenses explored in the previous chapters (domestic violence as a crime against humanity, as a micro-state crime, as a structural state crime, and as an omissive and an agentic institutional state crime) as a whole coherent typology, to show how the various harms are put together and are related to each other to result in patriarchal state crime. The author uses two examples to show how the five types of state crime present and reinforce each other in practice. To conclude this chapter, the author explores the idea that domestic violence is not just experienced as a form of interpersonal victimisation, but constitutes a holistic experience of interpersonal, institutional and structural harms.
The book ends with proposals to address domestic violence which emerge from this framework. Rose recognises the need to improve already existing responses, particularly those that involve listening to survivors and improving protection. However, framing domestic violence as state crime allows a profound rethinking of these approaches, based on individual responsibility and ignorant of the state’s role in this form of violence. The author resorts to Stanley Cohen’s (1995) phasic justice approach to address state crimes and proposes the creation of survivor tribunals, forms of ensuring institutional accountability (through hearings in the survivor tribunal), official acknowledgement and apology, and the development of reparative, substantive and transformative justice to ensure recognition, remedy and prevention.
Readers familiar with domestic violence research can share Rose’s perplexity at the persistent and frustrating conclusions of much of this research: that in spite of policy commitment, legislation and institutional reform, domestic violence continues at epidemic levels and that the policies, institutions and practices addressed to protect and help survivors too often fail to do so, and too often revictimize, reproduce and mirror patterns of control and violence. As Rose states, this should force us to take a step back and radically question what we are doing (and thinking) wrong.
Rose does this by conceptualising domestic violence as a state perpetrated crime. I am not fully convinced of this, perhaps because of the very broad conceptualization of state crime used in the book; or the very general lens used, which puts all states at a similar level of criminality; or the fact that I am not sure if it is the structure (patriarchy) which works through and beyond the state and its institutions, and not the state itself which generates the structure. Perhaps, I am not convinced because this means ceasing to think of domestic violence as an individual crime, something embedded in criminological thought. But although I am not convinced of the argument, the book has convinced me of the need to take a conceptual and practical step back.
The book is very ambitious: as Rose states, it aims at having a theoretical and practical impact over the way domestic violence is currently comprehended and addressed, but also to ‘spearhead a new feminist state crime criminology’, in the line of anti-capitalist and decolonial contributions (p. 191). Only time can tell if the book manages to do that. What it certainly accomplishes is that it forces readers to stop and helps us radically rethink what we already know that does not work in addressing domestic violence. Not all books do this, and this makes Domestic violence as state crime a very welcome provocation.