Domestic Violence: Beyond Patriarchy

Domestic Violence: Beyond Patriarchy In the Beginning The Battered Women's movement of the 1970's enlightened society about a much secreted, and what at the time, was considered a family matter, that of violence against women by their male intimate partners. Many lives have been saved as a direct result of society's public awareness of this much-hidden scourge on our families. Federal and state laws prohibiting Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) have been enacted, and funding has been put in place for battered women's shelter programs. These changes have made a significant difference in the lives of battered women and children over the last few decades. The feminist theoretical perspective of IPVIPV has been depicted throughout our society as well as how victim services, and batterers intervention programs (BIP) are modeled. "Our culture has historically exhibited certain patriarchal values observable in religion and social custom. Working against the backdrop of this history, feminism quite naturally saw an antidote in ending social oppression of women. Wife assault, kept largely out of the public view and tolerated by prevailing attitudes, was regarded by feminists as an evil symptom of patriarchy." (Dutton, page 17, 2006) Feminist theory defines IPV as a social problem with a single type of victim i.e. heterosexual women and one root cause, that of male privilege and patriarchy, which supports male domination, power, and control and the oppression of women. The need for services for IPVBIP's for female perpetrators is obscured and trivialized by this "one size fits all" view. Dutton describes feminist theory on IPV as being a "'paradigm:"' [A paradigm is] a set of guiding assumptions or worldview, commonly shared within a group and serving to ward off recognition of data that are dissonant with the paradigm's central tenets. This theory views all social relations through the prism of gender relations and holds that men hold power over women in patriarchal

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