Toward a Gender-Inclusive Conception of Intimate Partner Violence Research and Theory: Part 1 - Traditional Perspectives

Some three decades after the first shelters for battered women were established in England and the United States, public discourse and public policy on intimate partner violence (IPV) has framed the problem in terms of male perpetration and female victimization. Ideally, policy ought to be informed by unbiased research. However, IPV research has, until very recently, almost exclusively been concerned with the physical and psychological abuse of women by their male partners, and has ignored or marginalized alternative lines of research that suggest female-perpetrated partner abuse is a significant social problem. The reluctance to investigate these issues in an objective and scientific manner has been due to the prevailing patriarchal conception of intimate partner violence, a paradigm based on radical feminist sociopolitical ideology. In this paper, neglected lines of research are reviewed, including studies conducted in the 1980s and 1990s on offender personalities, self-defense, the effects of IPV and other contextual factors, emotional abuse and control, and the dynamics of high-conflict and violent couples.