Re-Telling the “Master Narrative” of Domestic Abuse: A New Nexus Between Narrative Criminology and Applied Narratology

Over the past two decades, productive discussions have begun on the theoretical paradigms of narrative criminology, as criminology has joined other social science disciplines witnessing a “narrative turn.” However, criminologists have thus far “hardly connected with narratology,” and instead accessed a “fairly limited toolkit for discerning the nuances of storytelling.” This article, thus, heeds Presser’s call for greater criminological engagement with narrative theory, and greater cross-fertilization between the fields, which hitherto has been limited. It sets out to explore how a “master narrative” of domestic abuse is witnessed and experienced (and perpetuated) by front line workers offering specialist support and help in this area. Through the analysis of interview data from the first study of its kind attentive to the narrative status of qualitative data solicited from domestic abuse service providers, this article will illustrate how these narrator-practitioners (re)produce a problematic and persistent “master narrative” of domestic abuse. Specifically, the findings of this original test-case in “applied narratology” reveal the persistent presence of a range of problematic tropes and stereotypes constituting the “master narrative” of domestic abuse as a complex web of interwoven stories; the existence and co-constitution of which is harmful as it erects barriers to support, impacts service provision and negatively forms part of a wider societal response to domestic abuse. This article thus concludes by underscoring the value of narrative criminology and/as “applied narratology” as a critical nexus and brings fresh insights from narrative theory into the process of re-telling the “master narrative” of domestic abuse.