Domestic violence & abuse: prevention, intervention and the politics of gender

This thesis foregrounds data from a survivor-led, qualitative study on domestic violence and abuse (DVA) prevention and intervention, set against the backdrop of UK austerity and the increasingly prominent political endorsement of a gender-neutral conceptualisation of DVA. The study charts how DVA prevention, victimhood and perpetration discourses might be productively reworked to shift the pervasive victim-blaming narratives patterning public understandings and intervention responses to DVA and violence against women (VAW). A key feature of this work entails expanding the scope of responsibility assigned to men for reducing DVA and men’s violence towards women, including within the context of the family.

Using feminist, participatory based methods, the study elaborates a triangulated analysis of data from three participant groups: (i) women victim-survivors, (ii) women DVA practitioners, and (iii) ‘engaged men’ involved in efforts to address men’s violence. With analysis critically organised through the lens of the diverse lived experiences of victim-survivors, policy and practice implications are discussed in relation to four sociological domains: women’s lived experience of DVA; mothers and the family in which DVA is a feature; DVA, welfare reform and austerity; and men’s participation in the field of DVA or VAW.

Analysis substantiates the imperative of earnestly listening to victim-survivors, and of recognising their experiences as a crucial component in the design of policy and sector responses to DVA. Accounts signal how typically gendered notions of ‘authentic victimhood’ are both routinely mobilised and fundamentally challenged, as victim-survivors engage in complex resistance work even in highly constrained and unsafe environments. Analysis also reveals the various ways in which welfare austerity exacerbates the harms associated with DVA, particularly for those living more marginal lives, closing down vital routes and opportunities for help-seeking and leave-seeking. The UK government’s commitment to tackling DVA is therefore severely undermined in this context. An examination of mothers’ experience of DVA further demonstrates how they are routinely failed by dominant (statutory) responses to DVA, cementing the urgent need for culture change and greater accountability and responsibility to be allocated to fathers who perpetrate DVA. Finally, data from across all three participant groups substantiates that men do and should have a role to play in addressing men’s violence towards women, at various scales, while also foregrounding the complexities associated with this work.