Commentary Violence Against Women

Volume 13 Number 8
August 2007 874-884
© 2007 Sage Publications
10.1177/1077801207304806
Understanding the Complexities http://vaw.sagepub.com
hosted at
of Feminist Perspectives on http://online.sagepub.com

Woman Abuse
A Commentary on Donald G.
Dutton’s Rethinking Domestic Violence
Walter S. DeKeseredy
Molly Dragiewicz
University of Ontario Institute
of Technology, Oshawa, Canada

A ll books, including Donald G. Dutton’s (2006) Rethinking Domestic Violence,

are written and published in a specific political and economic context. As vividly
described by Faludi (1991), Hammer (2002), and many others who made progressive
contributions to an interdisciplinary understanding of the enduring discrimination
against contemporary North American women, we still live in a climate characterized
by vitriolic attacks on feminist scholarship, practice, and activism intended to secure
women’s basic human rights (DeKeseredy & Schwartz, 2003; Stanko, 2006).
Despite its title, Dutton’s new book does not focus on rethinking domestic vio-
lence. Instead, it is another example of the conservative backlash against feminism in
general and feminist research on woman abuse in particular, a response that “helps to
veil the extent and brutality of this problem and to block efforts to deal with it”
(Hammer, 2002, p. 5). Dutton’s preoccupation with feminism is reflected in entire
chapters dedicated to criticizing feminist theory and research and the book’s “bottom
line” summary, where half of the main points concern Dutton’s interpretation of fem-
inism rather than new insights about domestic violence research. Accordingly, the
main objective of this commentary is to respond to some of Dutton’s criticisms of
feminist inquiry and practice.

“Old Wine in New Bottles”:

Dutton’s Critique of Feminism

Like his arguments for marginalizing the consideration of gender in the etiology
of violence, many, if not most, of Dutton’s criticisms of feminism are dated. For

Authors’ Note: The authors would like to thank Edward G. Gondolf and Claire Renzetti for their helpful
comments and criticisms.

874
 DeKeseredy, Dragiewicz / Commentary 875

example, we see claims that (a) women are as violent as men in intimate relation-
ships, (b) feminist research is political and, therefore, invalid, (c) feminists offer single-
factor explanations of woman abuse, (d) feminists ignore or deny women’s use of
violence, and (e) feminists strongly support ineffective mandatory arrest and prose-
cution policies. Readers might guess that the book was occasioned by the astronom-
ical growth of feminist research on woman abuse. However, its references to recent
feminist work are few and far between. Therefore, we will fill in the blanks regard-
ing what the feminist research says about these issues.

Women Are as Violent as Men

To support this claim, Dutton heavily relies on data derived from renditions of the
Conflict Tactics Scales (CTS), originally developed by Murray Straus (1979). For
those who have used the CTS or who have examined data gleaned by them, it may
seem painfully obvious but worth stating again: They ignore the contexts, meanings,
and motives of both men’s and women’s violence. As has been repeatedly stated,
unless researchers can accurately determine why women use physical violence against
men, it is irresponsible to contend, as Dutton does, that “in Canada and the United
States, women use violence in intimate relationships to the same extent as men, for the
same reasons, and with largely the same results” (p. ix).
To reach these conclusions, Dutton and other proponents of sexual symmetry artifi-
cially narrow the definition of violence between intimates to obscure injurious behav-
iors that display marked sexual asymmetry, such as sexual assault, strangulation,
separation assault, stalking, and homicide. Rather than an unacceptable or hysterical
broadening of the definition of violence, these behaviors are commonly part of abused
women’s experience. Like others who assert that women are as violent as men (e.g.,
Straus, 2006), Dutton downplays research on these forms of violence. Moreover, he
pays little attention to differentiating between defensive and offensive forms of violence
between intimates, a courtesy we extend to victims of other crimes (DeKeseredy, 2006).
To make claims about the symmetry of violence between intimate partners, one
must also conflate sex and gender. Discussions of prevalence that rely on the variables
“male” and “female” cannot tell us much about gender, the socially constructed and
normative set of meanings attached to these categories. This distinction is one of the
primary contributions of feminist perspectives to the social sciences. Research that
asks perpetrators and survivors about the nature of violence between intimates finds
that both say much about gender. For example, violent men talk about threats to their
masculinity experienced when women or men fail to demonstrate adequate respect for
them, whereas women talk about the normative gender expectations that abusers use
to justify their violence (Anderson & Umberson, 2001; DeKeseredy & Schwartz,
2002; Dobash, Dobash, Cavanagh, & Lewis, 1998; Eisikovits, Goldblatt, & Winstok,
1999; Gilligan, 1997, 2001; Hearn, 1998; Rudd, Dobos, Vogl-Bauer, & Beatty, 1997).
876 Violence Against Women

Dutton’s claim that “mainstream governments came to support domestic violence

policy based on radical feminism” (p. 153) is also dubious. For example, the 1999 and
2004 General Social Surveys conducted by Statistics Canada focus on violence
against women and men in intimate relationships and generated sexually symmetri-
cal CTS data.1 Certainly, Statistics Canada has moved away from developing feminist
surveys of violence against women and is currently being influenced by political
forces guided by fathers’ rights groups and others with a vested interest in minimiz-
ing the pain and suffering caused by male-to-female abuse (DeKeseredy & Schwartz,
2003).2 Note, too, that on October 3, 2006, Bev Oda, federal minister for the Status
of Women Canada (SWC), announced that women’s organizations would no longer
be eligible for funding for advocacy, government lobbying, or research projects.
Furthermore, SWC was required to delete the word equality from its list of goals
(Carastathis, 2006). So much for Dutton’s claim that “women’s rights have finally
been acknowledged after centuries of religion-based political repression” (p. ix).

Feminism is a Political Agenda

Dutton accuses feminists of “dogma preservation” (p. ix), of “politically concep-
tualizing” domestic violence (p. xi), and of attempting to “spin” data to be consistent
with their “paradigm” (p. 349). Other similar antifeminist claims scattered through-
out his book could easily be listed here, but the most important point to consider here
is that, as is the case with his recent coauthored critique of the Duluth model of
batterer intervention (see Dutton & Corvo, 2006), Dutton tries to create an “us versus
them” scenario in which he and those who support his views are objective scientists
pursuing the truth, whereas feminists, at best, only pay lip service to rigorous empir-
ical work.
Although conspicuously absent from the book, scores of feminist studies (both
qualitative and quantitative) have been conducted since Dobash and Dobash pub-
lished their path-breaking feminist analysis of wife beating in 1979, including more
recent work by the same authors (Dobash, 2003; Dobash & Dobash, 1998, 2004).
Many are published in journals that meet the highest disciplinary standards, such as
Violence and Victims, Aggression and Violent Behavior, and Violence Against Women.
Also, books presenting data generated by feminist researchers are published by
Oxford University Press, Rutgers University Press, and University of Toronto Press.
Feminists’ scholarship is subjected to the same standards of rigorous peer review as
other work and is clearly not published simply because of feminists’ empirical, theo-
retical, or political perspectives. We can only hypothesize why Dutton did not cite
many feminist studies in this book, but given the tone of his criticisms, one possible
explanation is that he has contempt for feminist inquiry. Another possible reason is
that he is simply not familiar with the literature he allegedly critiques.
As feminists, we have no problem being labeled political. After all, as Sartre (1964)
reminds us, “all writing is political” (p. 29), and we hope that our work will help
 DeKeseredy, Dragiewicz / Commentary 877

reduce much pain and suffering. Moreover, we, like many other contemporary social
scientists, contend that no scientific method, theory, or policy proposal is value free.
Nor are the theories, methods, and policies advanced by Dutton. For example, by
denouncing feminist approaches and advancing psychological work, Dutton is engaged
in a process of activism and is trying to advance his own political agenda, as he and
Corvo (2006) do in their attack on the Duluth model and attempt to replace it with their
own clinical one that is also described in Rethinking Domestic Violence (Gondolf, in
press).
In what is still one of the most widely read and cited social scientific articles in
the world, Howard Becker (1967) asks scholars, “Whose side are we on?” Although
Dutton attempts to paint feminists as “ideologues” and portray himself as an objec-
tive scientist, in reality he is advancing a political agenda that supports the goals and
claims of fathers’ rights groups and other conservative political movements deter-
mined to diminish the severity of male-to-female abuse (Gondolf, in press). Most
feminist scholars, on the other hand, put their politics up front for all to scrutinize
and are committed to putting gender at the forefront of research, theory construction,
and policy development.
Still, people lacking knowledge of feminist inquiry might get the impression from
reading Dutton’s chapter 5 that feminists are hostile to “men in general” (p. x).
Nothing can be further from the truth. The goal of feminist work on crime and jus-
tice is “not to push men out so as to pull women in, but rather to gender the study of
crime and criminal justice” (Renzetti, 1993, p. 232). In other words, feminist
approaches to violence and abuse seek to add salient factors into research rather than
demanding that consideration of entire socially significant categories be eliminated.
Furthermore, as pointed out later in this commentary, it is erroneous to paint all fem-
inists who study and/or do political work to end woman abuse with the same brush.

Single-Factor Explanations of Woman Abuse

According to Dutton,

The claim from a feminist analytical perspective, therefore is twofold: that society is
patriarchal and that the use of violence to maintain male patriarchy is accepted. This
feminist argument indicates patriarchy as a direct cause of wife assault rather than an
inducement that interacts with other causes. (p. 97)

Scholars familiar with the extant literature on the relationship between gender and
violence do not have to be reminded that there is more than one “feminist analytical
perspective” on woman abuse and that there have been many new theoretical devel-
opments since the offerings cited by Dutton to support his claim (e.g., Bograd, 1988;
Dobash & Dobash, 1979). For example, there is now a large feminist literature com-
bining both macro- and micro-level factors, such as unemployment, globalization,
878 Violence Against Women

deindustrialization, life events stress, intimate relationship status, familial and soci-
etal patriarchy, substance use, male peer support, and other factors. Regardless of
what influenced him to exclude major contemporary feminist perspectives, his book
reflects an inadequate understanding of feminist theories.
Even so, Dutton provides an in-depth overview of major psychological contribu-
tions to the field, and many people would contend that feminists should attempt to
integrate some of the perspectives cited in his book with their analyses of how gen-
der and other sociocultural forces influence rape, beatings, stalking, psychological
abuse, and the like. Following what Gondolf (in press) suggests in his response to
Dutton and Corvo (2006), we do need to broaden the discourse and debate among
researchers and practitioners (p. 13). Nevertheless, some of the key points made by
Dutton are similar to those made by him and Corvo in the sense that they “appear
more to circumvent a major part of the field” (Gondolf, in press) that he deems hos-
tile to his ideological position.

Feminists Ignore Women’s Use of Violence

According to Dutton, “Women are never violent except in self-defense” is one of the
“bedrock beliefs in feminist theory” (p. 98). This is inaccurate. Feminist scholars have
been at the forefront of research on women’s and girls’ use of violence. For example,
the journal Violence Against Women published a three-part special issue titled
“Women’s Use of Violence in Intimate Relationships” in 2002 and 2003 (Volume 8,
Numbers 11 and 12; Volume 9, Number 1). Moreover, the same journal published
another relevant issue titled “Intimate Partner Violence: Debates and Future Directions”
(Volume 12, Number 13) that also focused on women’s use of violence. And in their
work since 1979, feminists such as Dobash and Dobash (2004) have gathered data on
women’s use of violence and have attempted to theorize this problem. Swan and Snow
(2006) offer another example of such theoretical work.
What about government interest in the topic? According to Dutton,

What has occurred in North American governments at national and local levels has been
a simplistic conceptualization of intimate partner violence (IPV) that has resulted in a
denial of violence against men and also of bilateral complicity in violent couples. (p. x)

However, the U.S. national government has expressed great interest in women’s vio-
lence and an awareness of multiple positions and debates within the field. The National
Institute of Justice (NIJ) organized a workshop on gender symmetry in 2000. As stated
by its organizer, Leora Rosen (2006),

In selecting participants for this workshop, our goal was not just to bring to the table
those who had historically been on opposite sides of the debate and initiate dialogue
between them but also to seek out some middle ground or new ground—for example,
 DeKeseredy, Dragiewicz / Commentary 879

approaches that considered variations in the manifestation and etiology of IPV. We hope
to encourage theoretical developments that would improve our understanding of all
manifestations of IPV and move the field forward. The workshop covers three critical
topic areas: (a) a typology of violence, (b) measurement issues, and (c) women’s use of
violence. (p. 1000)

Much of what was said at the workshop was recorded, edited, and posted on the NIJ
(2000) Web site “to serve as a guide for prospective applicants planning to submit pro-
posals on this topic” (Rosen, 2006, p. 1000). Moreover, papers commissioned for the
workshop were published in one of the above special issues of Violence Against
Women (Volume 12, Number 13). If Dutton had been aware of the Web site and had
taken the time to read the materials posted there and published in the special issue, he
would have discovered that the feminist and nonfeminist scholars who attended the
workshop were deeply committed to enhancing a rich empirical and theoretical under-
standing of women’s use of violence.

Feminists Strongly Support Ineffective Mandatory Arrest and

Prosecution Policies
This assertion is similar to Linda Mills’s (2003) argument. Ironically, Dutton begins
chapter 12, titled “The Failure of Criminal Justice Intervention,” by citing a passage in
James Q. Wilson’s (1985) book Thinking About Crime and acknowledges Wilson in
the preface for helping to “shape” his “thinking about the limits of legal policy”
(p. xii). The irony is that Dutton is a strong advocate of treatment, whereas Wilson is
a fierce proponent of law-and-order solutions to crime. In fact, like others referred to
by critical criminologist Jock Young (1986) as either administrative criminologists or
right realists, Wilson is fundamentally opposed to treatment. For him, to adequately
control crime, policy makers should develop solutions based on the “radical individu-
alistic” writings of Cesare Beccaria and Jeremy Bentham. Like these classical crimi-
nologists, and unlike Dutton, who is committed to doing theoretical work, Wilson does
not offer a formal theory of crime. In fact, for him, the search for “root causes is a use-
less endeavor because a free society can do little about attacking these root causes so
that a concern for their elimination becomes little more than an excuse for doing noth-
ing” (p. 6). Rather, Wilson asserts that we should devote all of our energy to improv-
ing the ability of the criminal justice system to deter people from committing crimes.
Still, Wilson (1985) does offer elements of a causal theory, one that views crime
as a function of inadequate control. Wilson assumes that all people are both free
willed and predisposed to committing crimes. He also contends that punishment—not
treatment—should be used to deter crime and that punishment should be proportional
to the severity of the crime committed. Furthermore, he asserts that swift and certain
penalties are more effective than draconian punishments. Given that Wilson is opposed
to treatment and strongly supports law-and-order strategies, we can only speculate how
880 Violence Against Women

Wilson influenced Dutton’s thinking about legal policy. The key thing their respective
work has in common is that it dismisses or ignores the gendered nature of crime.
Of course, some feminists strongly support aggressive criminal justice approaches
to dealing with woman abuse, seeking increased enforcement of existing laws and
harsher penalties for convicted batterers. Feminists in the battered women’s movement
fought legal battles and undertook consciousness raising to ensure that women who did
seek assistance from the police would receive equal protection of the law, regardless
of whether the perpetrator was a current or former intimate partner. Nevertheless, this
is only part of the picture. Feminists have also been at the forefront of efforts to create
holistic non-criminal justice responses to violence against women. INCITE! (2003), a
self-identified “national activist organization of radical feminists of color,” took the
lead in calling for the consideration of multiple related factors contributing to violence
against women and men. Their joint statement with Critical Resistance “against gen-
der violence and the prison industrial complex” says,

It is critical that we develop responses to gender violence that do not depend on a sex-
ist, racist, classist, and homophobic criminal justice system. It is also important that we
develop strategies that challenge the criminal justice system and that also provide
safety for survivors of sexual and domestic violence. To live violence-free lives, we
must develop holistic strategies for addressing violence that speak to the intersection of
all forms of oppression.

Even if a handful of 1970s versions of radical feminism could be characterized as

“single-factor” approaches because of their emphasis on patriarchy as the root form of
oppression, statements such as this clearly demonstrate that contemporary feminisms
cannot. INCITE! and the more than 145 individuals and organizations who signed their
statement on violence against women and the prison industrial complex share many of
Dutton’s misgivings about criminal justice approaches, although for different reasons.
These feminists argue that mandatory arrest laws appear to have done more to protect
batterers than survivors of violence. They also point out that law-and-order approaches
to violence are ill suited to the needs of a diverse range of marginalized women (e.g.,
women of color, poor women, lesbians) who have historically been inadequately
served by police intervention.
In addition, these progressives argue that prison and other punitive approaches
cannot truly prevent violence against women. And they resist the professionalization
of antiviolence work that has pulled efforts away from grassroots organizing toward
depoliticized bureaucracy to secure funding for their work (INCITE!, 2003). This is
where the variety of diverse feminist positions on violence against women, men, and
children converge and diverge from Dutton. Feminists, including those involved in
drafting the Violence Against Women Act and other laws on violence against women,
have always asserted that broad-based social change is imperative for the prevention
of violence. They reject the idea that individual psychological counseling is adequate
to this task.
 DeKeseredy, Dragiewicz / Commentary 881

Many other feminists, who probably would not identify as radical, are also hesitant
to primarily rely on criminal justice intervention. In fact, scores of feminists who con-
tend that intimate violence is primarily directed at women and who focus on the
contribution of broader social forces to this problem assert that harsh law-and-order
initiatives “mirror the factors that contribute to abuse” (D. H. Currie & MacLean, 1992;
DeKeseredy & MacLeod, 1997, p. 121). Consider, too, that many police officers are
clearly not listening to some feminists’ calls for mandatory arrest and prosecution.
Charges are today, as they were 17 years ago, “far from typical” (Kaufman Kantor &
Straus, 1990), especially those against men who rape their intimate partners. Regardless
of the effectiveness of criminal justice interventions, the response called for today by
most feminists involves coordinated, collaborative, community-based initiatives. They
do not advance “compartmentalizing social problems along bureaucratic lines”
(E. Currie, 1985, p. 18). In other words, they do not contend that because woman abuse
is a crime, only the criminal justice system should respond to it.

Conclusions

Stanko (2006) observes that “what is often missing from a general understanding
of violence is asking what can be learned from the struggles feminists have waged for
decades now against sexual and physical assault” (p. 554). Certainly, one cannot learn
much about contemporary feminist contributions to the field from reading Rethinking
Domestic Violence. Readers unfamiliar with scholarly and policy work on woman
abuse are likely to get the impression that feminists and those informed by other
schools of thought basically “fall into ideological positions that categorically dis-
missed other points of view” (Gondolf, in press). Of course, there are researchers and
practitioners who reject the contributions of people who approach topics or social
problems in ways distinct from them. Nevertheless, increasingly, we are witnessing
large groups of international scholars, advocates, and practitioners embrace diverse
ways of thinking about sexual assault, homicide, beatings, sexual harassment, and
other “intimate intrusions” (Stanko, 1985). For example, scholars from a broad range
of disciplines are teaming up to construct theories and studies that address multiple
levels of analysis. There is much less paradigm hostility than that described by Dutton
in this period of late modernity. And as the late Paul and Sheila Wellstone (2001)
noted in Renzetti, Edleson, and Bergen’s (2001) Sourcebook on Violence Against
Women, the “shared work of a concerted group of experts promises to affect us all by
saving the lives of women” (p. x).
Where do we go from here? Feminist scholar Claire Renzetti (1997) has one of
the best answers to this question:

Of course, while the causes of and solutions to the problems are not individualistic, but
rather structural, we cannot lose sight of individuals. The challenge we confront is to
disentangle the complex relationships between individuals and society, including our
882 Violence Against Women

own roles in this dialectic. A tall order, no doubt, but the only one with any chance of
real success. (p. vii)

Ending woman abuse and other forms of violence in intimate relationships also
requires scholars moving beyond trying to “win a point” in the “name of science”
(Renzetti, 1997, p. vi). In addition, we must remember that no matter how we study or
try to explain violence against intimate partners, the perspectives we offer are often
irrelevant to those who experience it (DeKeseredy & MacLeod, 1997). After all, who
knows more about abuse than the people who experience it?

Notes
1. See Ogrodnick (2006) for more information on these surveys.
2. Statistics Canada’s 1993 national Violence Against Women Survey was heavily informed by femi-
nist scholarship. See Johnson (1996) for more information on this study and the data gleaned by it.

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Walter S. DeKeseredy is professor of criminology, justice and policy studies at the University of Ontario
Institute of Technology. He has devoted over 20 years to studying various issues related to woman abuse
and to poverty and crime, and he has received three awards from two divisions of the American Society
of Criminology for his work on these and other social problems.

Molly Dragiewicz is assistant professor of criminology, justice and policy studies at the University
of Ontario Institute of Technology. Her interdisciplinary research interests include domestic violence,
violence and gender, perpetrator narratives, media representations of crime and violence, critical crimi-
nology, human rights, and globalization.