Perpetrator or victim? A review of the complexities of domestic violence cases

What is it about?

Laws against intimate partner violence (IPV), in the United States and a few other English-speaking countries, have been enforced much more vigorously in comparison with most countries, some of which have no such laws at all. As a result, more perpetrators have been held accountable for their actions, increasing the safety of victims. However, the judicial system response has not always been ideal. Arrests are made with scant evidence of wrongdoing, false allegations are made, and prosecutions are pursued against the wishes of victims who in turn retract their complaints, prosecutors. Many perpetrators are never brought to justice, and many innocent individuals are wrongfully arrested and prosecuted, in violation of due process and mitigating against our common efforts to reduce IPV in our communities. This state of affairs can be traced two key factors, among them the persistence of the gender paradigm, an outdated and discredited set of assumptions about the role of gender in IPV, as formulated by battered women’s advocates, that has informed IPV public policy for several decades; and the complex nature of IPV, a phenomenon that mostly happens behind closed doors, varies widely in frequency, intensity, mutuality and impact on victims, and cannot easily be framed in binary victim/perpetrator terms.

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