What is it about?
Racial segregation negatively affects the lives of black people in a variety of ways, but little historical research has directly examined how it exacerbates experiences of intimate partner violence. From over-exposure to community violence to under-protection by biased criminal legal systems, black women historically found themselves vulnerable to violence and without many non-lethal means for self-defense. Additional research should be done concerning black male victims of intimate partner violence as well.
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Why is it important?
Intimate partner violence is not a mere interpersonal problem and no racial group has a monopoly on this phenomenon. However, for groups who are already pushed to the margins of society, IPV can be exceedingly deadly and still ignored. This piece is fundamentally about one of the ways racial segregation manifests in poor life outcomes for its victims.
Perspectives
I never intended to study IPV, but I found it was an unavoidable feature of social life and that its consequences seemed to be both exacerbated by and treated less seriously by social institutions because of anti-black bias and racial segregation. Importantly, by using geographic information systems to map incidents of IPV, I also learned how segregation disrupts the division we often think of as existing between private and public spaces. Intimate partner violence, then, is more than just an interpersonal phenomenon. It is structural and its negative effects extend beyond private spaces. It is not simply an individual experience, but one that exceeds the boundaries of the home and of the body. How might this change how we approach studying and imagining solutions to the problem of IPV?
David Ponton III
University of South Florida
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Private Matters in Public Spaces: Intimate Partner Violence against Black Women in Jim Crow Houston, Frontiers A Journal of Women Studies, January 2018, Project Muse,
DOI: 10.5250/fronjwomestud.39.2.0058.
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