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Lifting the Veil: Foundations for a Gender-Inclusive Paradigm of Intimate Partner Violence

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Perceptions of Female Offenders

Abstract

This chapter details the ongoing debate between the gender paradigm and the family violence paradigm of intimate partner violence (IPV). The gender paradigm of IPV argues that domestic violence is the inevitable consequence of patriarchy and cleaves men and women along a mutually exclusive aggressor → victim binary. The family violence paradigm rejects the foundational assumption that violence and aggression are innately gendered and advocates the employment of social learning models to provide a more inclusive theoretical foundation for understanding IPV. Empirical findings throughout the past three decades have repeatedly found that women aggress against their intimate partners at approximately the same rate as men and, importantly, not exclusively as a form of self-defense. The sovereignty of the gender paradigm has rendered female perpetrators a relatively invisible population and obscures the routes toward ensuring their successful treatment in batterer intervention programs (BIPs) throughout the country. This chapter will outline the theoretical inconsistencies subsumed within the gender paradigm and present both theoretical and empirical substantiation for the family violence models of IPV. Our intent is to challenge the social and legal dominance of the gender paradigm and to advance the nuanced and encompassing family violence model for IPV.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Social Work, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA, 70118, USA

    Fred Buttell & Emily Starr

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  1. Fred Buttell
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  2. Emily Starr
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Correspondence to Fred Buttell .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. , Department of Psychology, The Pennsylvania State University, Franco Bldg 131, Reading, 19610, Pennsylvania, USA

    Brenda L. Russell

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Buttell, F., Starr, E. (2013). Lifting the Veil: Foundations for a Gender-Inclusive Paradigm of Intimate Partner Violence. In: Russell, B. (eds) Perceptions of Female Offenders. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5871-5_8

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