Challenging “Battered Woman Syndrome”

I opened Rethinking Domestic Violence with great interest. More than ten years ago I documented my own departure from an abusive marriage into a lesbian relationship in my memoir No Previous Experience. At that time I read about domestic abuse for the first time—notably Lenore Walker’s The Battered Woman (1979), which described the typical cycle of abuse, a pattern that seemed valid to me. A build-up of tension leads to verbal abuse, then to yelling, often exacerbated by alcohol or drugs; then it leads to destruction of property, often something of value to the woman, and then to a state of rage in which forced sex or physical abuse could occur. The catharsis of this release of anger—which might or might not involve police intervention and arrest—leads in turn to docility, apologies and contrition, often expressed by gifts. Then the cycle—usually covering months—begins again.

Donald Dutton’s book acknowledges Walker’s contribution to the...