An Ongoing Battle

Domestic violence, or, as it is now called, intimate partner violence, has been the subject of analysis and social policy since at least the beginning of the 19th century. The current wave of interest started in the 1970s when domestic violence was called wife assault and was viewed as a way for male perpetrators to suppress women’s rights. Males, after all, are bigger and stronger and use that advantage to enforce their belief in patriarchy, or so the feminists would have everyone believe. Walter DeKeseredy, a sociologist and professor of criminology at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, takes this view, and it is probably important for me to state at the outset that I do not. As DeKeseredy writes in his introduction to Violence Against Women: Myths, Facts, Controversies, "Canadian scholars, practitioners and activists are constantly generating new empirical, theoretical and political ways of understanding sexual assaults, wife beating, femicide and...