This article explores how public policies regarding domestic violence aim at assembling a fragmented domain of views, attitudes and practices in a coherent manner. We propose to approach policy from an object-oriented anthropology, which makes it necessary to understand how objects come into being and to explore their ontology. We argue that policy objects, such as domestic violence, become real and multiply in practice when they associate in an assemblage: their ontology is relational. This implies an emphasis on motion, non-coherence and multiplicity in the study of how policy objects are enacted. We illustrate this approach by sharing a narrative of the development of a policy instrument, the reporting code on domestic violence and child abuse in Rotterdam (the Netherlands). The case study is focused on the interaction between the reporting code and its normative inscription, which is contested by a number of professionals. In order to demonstrate that policy instruments aim at constructing a new social order, we draw special attention to various modes of syncretism that are applied to create coherence.
In a number of countries, domestic violence is represented as a governable phenomenon that is amenable to policy interventions. Over the past 40 years in the Netherlands, however, this approach has not resulted in a reduction of domestic violence. Yet new policy strategies continue to be designed to improve existing interventions. In this article, we focus on a Dutch policy measure that aims to detect early signals of violence and abuse. We argue that this strategy, by approaching domestic violence as a technical problem, fails to take into account structural and symbolic violence. As a consequence, the impact of domestic violence policies on women, particularly poor women, and especially women with a migration background, is to intensify their difficulties. Moreover, these policies deploy a technology that shapes the subjectivity of professionals engaged in protection practices, while maintaining the status quo of inequality and violence against women. The connection between these two flaws of domestic violence policies leads us to claim that the current approach is constituted as a regime of deficiency.
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