Chronic Victims, Risky Women: Domestic Violence Advocacy and the Medicalization of Abuse

Abstract

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Europeanization or National Specificity? Legal Approaches to Sexual Harassment in France, 2002–2012

“…Yet it further obscures the sex‐discrimination component of sexual harassment by lumping sexual harassment with various other psychosocial risks that affect employees regardless of sex. Sociologist Paige Sweet has similarly shown how, in the context of U.S. domestic violence advocacy, medicalized risk—especially as instantiated via screening technologies—obscures gender inequality and gendered violence while promoting gender essentialism (Sweet ). Future work should examine how new understandings of sexual harassment as a psychosocial risk shape how employers and employees think about the causes and effects of sexual harassment.…”

Advancing Complexity Theory as a Qualitative Research Methodology

“…This discourse keeps knowledge of IPV tightly defined within a "scientific evidence base" marginalizing other bodies of knowledge which may contribute to a wider understanding of the problem. For example, critics of the public health approach argue it medicalizes abuse, presenting women as the population group in need of the intervention, rather than the perpetrators of the violence (Sweet, 2015;Tower, 2007). Others are cognizant of the simplicity of the public health approach, arguing the approach does not account for the complexities of the problem, such as the context of entrapment the victim faces (Kelly, 2011;Nicolaidis & Touhouliotis, 2006).…”

Commodification, vulnerability, risk: gendered social policy developments in the United States, 1980–2018

“…hospitals, mental health services, social services, child protection services) took up the responsibility of addressing gendered violence and forms of gendered social risk. While feminist activists were considered the main producers of expertise on domestic violence in the 1960s-1970s, they were progressively replaced by trained professionals with degrees in social work, psychology and medical fields (Gottschalk, 2006;Sweet, 2015; for a similar argument on sexual violence intervention see Bevacqua, 2000;Corrigan, 2013). In this context, the individualized push for women to learn self-regulation replaced the initial collective goal of empowerment and social transformationthe hallmark of feminist intervention in shelters and rape crisis centres.…”

“…For example, implementation guidelines for Partner Abuse Intervention Programmes recommend that earlier victimisation of female perpetrators be recognised, while previous experiences of abuse are downplayed in interventions with men, even though male perpetrators are also more likely to have been the victims of child abuse or neglect than non-perpetrators. The language of vulnerability and trauma allows policy experts and administrators to talk about gender as a risk category, serving to reify gender differences, while respecting the political imperative to move towards 'gender-neutral' policies and interventions (Sweet, 2015). More broadly, trauma was recognised as a public health problem, and in 2009, the Federal Partners Committee on Women and Trauma was convened (Federal Partners Committee on Women and Trauma, 2013).…”