Title: Domestic violence and abuse through a sociological lens
Abstract: This chapter features contributions, historical and contemporary, made by sociologists to the study of domestic violence and abuse. Historically, these include fielding the first studies uncovering the nature and extent of domestic violence in the United States, as well as the development of the Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS) – the most widely used measure of physical domestic violence. We touch on the gender symmetry debate (the dispute over whether domestic violence is perpetrated at equal rates by men and women or is more likely to be perpetrated by men against women) and highlight the solution of one sociologist in proposing that there are different types of domestic violence which are tapped by different sampling strategies: situational couple violence and coercive controlling violence. At the contemporary level, the chapter focuses on sociology's study of how norms (which are shared cultural expectations for behaviour) regarding gender and domestic violence are related to domestic violence, citing examples from around the world. We discuss how inequality, a primary area of study in sociology, conditions experiences with domestic violence. This discussion includes how exploiting inequalities related to gender, race, sexual orientation, and national origin facilitates the use of gaslighting as a type of abuse. We argue that sociology's focus on how structural inequalities condition individual lived experiences lends itself to the intersectional approach developed by Black feminist scholars and activists, which helps us better understand and design effective prevention and intervention strategies to combat domestic violence across a broad range of identities.
Publication Year: 2021
Publication Date: 2021-03-17
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 4
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