What do you think?
Family Violence in the United States: Defining, Understanding, and Combating Abuse
Family Violence in the United Defining, Understanding, and Combating Abuse examines all types of family aggression. The book is designed to provoke readers into questioning assumptions, evaluating information, formulating hypotheses, and designing solutions to problems of family violence in the United States. Using an ecological framework, authors Denise A. Hines and Kathleen Malley-Morrison provide a thought-provoking and informative discussion not only of the most well-recognized forms of maltreatment in families, but also of less understood and more controversial issues such as husband abuse, parent abuse, and gay/lesbian abuse.
424 pages, Hardcover
First published December 1, 2004
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
October 10, 2021
It’s rather bizarre that, at least in the UK where I live, domestic violence has been accepted as being a form of gendered violence against women. It’s not. Domestic violence is a form of family violence, but it’s not gendered, and it certainly is not the product of the patriarchy targeting women only, whereas men are supposedly given a free ticket to exert power and control over their female partners -even through violence if necessary! Women, in fact, turn out to be as abusive as men, not only when it comes to intimate partner relationships, but, also, against their children, their siblings, their parents.
About, here’s one of the strongest points of this book: it reviews the literature available on violence within domestic and family settings as a whole; and so addresses IPV as much as it does child abuse and elderly abuse, or, again, abuse within LGBTQ relationships. Combing through multiple statistics, studies and scientific analyses, here’s a fairly technical book (although engaging enough to be readable) which also exposes -even if ‘in between the lines’ only- the negative impact society’s blind acceptance of feminist theories to explain domestic violence ('it’s patriarchal and gendered', 'only women are victims') has had upon whole demographics not fitting such politico-social narrative (men of course, but also lesbians and transwomen). Ideologies have consequences.
I said ‘in between the lines’ because, the authors, in fact, do not reject out of hand the idea that family violence can be patriarchal. In fact, they point at studies showing that, indeed, the greater the inequalities between men and women, the higher the probabilities for domestic abuse to occur (with men as abuser and women as victims). What they do, though, is to put such theory in perspective, and so demonstrate that it is far from being a ‘fit all’ model we can entirely rely upon. Put bluntly: it’s too simplistic an explanation to be credible on its own; and there are many other factors which explain better why someone (man or woman, for such violence are not gendered) would engage in abusive behaviours. They outline some of them (ranging from biology to psychology and even other social models -as they take violence as a feature of a whole ecosystem), an approach which, interestingly, even helps to give a new perspective on the patriarchal model itself! For example, even in situation of high inequalities between men and women, it’s not the patriarchal values embodied by the men which is the most likely to cause abuse, but their personal attitude to violence.
Here's a book which was published in 2005, and so the bulk of the statistics and studies cited are from the 1990s or early 2000s. It’s also a book which focuses entirely on the USA, a country where the situation, in a few contexts at least, can differ from that in Europe (spanking and physical disciplining of children is more commonly accepted than in Europe, and, of course, access to guns is a major contributing factor to a higher level of violence!). Nevertheless, by addressing the whole family as a dynamic system (and not men only as a lump group of misogynists), and by seeing violence as the product of multiple factors coming altogether at varying degrees depending on individual situations and circumstances as diverse as the interpersonal dynamics in which abuse occur (instead of blaming patriarchy only, and call it a day) the authors not only offer a broad and realistic perspective upon how family and domestic abuse unfold, but, also, demonstrate its impact upon whole victims which, so far, have been completely let down.
It’s a pity that this is mostly a scholarly review, for here’s a textbook everyone interested in violence ought to read. Many a prejudice and sexist stereotype are debunked!
About, here’s one of the strongest points of this book: it reviews the literature available on violence within domestic and family settings as a whole; and so addresses IPV as much as it does child abuse and elderly abuse, or, again, abuse within LGBTQ relationships. Combing through multiple statistics, studies and scientific analyses, here’s a fairly technical book (although engaging enough to be readable) which also exposes -even if ‘in between the lines’ only- the negative impact society’s blind acceptance of feminist theories to explain domestic violence ('it’s patriarchal and gendered', 'only women are victims') has had upon whole demographics not fitting such politico-social narrative (men of course, but also lesbians and transwomen). Ideologies have consequences.
I said ‘in between the lines’ because, the authors, in fact, do not reject out of hand the idea that family violence can be patriarchal. In fact, they point at studies showing that, indeed, the greater the inequalities between men and women, the higher the probabilities for domestic abuse to occur (with men as abuser and women as victims). What they do, though, is to put such theory in perspective, and so demonstrate that it is far from being a ‘fit all’ model we can entirely rely upon. Put bluntly: it’s too simplistic an explanation to be credible on its own; and there are many other factors which explain better why someone (man or woman, for such violence are not gendered) would engage in abusive behaviours. They outline some of them (ranging from biology to psychology and even other social models -as they take violence as a feature of a whole ecosystem), an approach which, interestingly, even helps to give a new perspective on the patriarchal model itself! For example, even in situation of high inequalities between men and women, it’s not the patriarchal values embodied by the men which is the most likely to cause abuse, but their personal attitude to violence.
Here's a book which was published in 2005, and so the bulk of the statistics and studies cited are from the 1990s or early 2000s. It’s also a book which focuses entirely on the USA, a country where the situation, in a few contexts at least, can differ from that in Europe (spanking and physical disciplining of children is more commonly accepted than in Europe, and, of course, access to guns is a major contributing factor to a higher level of violence!). Nevertheless, by addressing the whole family as a dynamic system (and not men only as a lump group of misogynists), and by seeing violence as the product of multiple factors coming altogether at varying degrees depending on individual situations and circumstances as diverse as the interpersonal dynamics in which abuse occur (instead of blaming patriarchy only, and call it a day) the authors not only offer a broad and realistic perspective upon how family and domestic abuse unfold, but, also, demonstrate its impact upon whole victims which, so far, have been completely let down.
It’s a pity that this is mostly a scholarly review, for here’s a textbook everyone interested in violence ought to read. Many a prejudice and sexist stereotype are debunked!
May 24, 2011
This textbook for class really made me think about troubling topics in different ways.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews