Rethinking Domestic Violence.

Margaret Conrad is a history professor at Acadia University and editor
of They Planted Well: New England Planters in Maritime Canada.

As the title of this book suggests, Donald Dutton’s goal is to move beyond the current gender-based approaches to intimate-partner violence, which defines men as perpetrators and women as victims, to one that takes into account women as abusers and abuse in different contexts (gay and lesbian relationships, for example). He makes a strong case for adopting intervention strategies that address the type of person to which they are applied, distinguishing three categories of abusers, depending on the seriousness and nature of the violence. In making his case, he draws on a wide range of theoretical and empirical literature—unfortunately, references are buried in endnotes and not conveniently brought together in a bibliography—but the tone of his argument leaves much to be desired.

Dutton has an annoying tendency to make the kind of sweeping and unsustainable generalizations that he finds so objectionable in others. Thus, we read early in the text that the lack of women’s rights in Western society originated in “centuries of religion-based oppression,” that feminist approaches to domestic abuse suffer from “dogma preservation” and a tendency “adapted from the Marxist view of the bourgeoisie” to find a “bad guy,” and that sociology is characterized by a “top down” analysis. While no doubt theology, feminism, and sociology have much to answer for, their approaches and impact are much more diverse and complicated than these comments suggest. This off-putting effort to raise himself by putting down others makes it less likely that Dutton’s main argument (intimate-partner violence is better predicted by personality disorders than by social-structural factors in Western cultures) and his remedy (professional assessment and the use of Intimate Abuse Circles for the least dangerous abusers) will receive the kind of thoughtful engagement by researchers, judges, and service providers that they warrant.