Public Policy and Laws Addressing Men’s Violence against Female Intimate Partners

Abstract

This chapter surveys the field of domestic violence law. What are the wins, debates and innovations in laws addressing intimate partner violence?

The first part is about the path travelled. We will see how certain kinds of violence against women, particularly sexual and physical violence, have been recognized in our laws, while others remained unacknowledged and trivialized.

The second part is about the current geography of the field, its crossroads and challenges. We will cartography developments in intimate partner violence law by identifying their breadth, depth and specificity, thus learning to read laws in three dimensions. This new perspective on domestic violence law sheds light on complex puzzles, such as coercive control legislation or the criminalization of rape by deception.

The third part is about the road ahead; it is about innovating and breaking with the past. We will go off the beaten track to explore criminalizing ordinary violence and displacing the incident model of crime. The former means recognizing that violent men are normal men. The latter means seeing rape and assault not as isolated, one-off events, but as part of a broader environment of violence, control, and inequality.

The goal is none other than liberation for all women.

Keywords: intimate partner violence, domestic violence, domestic violence law, violence against women, coercive control, rape law, sexual violence law

JEL Classification: K36, K14