Abstract
The article assesses three approaches to domestic violence: two that use the concept of ‘coercive control’ and one that uses ‘domestic violent crime’. These are: Stark’s concept of coercive control; Johnson’s distinction between situational couple violence and intimate terrorism, in which coercive control is confined to the latter; and that of domestic violent crime, in which all physical violence is conceptualized as coercive and controlling. The article assesses these three approaches on seven issues. It offers original analysis of data from the Crime Survey for England and Wales concerning variations in repetition and seriousness in domestic violent crime. It links escalation in domestic violent crime to variations in the economic resources of the victim. It concludes that the concept of domestic violent crime is preferable to that of coercive control when seeking to explain variations in domestic violence.
Highlights
Domestic violence is an important form of coercion; a serious violent crime; and a cause and consequence of gender inequality
The analysis findings are organized around the questions that are susceptible to empirical testing: the scale of domestic violent crime; its gendering; its repetition and seriousness; and associations with the victim’s employment status and housing tenure
In the analysis of three approaches to domestic violence, two different interpretations of the concept of ‘coercive control’ were disentangled (Johnson and Stark) and an alternative approach based on the concept of ‘domestic violent crime’ proposed
Summary
Domestic violence is an important form of coercion; a serious violent crime; and a cause and consequence of gender inequality. Further distinctions arise from differences in the approach to the relationship between violence and coercion, with a developing focus on coercive control (Stark, 2007) This focuses on gendered motivation in generating the most extreme forms of domestic violence. There is a third approach: domestic violent crime (violent crimes perpetrated by intimate partners and other family members), which is gender asymmetrical and in which violence escalates over time if the resilience of the victims is compromised because of lack of access to structural, especially economic, resources (Walby et al, 2016) This third approach focuses on the relationship between violence, economy and society; rather than on ideas and motives
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