Radical Feminist Approach To Domestic Violence

This essay will explain domestic violence in terms what who commits domestic violence and why. This will be achieved by exploring conflicting and competing theoretical interpretation of domestic violence, such as, Radical Feminism, Individual theories, Family Violence and Intersectionality approach. The use of these theories are important in answering the question because they look at specific interpretation of why domestic violence occurs, for example, premeditated or learnt behaviour and so on. However, these theories have their faults in how they have interpreted domestic violence, therefore this essay will also examine the advantages and disadvantages of the said theories.
However, it is first necessary to define what constitute domestic
This approach also claim that the cause of domestic is violence is due conflict in a relationship. Sociologist that abide to this theory use the Critical Tactic Scale to gain statistic on domestic violence, which is based on the conflict theory which assumes that conflict is an inevitable part of all human association, whereas violence as a tactic to deal with conflict is not” (Strauss, Hamby, Boney-McCoy and Sugarman (1996). Which suggest that conflict is a part of a developing relationship, however, when that conflict causes violence, it is then necessary for other agencies to intervene such as counselling. The Critical Tactic Scale is a list of items or acts intended to measure abuse, which are then used to measure conflict. This scales suggests that domestic violence is just a physical violence, this approach does not consider emotional abuse which is included in the Home Office definition of domestic violence. Which creates a hierarchy of abuse based on seriousness Kelly (1987, because emotional abuse is often experienced as more harmful than physical violence (Chang, 1996; Kirkwood, 1993), and a slap can often draw blood or break teeth. In addition, the scale doesn’t allow for question in whether respondent is telling truth when reporting their own engagement
What it does not tell, is why people use violence. Thus, mainly reporting that men and women are equally violent, and thereby missing the possibility that the perpetrator of act may have used it for different reasons. It is claimed that Women use violence for a variety of reasons, but a common one is to defend themselves. Whilst men typically use violence to control their female partners (DeKeseredy, etal, 1997; Ellis & Stuckless, 1996). In addition, researchers could miss whether the violence was out of the blue or whether it was a frequent