Redefining Domestic Violence and Abuse: Unintended Consequences of Risk Assessment

Abstract

As neoliberalism increasingly defines the political context within which health, social care and criminal justice agencies are provided in Western democracies so does risk. Its assessment, management, targeting and minimisation is increasingly emerging as defining and organising features of that provision (for example, Hoyle, 2007; Kemshall, 2010; O’Malley, 2010). The approach taken in this chapter is one that critiques those who have characterised late modernity as the ‘risk society’ (Beck, 1992). Instead it combines the analytical tool box of governmentality (Rose, O’Malley and Valverde, 2006) with cultural approaches to risk (Douglas, 1992) and seeks to unpack the contradiction inherent in current policies for domestic violence and abuse (DVA); and the implications of this for understanding DVA, practice in response to it and victim/survivors. This contradiction on the one hand defines DVA as a social problem that anyone might be at risk of, while on the other hand produces a particular heteronormative intimate-partner relationship as the dominant model through which the highest risk (for instance, of domestic homicide) is experienced. The socially constructed and contingent nature of risk in this context underpins the argument. At the same time it is asserted that, while the risk factors identified as associated with the highest risk are problematised, the social behaviours experienced as DVA are understood to be real in their effects. In the case of DVA, this is demonstrated in embodied as well as other material ways.