Counter Hegemonic Domestic Violence Analyses and Movements

The American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare recently released its Grand Challenges for Social Work. ‘‘Ending gender-based violence (also referenced as domestic violence [DV]) constitutes one of two streams for the Grand Challenge #3, Stop Family Violence. Although Edleson, Lindhorst, and Kanuha's (2015) working paper suggests hope that the United States ‘‘has the resources, tools, and knowledge to move more quickly toward not only healthier nonviolent relationships but also families, neighborhoods, and communities that value safety, empowerment and respect for girls and women'' (p. 3), we posit that insufficient attention is paid to the political, economic and historical-structural conditions that create and shape antiviolence work (research, practice, and policy), and consequently the ways social workers can meet this Grand Challenge. This roundtable will focus on the ways that neoliberalism, criminalization, and professionalization are braided together (herein referenced as “the braid”) to create and constrain the nature of work made im/possible in Social Work's goal to end DV.

The increased focus on evidenced based practice offered by ‘professionals' within the neoliberal agenda, coupled with increasing collaborations between the DV movement and the State (often through the criminal justice system) have transformed the battered women's movement from a social change movement rooted in feminisms, to social services focused on individualized treatment and programming. Through VAWA, DV is now regarded as an individual-level problem with funding and policy initiatives focused on shelter, enhanced criminal-legal involvement (policing, courts, detention), and targeted intervention through the State. With the increased institutionalization of and reliance upon formalized governmental support, DV work is progressively modeled after other service-based interventions increasingly shaped by professionalization. Some have also argued that an over reliance on the State for funding, leadership and support has led to greater criminalization and privileging of carceral approaches. In particular, increased criminalization of DV has led to many un/intended consequences particularly within marginalized populations including women of color, undocumented immigrants, the poor, transgender, lesbian and queer people, women with disabilities, and people in the sex trades.

This roundtable session will begin a dialogue about the macro forces shaping DV research, practice, and policy specifically in the recent past and current American landscape. In particular, we will focus on the ways macro forces have constrained the liberatory potential of DV work, simultaneously accompanied by a disproportionate impact on marginalized communities. Given the current political climate, presenters will facilitate a discussion of alternative approaches to addressing domestic violence outside of existing institutions and systems. Presenters will focus on counter-hegemonic anti-violence analyses and movements, ways advocates, activists and academics are resisting and subverting the braid, specifically around race and decarceration, alternative, non-State interventions to violence, advocacy for criminalized survivors and cross-sectoral organizing in the original tradition of Crenshaw's 1991 seminal work on intersectionality and violence against women of color. Our objective is to stimulate a critical dialogue amongst DV researchers to generate creative possibilities for research and practice that resist the braid as a means of better serving racialized survivors of DV, in particular.