Ending the Gender Binary: A Path Toward Ending Gender-Based Violence

Since the establishment of the United States, a social movement for women’s equality has emerged about every sixty years. The 19^th and early 20^th century marked women’s progress toward owning property, voting, and running for public office. The Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1960s and 1970s contributed to women’s movement into the workforce and policies addressing equal employment, workplace discrimination and harassment, violence against women and women’s health. Despite contemporary policies seeking to address issues of gender such as the Violence Against Women Act, we find ourselves within another historical shift for gender equality with gender based violence as a key issue; this makes it imperative for social workers to be on the forefront of analyzing this issue and developing effective interventions on micro, mezzo, and macro levels. Most recent research on intimate partner violence and gender-based violence demonstrates that current theoretical frameworks and models of intervention fall short of explaining why violence, often understood as an issue of gender, occurs within same-sex or other non-conforming relationships. Some researchers have even argued that for this reason, intimate partner violence should not be understood as an issue of gender but as a result of other predictors outside of gender. This paper first argues the gender binary does prove limited in explaining intimate partner violence. However, it further demonstrates that gender conceptualized as a social structure, which understands gender as a set of dominant assumptions about men and women patterned throughout all of society (e.g. policies, literature, advertising, religion, unconscious biases), is most relevant in understanding the persistence of gender-based violence. The second part of the paper systematically reviews relevant research articles from three top social work research and gender journals to demonstrate how analyzing gender and its relation to violence by way of a binary variable offers limited explanatory value. These findings will prove useful as social workers work to create a more comprehensive gender frame for understanding gender-based violence and develop interventions at all levels.