A Feminist Disruption: Social Work Response to Intimate Partner Violence in the 1970s and 1980s

Background and Purpose: Contemporary critiques of social work's response to intimate partner violence (IPV) highlight a tendency toward individualized, depoliticized approaches that obscure the structural roots of gender-based violence. This tendency appears to conflict with the values of the feminist movements that helped bring IPV into public consciousness in the 1960s and 1970s. Has social work always responded to IPV in this way? In what ways did social work interact with feminist movements, and how did the interactions shift over time? This study explores how IPV was taken up in social work discourse during the 1970s–1980s and asks what this history might offer for reimagining the field's relationship to social movements and its capacity to address structurally rooted social problems.

Methods: This study conducts a qualitative content analysis of articles published in major U.S. social work journals between the early 1970s and late 1980s, examining how IPV was framed, problematized, and situated within broader professional and political discourses during this period. The analysis focuses on how social work scholarship engaged with emerging feminist analyses and evolving academic concepts such as family violence and systems theory. Additional sources include National Association of Social Workers (NASW) policy statements and monographs by leading social work scholars of the time.

Results: Preliminary findings suggest that during the 1970s, some segments of the social work profession began engaging with IPV through feminist frameworks shaped by the battered women's movement. These perspectives emphasized systemic change, community organizing, and collective interventions, offering a departure from the profession's long-standing reliance on casework and psychoanalytic theories that had dominated practice since the early 20th century. However, by the 1980s, frameworks emphasizing gender neutrality and family-centered language, such as "family violence," became increasingly prominent, along with the rise of systems theories. These shifts contributed to a return to an individualized framework of IPV as a problem on intrapersonal and interpersonal levels that demands professionalized interventions.

Conclusions and Implications: This historical trajectory seems to suggest that feminist and movement-based approaches to IPV only constituted a brief disruption rather than a sustained transformation. The profession's reversion to individualized and depoliticized models reflected broader political and institutional pressures—including the waning influence of social movements in the 1980s and the drive toward professional legitimacy through routinized interventions. Revisiting this history warns us of the entrenched tendency of the social work profession to fall back on individualized solutions to structural issues.

At the same time, placing this moment of disruption in dialogue with today’s renewed feminist calls for community-based approaches—ones that resist professionalization and carceral solutions—invites us to recover and reimagine the possibilities of social work praxis rooted in collective care, accountability, and structural changes.