'Gender and Intimate Partner Violence: A Case Study from NSW

Abstract

The extent to which gender plays a role in intimate heterosexual partner violence remains one of the most hotly (and continuously) contested issues in the field. Since the problem of intimate partner violence (‘IPV’) first emerged on the agenda of Australian governments around 30 years ago, a plethora of responses and activities has been put in place that largely conceives of and responds to IPV as a gendered harm – with women being the predominant victims and men the predominant perpetrators. This understanding of IPV as a gendered harm is supported by official statistics from the police, courts, health services, and homicide data. Despite these official statistics, the gendered understanding of IPV has been subject to sustained challenge by various researchers, and by men’s groups (invariably relying on that research). Community attitudes in Australia also increasingly reflect this view of IPV as a gender neutral phenomenon. These different views of gender and IPV reflect what has been a long-standing, and often acrimonious, debate played out in the sociological literature for over 30 years. In general terms, the debate about gender is characterised by a schism between ‘family violence’ researchers (who see IPV as symmetrical in its occurrence, with men and women being equally likely to be perpetrators) and ‘violence against women’ or feminist researchers (who see IPV as asymmetrical, predominantly perpetrated by men against women). This article engages with the issue of gender and its importance in understanding IPV through an examination of the differences in men’s and women’s complaints for civil protection orders in New South Wales (known as Apprehended Domestic Violence Orders or ADVOs). This research focused on cross applications, that is, cases where the male and the female partner to a relationship are both making allegations that the other has used violence or abuse against them.

Keywords: Intimate partner violence; gender; domestic violence; civil protection orders