Viewing gendered violence through a feminist lens

Professor Jamie Abrams has an article published in the Yale Journal of Law & Feminism.

In "The Feminist Case for Acknowledging Women's Acts of Violence," Abrams describes how the domestic violence movement was successfully built on a gender binary of men as perpetrators and women as victims, leaving female victims of female abuse, male victims of female abuse and all individuals who do not identify with the gender binary outside the frame.

In response, the feminist movement has historically deployed a "strategy of containment" to accept male victims for services and contain statistical and political exaggerations of women's violence.

While that strategy has achieved critical successes in protecting funding and infrastructure, it is too myopic and reactive to endure.

In her article, Abrams argues that it is time for the feminist movement to claim women's acts of violence as consistent with feminism -- not threatening to it -- to strengthen the foundation of the movement to endgendered violence, to move beyond the masculinist frame that still dominates domestic violence and to address troublesome framings of women abusers as pathologized and marginalized.