The book was published earlier this month. It's called Gender and Domestic Violence: Contemporary Legal Practice and Intervention Reforms and was edited by Brenda Russell and John Hamel.

Summary

Over the past 40 years, considerable progress has been made in lowering rates of domestic violence in our communities. This progress has been uneven, however, due to continuing misconceptions about the causes and dynamics of domestic violence, which include an exaggerated focus on males as perpetrators and females as victims, as well as a heavy-handed law enforcement response that compromises the rights of criminal defendants without necessarily reducing violence.

Gender and Domestic Violence presents empirical research findings and reform recommendations for prosecutors, criminal defense attorneys, policy makers and intervention providers with the aim of rectifying shortcomings in legal and law enforcement responses to domestic violence. The volume's editors and chapter authors confront the notion that certain beliefs shared among victim advocates, legal actors, and other stakeholders -- principally that domestic violence is bound by gender, and is primarily a crime against women -- have led to the use of ineffective and potentially harmful one-size-fits-all intervention policies that can jeopardize defendant due process and victim safety. Domestic violence experts, legal scholars, and practicing attorneys present how gendered aspects of domestic violence affect legal decision-making and practice and provide strategies for becoming more inclusive in the adjudicative process, intervention/prevention, and practice. Gender and Domestic Violence: Contemporary Legal Practice and Intervention Reforms provides the foundation from which we can begin to move beyond the gender paradigm by recognizing disparities and applying tools that improve research, policing, and practice, allowing us to progress toward eradicating domestic violence, and to move closer to equality.

Brenda Russell is a psychology professor who has a long history of research about gender biases in the legal system, as well as female perpetration of domestic violence, including rates of violence in the LGBT community and among lesbian women.

John Hamel is the editor-in-chief of the well-known domestic violence research journal Partner Abuse. He was also the director of The Partner Abuse State of Knowledge Project, or PASK, which itself was a groundbreaking publication about domestic violence based on the efforts of 42 researchers and 20 different university and research institutions around the world.

One of the main points from PASK was how our ideas about domestic violence are completely backward from what the data and research tells us.

Here are some of the findings from PASK:

  • Among large population samples, 57.9% of IPV reported was bi-directional, 42% unidirectional; 13.8% of the unidirectional violence was male to female (MFPV), 28.3% was female to male (FMPV)

  • Among school and college samples, percentage of bidirectional violence was 51.9%; 16.2% was MFPV and 31.9% was FMPV

  • Male and female IPV perpetrated from similar motives – primarily to get back at a partner for emotionally hurting them, because of stress or jealousy, to express anger and other feelings that they could not put into words or communicate, and to get their partner’s attention.

  • Eight studies directly compared men and women in the power/control motive and subjected their findings to statistical analyses. Three reported no significant gender differences and one had mixed findings. One paper found that women were more motivated to perpetrate violence as a result of power/control than were men, and three found that men were more motivated; however, gender differences were weak.

Due to the high rate of bi-directional abuse found in domestic violence cases, Hamel and other experts have advocated for family counseling and anger management therapy to treat and combat the problem.

Most domestic violence cases leave few injuries, if any at all. And severe cases that do result in injuries usually start out small, and escalate over time. With both parties being guilty of this escalation.

Early intervention and counseling might therefore prove to be more successful than older approaches based on the Duluth model, or the theory of patriarchal violence, both of which are known to be highly flawed theories with limited success in the real world.