Is domestic violence a gender hate crime, and why does it matter?

Woods concludes:

Internationally there is a growing recognition that a gendered conceptualisation of DV has passed its use-by date, and that such explanations do not account for the reality of DV research findings. Interventions based on a gendered approach are ineffective.

 

This last sentence is inarguable. The gender paradigm we have used to understand and address DV for the last forty years has not resulted in any significant decrease in the crime.

This 2007 Canadian study on Perceptions of Motives in Intimate Partner Violence (Hamel, Desmarais and Nicholls) concludes: "Results of this study provide empirical support for the existence of a gender bias within the field of domestic violence to minimize intimate partner violence perpetrated by women."

This US study (Journal of Aggression, Conflict and Peace Research, Volume 2 Issue 3, July 2010) on what researchers termed "Intimate terrorism" [IT] by women towards men concluded:

The results of this study indicate that the adherence to the theory that patriarchy is the foundation of IT in Western, developed nations deserves reconsideration. Because IT can be perpetrated by both men and women, against both men and women, it is imperative that researchers, practitioners, and decision/policy-makers reconsider their conception of the causes of both IT and CCV so that all potential victims are addressed and provided with services.

A 2005 study conducted by researchers at the University of British Columbia titled "The gender paradigm in domestic violence research and theory: Part 1-The conflict of theory and data" concludes, among other observations that:

One detects a tendency to dismiss male victimization in reports where the female victimization rate is higher. It raises the question as to why this comparison is so often made. If group B is victimized less than Group A, it is nevertheless being victimized and the social mandate should be to reduce victimization of all citizens, not just certain groups. We would not accept this argument for any other pair of groups. Although women may be injured at a higher rate, men are injured as well. The inevitable conclusion is that feminist theory on intimate violence is flawed. It cannot accept the reality of female violence. While male violence is viewed as never justified, female violence is viewed as always justified. The data do not support this double standard.

Same sex domestic and intimate partner violence.

The 12-year National Plan is heterosexist in its focus. Based on a gender paradigm in which women are victims and men are perpetrators, it effectively renders same sex DV and IPV invisible.

This is because if the Plan were to acknowledge the seriousness and prevalence of same sex violence, its definition of DV as a gender-hate crime perpetrated by men against women would be discredited.