Contending with the social and political aspects of battered women seems to be divided along the lines of gender identity. That is, the problems inherent in policy debate concerning the implementation (or continuation) of programs designed to ameliorate the abuse of women by their husbands, ex-husbands, and other intimates present or past seem to degenerate into either recitations of time-honored patriarchy or latter-day feminism.
The patriarchal (sometimes referred to as hierarchical) rhetoric usually follows lines of reasoning which suppose that the incident of violence directed at a women by a non-stranger is brought about through some act or omission on the part of the woman or her family, is preventable if the woman offers more than token resistance, and is rooted in centuries-old systems which reinforced the status of women as the property of their husbands. Hart (1993) recognizes this when she writes that, "Unlike other victims of violent crime, battered women are often viewed . . . as responsible for the crimes committed against them" and may further be considered "unworthy victims" in the eyes of some within the criminal justice system (p. 626).
At the opposite end of the spectrum, the feminist dialogue prefers to view the problem of violence against women as one of gender inequality. Edleson and Frank (1991) depict some of the feminist analyses as: "Gender inequality plays a central role at both the personal and societal level in creating and maintaining battering," or, "We do not define battering as a problem within a relationship or as the pathology of the individual perpetrator" (p. 546). The basic premise of feminist theories concerning the abuse of women (and children) is that societies have historically maintained a stance which preserves the rights of men to dominate their households ("A man's home is his castle"), to the extent that women have been disempowered. They frequently regard terminology s...