macy salzberger

Rape, as a kind of violence, has received a great deal of philosophical attention. In addition to challenging popular and legal conceptions of what rape means and who can be raped, feminist scholars have interrogated what, if anything, makes rape distinctively wrong or harmful. By contrast, domestic violence has received relatively little philosophical treatment. How are we to distinguish domestic violence from other kinds of violence? Is there anything that makes domestic violence distinctively wrong? In this paper, I give an account of the meaning of “domestic violence” to better inform policy, give victims the hermeneutical resources to identify themselves as victims, and to clarify our social understanding.

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Sociologists often understand domestic violence as involving a pattern in which one partner intends to control the other with physical violence. Evan Stark identifies this pattern as domestic violence, while Michael Johnson identifies this as one kind of domestic violence, namely “intimate terrorism.” Johnson also considers three different kinds of violence as kinds of domestic violence: violent resistance, situational couple violence, and mutual coercive control. For Johnson, "domestic violence" therefore includes instances of justified self-defense, one-off instances of violence, and cases where both violent partners intend to control one another. 

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I argue that while sociologists are right to emphasize the patterned nature of domestic violence, we ought to replace the intention to control as a necessary condition with the reasonable foreseeability that an action committed by the perpetrator may serve to control the victim. I also argue that the emphasis on physical violence problematically implies that physical violence is morally more significant than non-physical abuse. Finally, I argue that given that we typically understand "domestic violence" to carry thick ethical content and that this ethical content serves a useful social function, we ought to exclude “situational couple violence" and "violent resistance" from the category "domestic violence.