Seminar @ UCLan: Intersectionality in Young Men’s Accounts of Domestic Violence

Connect Centre for International Research on Interpersonal Violence and Harm
University of Central Lancashire – School of Social Work
4 November 2014, 4-5.45pm, Brook Building room 8

Intersectionality in Young Men’s Accounts of Domestic Violence

Professor David Gadd

Director of the Centre for Criminology and Criminal Justice Manchester University Law School

This paper argues for approaches to explaining domestic violence that are sufficiently nuanced enough for most men to be able to see both similarities and differences between themselves and other men who have described perpetrating assaults on women. It begins by outlining the instrumentalist assumptions that continue to inform key feminist approaches to explaining perpetrator behaviour. It then elaborates on how conceptual developments in the study of masculinities have challenged instrumentalist explanations without fully transcending the social determinism implicit in them. Using three young men’s narrative accounts the paper shows how domestic violence can be both instrumental and expressive at the same time – controlling and defensive – and that the meaning of such behaviours can often only be grasped by being alive to the gendered nature of social discourses, many of which are easily infused with racialized, disablist and class-based assumptions.

Professor David Gadd is Director of the Centre for Criminology and Criminal Justice at Manchester University Law School. David has 15 years of experience of conducting and analyzing in-depth interview research with offenders, and has written extensively on the subjects of domestic abuse, masculinities and crime, racial harassment, offender motivation and desistance from crime. His first book, Psychosocial Criminology (co-written with Tony Jefferson) was published by Sage in 2007. His second book, Losing the Race (co-written with Bill Dixon) was published by Karnac in 2011. David is lead editor of the (2012) SAGE Handbook of Criminological Research Methods (co-edited with Susanne Karstedt and Steven Messner).

Seminar is free. All welcome. Brook Building room 8. Refreshments provided.
To reserve a place go to EventBrite at: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/connect-centre-seminar-intersectionality-in-young-mens-accounts-of-domestic-violence-tickets-13026190687