Introduction

Domestic violence involves a pattern of coercive behaviours ranging from verbal abuse/threats, coercion, manipulation, and physical and sexual violence, to rape and homicide. On an individual level, therefore, experiencing domestic violence entails immense interpersonal struggles invoking honour, pride and shame. Such individual struggles are, however, set in a context of abstract (but very real) social structures and long-term social processes that construct gendered lives such that men in general are dominant over women. Wider community knowledge supports the research evidence, which consistently finds that the majority of domestic violence in heterosexual relationships is perpetrated by men against women (for recent figures see, for example, Walby and Allen, 2004; Home Office, 2005). When I refer to domestic violence in this chapter, therefore, I refer to male violence against female intimate partners and ex-partners.

In the mid-1990s my doctoral research programme involved qualitative action research with a local area-based domestic violence forum in a northern city. An important outcome of this research was a community-based project to provide support and services for women (Wilcox, 1996, 2000a, 2006a). Today, the city has four community-based domestic abuse projects (including the project I worked with), which provide essential support to women and children experiencing or recovering from domestic abuse. These community-based projects have not been without their problems but recent analysis of the benefits to statutory services of their provision in the voluntary sector has included reduced costs to health services, reduced risk of harm to children and an increase in the number of successful prosecutions. There are some other examples of organisations working along similar lines (see Hague et al, 2003; Hague, 2005) but when we look at the national picture this situation is not replicated.

Indeed, domestic violence is rarely addressed at the level of the local community although we know that it impacts on all communities, irrespective of ‘race’, gender, class, religion or cultural make-up. Moreover, gender-based violence is now recognised as a global phenomenon (WHO, 2002). And while there have been some positive shifts in awareness and attitudes among the professions that deal with domestic violence (although still more needs to be done) the turn to community is notably absent where domestic violence is concerned, as Walklate (2002) points out.