Frances Power Cobbe was a pioneering journalist who, in the 1850s, was prominent in the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. After campaigning for the Cruelty to Animals Act the society turned its attention to the plight of women and of exploited children. Cobbe later moved on to campaign on behalf of women who were subjected to male violence and, in 1878, published Wife Torture in England. She saw this as a different problem from the causes she had supported earlier: wife-beating was widely tolerated and the very act of legislating against it introduced the risk that court intervention 'would implicitly set a standard of toleration for "normal" wife-beating'.
Evan Stark and Anne Flitcraft have collected almost 20 years' worth of research data, reviews and essays on the subject of domestic violence in this volume. They stress the features of our society which, in their view, maintain the problem and inhibit effective responses.
The introduction presents the book as a collection of research papers written between 1978 and 1995, beginning with a study based in a busy emergency room in the 1970s. Considering the claims made for these data it is remarkable that the reference given is not to a peer-reviewed journal article but to an unpublished doctoral dissertation. The medical records of 481 women who attended with injuries in one month were examined and their histories were classified as 'definite', 'probable' or 'suggestive of' injury by a male partner. Unsurprisingly, given the setting and the fact that most women gave false histories, domestic violence was under-recognized by emergency room staff. Studies such as this one helped to raise the suspicion of the diagnosis in doctors', nurses' and social workers' minds.
Stark and Flitcraft attempt to understand the problem in the context of social and political forces and, to illustrate their views, they compare and contrast responses to domestic violence in the UK and USA. As the book unfolds it becomes clear that it is not principally research based but a polemic informed by strong opinion which the authors' data do not necessarily support. They state at the outset: 'The theoretical framework developed in these chapters draws on feminism and Marxism as well as on more conventional sociological and psychiatric paradigms.' Sometimes this is transparent, as in: 'In our view male violence against partners in contemporary society is a defensive response to women's progressive liberation from maternity and domestic servitude....' It is not always clear, however, exactly what data or theory they are drawing on, for example in jargon-riddled assertions such as the following: