ABSTRACT
If men are working with violent and abusive fellow men in the projects that have developed to work with masculine violence, largely as a response to the women’s movement, they are centrally concerned with changing men’s behaviour and giving protection to women and children. It was feminism, particularly radical feminism, which challenged traditional forms of social theory to make male violence a central concern in the analysis of the workings of patriarchal societies. Functionalist theories that had dominated social theory in the 1950s and 1960s failed to appreciate the importance of violence in sustaining male dominance and women’s subordination and oppression. Sexuality was deemed to be a matter of private life and individual choice. It was subjective and personal and so was marginalized within classical forms of social theory that could recognize oppression and injustice as ‘real’ only when they took place within the public realm of politics. This was true in different ways of Marx, Weber and Durkheim.
