ABSTRACT

The appropriation of violence in the service of social science research often follows from a naive commitment to solving a social problem. This chapter describes how the production of social scientific discourse that appropriates violence against women is linked to the political structure in which it has arisen. It addresses the question by critically examining the history of domestic violence as a social problem worthy of public recognition and state intervention. The co-optation of the institutional structures of the movement was accompanied by the expansion of new expert discourses that distorted the political meanings of the insurgent language. The dominant mode of understanding in expert discourse on battered women rests upon an internalized debate about the defeat of the "masochist" hypothesis within the social work profession. The social science theory of domestic violence is connected to practice by measures which define concrete state intervention.