ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we focus on the discipline of psychology and the ways in which it has (dis)engaged with questions of violence against women and the attendant challenges and implications. This is with a particular focus on the ways in which it reproduces individualised discourses that decontextualise the problem of domestic violence. We illustrate how some psychological discourse on domestic violence and abuse may close possibilities for knowledge production in the service of ending violence against women and non-normative persons, leaving silences and complexities unattended. More specifically, we ask what discourses will lead us closer to equality and a world free of violence, and which ones will take us further away? Some recognition has been given to the role of the discipline and its complicity in the perpetuation of racism and the maintenance of the racialised status quo. However, little proportional attention has been paid to the ways in which it has advanced heteronormative, essentialist, damaging and stereotypical thinking on gender-entanglements. We interrogate the implications of individualising and pathologising language in psychological discourse and how it shapes power and oppressions experienced by various identities exposed to domestic violence. We adopt an intersectional approach to our analysis of discourses of risk and representation; trauma and pathologisation; and heteronormativity. Importantly, we engage with these discourses to comment on possibilities for transformative psychological research and practice.
