ABSTRACT
The roots of the dominant focus on victims are in the initial “discovery” of domestic violence in the 1970s and how the problem was framed by the activists who brought it to the public’s attention. These activists framed the problem in a way that emphasized the needs of battered women to end abuse, not the need to hold abusers accountable. Media looked to activists for information about this new problem and so it is not surprising that their coverage also focused on victims. The media’s focus has remained primarily on victims for the past three decades except for attention directed toward female abusers, which began in the 1990s. To be fair, the battered women movement did attempt to draw attention to the cultural and structural factors that contributed to domestic violence. However, the cultural and political context of the time intensified the media’s narrow focus on victims. Unfortunately, the problem has become increasingly personalized, further obscuring how our cultural and social structures foster domestic violence.
