ABSTRACT
This first part of this chapter revisits the key actors that shaped the understanding of domestic violence and the context within which domestic violence developed from a private issue to a human rights violation. It emphasises the significant contribution of multifaceted feminism to challenging women’s inequality through the lens of legal neutrality, which resulted in placing such issues as violence against women on the international agenda. Today, however, the prevalence of men’s domestic violence against women is at the same levels as at the beginning of the domestic violence revolution in the 1970s. These realities along with growing counter-feminist discourses merit a reminder of the hard-won battles by the battered women’s movement. The pandemic prevalence of domestic violence also shows that the deeply gendered patriarchal order of the liberal state, underpinned by the division between private and public, and the trend of gender neutrality, is alive and thriving. Subsequently, the second part of this chapter investigates where human rights stand in all this.
