Race, Poverty, and the Crime-Centered Response to Domestic Violence: A Comment on Linda Mills’s Insult to Injury: Rethinking Our Responses to Intimate Abuse

Source: (2004) Violence Against Women. 10(11): 1331-1353.

Linda Mills (2003) criticizes our current crime-centered approach to domestic violence. I share her concern that this approach is harmful for women (or at least, for some women). I disagree, however, with Mills’s analysis and with the reform proposal that flows from that analysis. As I describe in this essay, Mills focuses mostly on psychological harms rather than material and social conditions. The result is to diminish the importance of power in understanding the phenomenon of domestic violence, the political position of the batteredwomen’s movement, and the design of
an appropriate response. Author’s abstract.