Broken: Women’s Stories of Intimate and Institutional Harm and Repair (August 2024). University of California Press.

The second-wave feminist fight to achieve legal and societal recognition of men’s violence against women in the United States operated according to an incident-based, violence-focused victim-offender binary. Those held legally accountable for the violence were seen only as offenders, while those who survived the violence were seen only as victims. The victim-offender binary pre-dates efforts to achieve legal and societal recognition of men’s violence against women. But as a conceptual tool used as part of that struggle for recognition, the binary became inscribed in funding schemes, legal remedies, and intervention approaches.

Broken tells the story of how this binary persists in legal, child protection, and antiviolence intervention settings. Through trauma-informed life-history, go-along, and middle position interviews with women who participated in antiviolence intervention, and informed by my practice experience, this book explains how the binary plays out across formal systems settings. It also illuminates avenues toward healing, repair, and re-imagining responses to intimate harm.

Reviews

Beyond the Binary – A Holistic Approach to Healing and Repair
Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research of Bryn Mawr College