Seeing Family Violence Differently - Essay Example

Objective: To address three research questions related to studying DV from a communication perspective: (1) In what ways do the terministic screens informing social scientific approaches to DV skew research results and restrict the range of possible responses to DV as a social problem? (2) In what ways can a rhetorical perspective reveal the role(s) of systematic power and control that buttress a cultural complicity in intimate violence? (3) How might communication researchers incorporate broader critical rhetorical insights into their approaches to researching intimate violence?

This continued focus on discrete and measurable units of space, time, and people further entrenches social scientific models into a paradigm that necessarily deflects broader socio-economic-political-material culture, which lies beyond the scope of such analyses. This model – “Illustrates that violence is part of a pattern of behaviors rather than isolated incidents of abuse or cyclical explosions of pent-up anger, frustration, or painful feelings” (Peace & Paymar, 1993) – through relevant in certain ways to other familial relationships, speaks specifically to violence within intimate, heterosexual relationships.

  Impact of a methodological shift toward rhetorical perspective: (1) helps to encourage us all to separate out our terminologies; (2) demands that we analyze the types and the thresholds of evidence necessary in (often overlapping) argument fields; and (3) offers lenses for scrutinizing the broader rhetorical architecture supporting our socio-cultural frameworks for understanding intimate abuse. DV ought to be understood as a “phenomenon crossing all demographic lines which involve men as offenders who intend to do harm and women as victims who do not create their victimization” (Loseke, 1992, p. 16).