Intimate Partner Femicide: Contesting the Legal Story (Routledge Research in Gender and Society)

Domestic violence legislation is a key response to the entrenched social problem of intimate partner violence across the globe, yet little is known about the legal players who implement these laws in terms of their perceptions of intimate partner violence and femicide. Through in-depth, critical analysis of judicial transcripts, this book demonstrates that legal understandings of intimate partner femicide continue to be based upon outdated notions of 'couple conflict' and gender-neutral constructions of intimate partner violence. Contending that judicial understandings of ‘what happened’ must be re-aligned with feminist understandings of intimate partner violence and femicide, Intimate Partner Femicide: Contesting the Legal Story ... represents a call to uphold the rights of women to live free from male-perpetrated violence and femicide. This book will therefore appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in gendered violence, law, social justice and criminology.

Bethany Wilkinson is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Tasmania, Australia. She is primarily concerned with supporting the realisation of social justice for women who experience male perpetrated intimate partner violence. Her research centres on understandings of intimate partner violence and femicide; and how these understandings determine professional’s actions. Bethany has a particular interest in developing a cohesive understanding of intimate partner violence across a variety of disciplines with the aim integrating feminist knowledges into system responses. Her most recent work explores women’s agency in recovering from intimate partner violence in all dimensions of their lives: health, recreation, friendship, work or career, family and nourishing and supportive intimate partnership.

Susan Goodwin is Professor of Policy Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia. She is involved in research and critical policy analysis with and for a wide range of communities and organisations, in Australia and internationally, including organisations working to prevent violence against women. Her books include Social Policy for Social Change; Markets, Rights and Power in Australian Social Policy; and Working Across Difference: Social Work, Social Policy and Social Justice. Susan is co-author, with Carol Bacchi, of the book Poststructural Policy Analysis: A Guide to Practice (2016) which offers a way to question how policies, programmes and governmental interventions themselves produce “problems”, subjects, objects and places.