I felt very frustrated yesterday when someone told me that to
say “violence against women” is discriminatory, that it should
be called “relationship violence”. I tried to point out that
intimate partner violence is only one kind of violence against
women. There are a range of gendered ways in which women are
targeted for violence, not all of which are “domestic”. Erasing
the language feminists have invented to describe the harms women
disproportionately face is an attempt at silencing women. I
recognise that some kinds of feminism render women as innocent,
always already victims and men as always already abusers.
Reality, of course, is much more complex. Women are not
innocent. Women are not victims. Men are not invulnerable to
violence from other men and yes, from women. Many feminists are
naming as gendered-based violence men’s violence towards each
other. The kind of violence which makes many boys afraid to go
to school, which causes many of them to arm themselves and which
claims the lives of many, many y