1.1 Introduction
This book explores the use of physical violence and other behaviours that could be perceived to be abusive in the relationships of lesbians, gay men, bisexual women and men, and/or transgender women and men and non-binary gender and/or genderqueer people (LGB and/or T+). The Coral Project is a mixed-methods research project carried out in the United Kingdom (UK) to find out āwhat you do when things go wrong in your relationshipā, involving a national community survey of LGB and/or T+ people and follow-up interviews with volunteers from the survey. Interviews also took place with providers of both mandatory and voluntary perpetrator interventions for heterosexual, ostensibly cisgender men, and focus groups with a range of practitioner groups providing what we broadly call ārelationships servicesā (Donovan et al. 2014). This book focusses on key findings from the survey and interviews with LGB and/or T+ participants. We believe that our work is a reminder about the instability of research about intimate partner violence and abuse (IPVA) that relies on a narrow incident- or act-based approach, rather than research that attempts to provide a more holistic exploration of the relationships within which IPVA occurs. We are concerned with the different stories that can be told about IPVA depending on the data collected and the analysis undertaken.
Before we outline the structure and key themes of the book, a note about terminology is required. Whilst we use the term LGB and/or T+ to include the diversity of sexuality and gender identities that exist and to recognise that not all trans+ people identify as LGB, when discussing other authorsā work we use their chosen terminology, such as āsame-sex relationshipsā. The phrase āviolence and other behaviours that could be perceived to be abusiveā indicates our view that context, meanings, motives and impacts are crucial to making sense of these behaviours in an intimate relationship. Having made this point, and for brevity, throughout the rest of the book we sometimes refer to violence and āabusiveā behaviours, placing āabusiveā in scare quotes to remind the reader that the judgement of whether the behaviours are abusive is contingent. We use the acronym IPVA to refer to all violent and āabusiveā behaviours that might be experienced or enacted in adult intimate relationships. Throughout this book we also refer to domestic violence and abuse (DVA) as the most impactful and serious form of IPVA: what Johnson (2008) would call coercively controlling violence (CCV) and Stark (2007) coercive control. We use this term because it is the most often used in the UK context and because it aligns with the England and Wales Home Office definition (Home Office 2013). However, whilst the Home Office definition includes an incident-based approach to defining DVA, we focus on that part of the definition that depicts a āpattern of incidents of controlling, coercive or threatening behaviour, violence or abuseā (Home Office 2013, p. 2) and restrict our concern to adult intimate relationships.
A core argument underpinning this book is that safe and best practice responses are best informed by recognising that there are different kinds of IPVA. Below, we outline the typology of IPVA that we have used as the basis of our analysis. The field of IPVA has been dominated by a focus on the IPVA perpetrated by ostensibly heterosexual, cisgender men against ostensibly heterosexual, cisgender women. By cisgender we mean individuals whose gender identity aligns with the sex to which they were assigned at birth. We say āostensiblyā because, typically, in the mainstream research on IPVA, neither the gender identity nor indeed even the sexuality of either the person reporting victimisation or their partner is asked about (e. g. Walby et al. 2017); thus assumptions are made that data refers to heterosexual IPVA (Donovan and Barnes 2019). This book therefore queers mainstream research about IPVA by exposing its widespread heteronormativity and cisnormativity and by being clear about when participantsā sexuality and/or gender identity are known or assumed. Hereafter, we use āHC womenā to mean heterosexual, cisgender women and āHC menā to refer to heterosexual, cisgender men.
1.2 Key Concerns of This Book
Two major concerns run through this book: how knowledge and explanatory frameworks about IPVA are produced. There are obvious overlaps in that methodological approaches are informed by researchersā disciplinary origins, which provide particular epistemological and ontological approaches towards meaning-making and knowledge production about the world. Arguably, the production of knowledge about IPVA has developed as the case for a more sociological and holistic approach to understanding IPVA has been successfully made. Indeed, a pioneer of research about IPVA in lesbian relationships, Janice Ristock, evidenced the different ways in which IPVA might be enacted in her Canadian qualitative research before the idea of typologies of violence had really taken hold in the mainstream field. Her post-structuralist feminist analysis led her to critique the binaries of perpetrator/victim, male/female as irrelevant for her participants, whose accounts demonstrated how individuals might be both perpetrators and victims in the same and/or across different relationships, and that violence might be motivated for many reasons, including to control, defend, retaliate, for revenge. In a ārefusal of the social science/social service drive to create all-explanatory modelsā, she resisted any attempt to theorise a ānew model for understanding lesbian relationship violenceā (Ristock 2002, p. xi). Rather, she insisted that each case should be taken as an individual relationship experience that should not be expected to fit a pattern. We similarly resist any attempts to apply heteronormative, cisnormative theorising uncritically to the experiences of LGB and/or T+ people; however, we do intend to explore the ways in which a typology might provide a basis for operationalising the knowledge Ristock produced about the limitations of existing binaries.
In the mainstream, cisnormative, heteronormative IPVA field, quantitative methodologies have expanded from simply counting violent and/or āabusiveā acts (prevalence) and their fr...