Neutralizing gendered violence: Subsuming men’s violence against women into gender-neutral language

Violence is an important but awkward word. Specifically, definitions and terms used to describe violence, and men’s violence against women and children, are political. They are also often a starting point for the representation of and responses to the problem. Definitions and terms provide guides and parameters in discourses on what may, or may not, be considered, or highlighted, in policy and practice. For these reasons the politics of naming of violence and differentiating different “types” of violence bring many challenges and problems. We address the naming of such violence, especially tendencies toward the narrowing of definitions of violence, and the relationship between these two issues.