Life is complicated: Journeys,ghosts,liminality and policy responses to violence against women

Abstract

Drawing on the work of Avery Gordon and Susan Miller, this article considers the relevance of the notions of ghosts and journeys as a way of making sense of the ongoing policy challenges facing the violence against women field. When placed within the wider structural context of the cunning of the neo-liberal state, these concepts afford one way of rendering visible the ongoing liminality and marginalization of women’s lives as they are actually lived as opposed to how they are deemed to be lived in policy responses to such violence. Understanding women’s agentic responses to the ever-present, haunting consequences of living with violence, or having lived with violence, alongside the policy responses to such violence, is indeed complicated.

Introduction

In 2024, the United Kingdom witnessed a change of government. In anticipation of this outcome, a wide range of organizations and voices were prompted to deliver their views on what they considered to be the strategic priorities for any government tackling violence against women. Much of this activity followed on from violence against women and girls (VAWG) being added to the policing strategic risk register in England and Wales for this first time in 2023 alongside the establishment of a police-led National Centre for Violence Against Women and Girls and Public Protection in April 2025. This recent activity in England and Wales stands as testimony to the extent to which, during the latter half of the 20th century through to the early 21st century, such violence has moved from being thought of as predominantly a private issue to being acknowledged as a public one demanding public policy responses. This shift in attention has not been confined to the United Kingdom. VAWG, led by the United Nations, has risen up policy and practice agendas globally over the last five decades (see inter alia Fitz-Gibbon and Walklate, 2024). While the nature of such policy responses over this period of time has been driven by different pre-occupations (from social service responses to criminal justice responses, and more contemporarily, public health responses; Kimball et al., 2024; Meyer and Frost, 2019), each of these differently oriented drivers shares in the desire to both protect and prevent such violence. However, to offer either protection or prevention requires an understanding of cause, and it is at this juncture that policy responses to violence against women can come unstuck.

VAWG is now widely recognized as a ‘wicked problem’ (Rittel and Webber, 1973). As Kimball et al. (2024: 248) point out, this way of thinking about such violence is relatively uncontested. However, they further state,

. . . there is no definitive formulation of the nature of the problem. Patriarchy contributes to the problem, capitalism contributes to the problem, poverty contributes to the problem, and power and control are yet another part of the problem. The potential root causes of the problem are inexhaustible. As a result of not being able to clearly identify the root cause of domestic violence, we may attempt to ameliorate the problem, but there is no unambiguous solution. Therefore . . . we make policy and program decisions that are judged as better or worse based on ideology. For example, the use of the criminal justice system to protect survivors may be considered as improving conditions by carceral feminists and as worsening conditions by abolitionist feminists.

In sum, Kimball et al. (2024) argue that while frequently articulated as a ‘wicked problem’, a national crisis or a key driver of a nation’s risk register, in reality, drawing on Rittel and Webber’s (1973) original analysis, VAWG has been treated as a tame problem. For them, the difference between a tame problem and a wicked problem does not lie in its complexity but in the ability to solve it, and in order to solve it, there is a need to understand its causes. However, given there is ongoing debate about the nature, extent and causes of violence against women, (ranging from patriarchy to capitalism to the individual pathological tendencies of perpetrators), there is no unambiguous solution (Kimball et al., 2024). This leaves the field open to ideologically driven policy responses resulting in policy initiatives (e.g. criminalization) with further (unintended) consequences for those women they were intended to protect. (For a detailed overview of criminalization see the edited collection by Douglas et al., 2023 and on unintended consequences see Goodmark, 2023; Nancarrow, 2019). The work of these authors reveals the extent to which ‘tame’ policies can compound the consequences of other ‘wicked problems’ (poverty, racism and so on).

Following on from their analysis, Kimball et al. (2024) call for all those involved in influencing the future direction of policy to pay more attention to the unintended, interactive and system interdependent consequences of policy changes. This article is similarly concerned to encourage a moment of pause and reflection for those involved in influencing the violence against women policy field. In so doing, the article is situated in an overview of policy responses to this wicked problem and, prompted by Kimball et al.’s (2024) observations, endeavours to delve a little deeper into why it is such policy efforts can result in unintended consequences regardless of their intentions.

The article falls into four parts. The first draws on the work of Susan Miller (2018) (among others) as one way of revisiting the lives of women living with violence as they are actually lived. The second considers these lives and the extent to which they do, or do not, match with the policy response trends intended to impact/change them. The third part of the article brings these two bodies of knowledge together and, drawing on the conceptual work of Avery Gordon, explores the disconnect between women’s (complicated) lives and tame policy responses. The final and concluding part of this article offers some thoughts on the extent to which violence against women policies are doomed to fail because they are, in Kimball et al.’s (2024) terms ‘tame’, and/or whether this view needs to be tempered by an appreciation of the conceptual failures lying between the efficacy of and advocacy for such policies. It will be argued that it is within these conceptual failures that women’s lives can be erased, and such erasure can ease the path of neo-liberal policy: a path which contributes to the ongoing liminality of women’s lives.

Living with violence: The ‘messiness’ of ‘real’ lives

Some time ago, Hazel Genn was a member of a research team involved in assessing the efficacy of the criminal victimization survey for development in England and Wales (Sparks et al., 1977). She decided to engage in some follow-up work with respondents who had identified as multiple victims. In presenting some findings from this work, Genn (1988) makes the following observations.

. . . it became evident that these incidents could have represented only a small part of the total volume of crimes (as defined in our survey) which had been ‘suffered’ during the previous twelve months. What also became apparent was the fact that these events reported to us in the survey were not regarded as particularly remarkable. They were just part of life (Genn, 1988: 93, my emphasis).

While these observations did much to temper some of the data claims emanating from criminal victimization survey work during the 1980s, the fact that these observations emanated from women living with violence at the hands of the men in their lives is significant. That their experiences were seen by them as ‘just part of life’ is even more significant.

At the time, Genn’s (1988) observations added to other feminist-informed voices also documenting the ordinariness and routine nature of such violence(s) for women (and children) (Gordon, 1988; Kelly, 1988; Kirkwood, 1993; Schechter, 1982). Recognition of this ordinariness, however, provokes (at least) two further issues. First, in the intervening years since Genn’s observations and during that same time period violence(s) against women have moved from a focus on the physical and visible to the psychological and invisible, the question of what might be actionable in the face of such violence(s) has remained stubbornly problematic. This is particularly though not exclusively the case in relation to criminal justice. As Fitz-Gibbon and Walklate (2024: 45) observe, the failure of justice systems to meet with what women want is well-documented leading Walklate (2008: 49) to ask question about whose needs were being met within the justice space. Put simply that which might be deemed actionable by professionals and policy influencers in this space is not necessarily that which women themselves might deem actionable or even what they might want (Pinchevsky et al., 2024). The same observation might also be made in respect of social service and health responses (Hester et al., 2023). Such responses can frequently assume acts of violence are separable and separate elements of a woman’s life rather than ‘just part of life’.

The second implication concerning the ordinariness of such violence is historically, and contemporarily, embedded in the tricky concepts used to make sense of the impact of these kinds of experiences. For example, the (presumed) binary concepts of victim and survivor are also frequently presumed to be experienced as binary by women themselves. The experiences reported by Genn and others, in how to measure what is experienced as ‘just part of life’, do not easily sit with either category of victim or survivor. As Minow (1993) observed some time ago, the term victim is ‘cramped’ (does not resonate with how people see themselves). However, the term survivor is also problematic and cannot be presumed to be a status readily embraced by everyone. The challenge these terms represent has contemporarily been elided in the more widespread use of the term ‘victim-survivor’. Nevertheless this elision does not erase the issues which remain. Before moving on to examine the power of this victim-survivor binary in more detail, it will be useful to reflect on the significance of the two implications outlined earlier.

When rendered explicit, these implications connect with some of the issues alluded to by Kimball et al. (2024). In particular, they raise further questions for policy professionals and policy advocates. First, the inability to make sense of experiences as ‘just part of life’ frequently underpins the provision of tame responses to wicked problems. In other words, many policy responses like, for example, a commitment to ‘positive’ policing, improved risk assessments, inter-agency information sharing, criminalization more generally and so on, assume that the violence in women’s lives is a series of incidents rather than ‘just part of life’. (Kelly and Westmarland, 2016). Moreover, such responses have been deployed in women’s lives as if their lives were the causal variable for their experiences rather than men’s behaviour. In other words, women become the prime focus of the policy response with any actions taken simultaneously marginalizing women’s own knowledge and experiences.

For example, in relation to risk-assessment tools, Day et al. (2014) evidenced women’s capacity to assess their own risks in relation to intimate partner violence at least as consistently as any risk-assessment tools. Moreover such tools, rooted in gendered assumptions of risk (Walklate, 2018), can add to the marginalization of women’s knowledge and experience. Price et al. (2016) add some weight to this view by pointing to the problems posed for Indigenous women in Australia whose experiences of violence can be minimized because of the gendered hegemonic cultural reluctance to challenge the violence(s) of Indigenous Australian men. Similar observations might be made about the ways in which positive policing responses to intimate partner violence can contribute to the misidentification of the primary aggressor (Reeves, 2021) or how inter-agency information sharing can add to the problems faced by women rather than assist them by reflecting assumptions about good parenting and/or victimization (Hester, 2011; Meyer, 2011; Miller, 2018). In all these examples, the conflation of cause (those who use violence) with experience (those in receipt of violence), when taken alongside the valorization of incident-oriented approaches with women as the focus of any response, denies the complications of life. In other words, they deny processes and it is within this conflation that the tensions between the evidence and advocacy emerge. In sum, the evidence that life is complicated can frequently stand in contrast with those advocating for particular policy interventions; interventions which can assume life is simple. These observations offer a glancing insight into the ongoing challenges faced by policies in this field. Importantly, it is within these unarticulated policy assumptions that the processes characterizing women’s real lives can be lost.

One way of appreciating the importance of these observations is through the work of Susan Miller (2018). Drawing on empirical data she offers a detailed consideration of the tricky relationship between the concepts of victim and survivor and the complexities of the lives they are trying to capture (Kelly et al., 1996). The value of thinking about complexity is discussed in what follows.

Living with conceptual messiness: Victim, survivor, victim-survivor

The tensions between the victimological use of the term victim and the feminist preferred use of the term survivor have long been recognized (Morris, 1987; Stanko, 1985; Walklate, 1989). These tensions have had profound consequences on the relationship between feminist-informed voices and the victims’ movements more generally (Rock, 1986) which continue to resonate in the policy field in the 21st century. In this context, Walklate (2003), drawing on the development of a critical victimology and leaning heavily on the structuration theory of Giddens (1984), observed that Giddens’ emphasis on the inter-relationship between agency and structure,

. . . provides one way of understanding the dynamism between the structural location of women (one way of understanding women’s powerlessness, a defining characteristic of being a victim) and women’s negotiation of their structural location (one way of understanding the term ‘survivor’) (Walklate, 2003: 43).

This starting point centres women’s lives as they are actually lived and focuses attention on these lives as a product of processes (dualities) as opposed to the product of binaries (dualisms). More recently, focusing attention on women’s lives in this way, has become captured by the phrase ‘lived experience’.

In a parallel development, Pemberton and Mulder (2024) posited a place for phenomenology as furthering the critical victimological concern to bridge the gap between agency and structure. Pemberton and Mulder (2024: 4) suggest this approach centres victims and their stories as ‘knowledgeable subjects not reducible to stereotypes’. This approach assumes a ‘severe and event based’ (Pemberton and Mulder, 2024: 4) form of victimization as its starting point. However, the question remains as to how this kind of approach might work when severe victimization is routine and ordinary. In understanding women’s lives as comprising neither being a victim nor a survivor, but as a complex and complicated interplay of these differently constituted experiences, Miller’s (2018) empirical work (among that of others) offers one way out of this conundrum.

Miller (2018) in deep and telling qualitative work with 31 survivors of intimate partner violence (her preferred term), all of whom were living violence-free at the time of talking with her, recounts how these women negotiated their journey from living with violence to living violence free. In putting these women’s experiences to the fore, Miller (2018) draws attention to the ways in which their self-identities evolved over time. Some never seeing themselves as a victim, some understanding what happened to them as a feature of their powerlessness, and others only recognizing their victimhood when labelled so by others. Indeed over time these women’s sense of themselves became increasingly complicated. However, one feature that did not become more complex was the expectations made of them by the organizations they came into contact with. Miller (2018: 50) reports,

Women recalled at length the fortitude they had had to summon up just to persevere when interacting with social agents who demanded proof of victimization: they wanted desperately to retain a semblance of self-control and pride in their own resistance, yet they knew that in doing so they might be cast as undeserving of assistance.

These women’s testimonies and their experiences are drawn on throughout Miller’s book, from their efforts to protect their children at the expense of their own (often physical) safety to their help-seeking behaviours and to their current lives which, as Miller (2018) points out, continued to be replete with challenges (economic, familial, racist and so on). Miller (2018: 206) concludes by observing,

During the abusive relationship and long after its termination, women succeeded in juggling multiple balls simultaneously, which contributed to their belief that IPV/A was only one part of their life experience and not the core of who they were.

Miller (2018) makes the case that these women in their resourcefulness and capacity to get on with their lives afford a valuable resource from which policy-makers could learn. Moreover, it is clear that Miller’s work lends support to taking account of ‘lived experience’ in this policy field. Importantly key in Miller’s analysis is the concept of ‘journey’. Used as a metaphor this term is her way of capturing the processes of living (with violence): the complications of life as it is actually lived. Not unlike the work of Kirkwood (1993) and/or Stanko (1990), Miller (2018) is very keen to relay the stories of resilience and long-term survivorship of her respondents, all of whom were living free from violence when participating in her study. This is an approach which also, by implication, makes the case for understanding the victim-survivor relationship as a duality rather than a dualism. However, when digging a little deeper into this analysis, it is possible to discern the ghostly absent-presence of sociological understandings of the relationship between agency and structure (Gordon, 2008). In positing this relationship as ghostly, Gordon (2008) is encouraging a critical awareness of what is taken for granted within it and the extent to which it is, if ever, fully explored.

The ghostly processes of agency and structure are nowhere more problematic than in the rise of policy influencer voices promoting ‘lived experience’ as the basis for policy intervention. These voices reflect a tendency to render the social as simple (Young, 1999) in which the (problematic) relationship between the complications of real life can be set aside in the push, in terms of policy intervention, to make life simple. These pushes run the danger of erasing life’s complications explored further in what follows.

The messiness of lived experience: Living with ghosts

Despite its current prominence in policy circles, the engagement of victim-survivors in policy development by calling upon their ‘lived experience’ has been subjected to critique. At one level, as Doyle et al. (2021) argue, ‘good’ policy should be informed by those who are directly affected by it. However, how this is done and what assumptions are made about whose knowledge counts in this process are not easily dealt with. Importantly, as Fitz-Gibbon and Walklate (2024: 104) point out, the assumption that

. . . when a person speaks of their experience it is truthful, authentic, and real, and moreover, especially in the domain of advocacy, that it can count – or be relevant for all experiences of similar forms of violence.

is problematic. In addition, questions arise as to how such voices might be listened to. Ailwood et al. (2022) point to the problems of refusing to listen, failing to listen and selective listening alongside who might be listened to (Thill, 2015). When conjoined with victim-survivor co-production of policy, these problems can become compounded, especially in those circumstances when it is the white, heterosexual, middle-class woman whose voice in this space seems to be the most readily secured (Fitz-Gibbon et al., 2022; Hegarty et al., 2022).

Bringing some of the difficulties with the focus on ‘lived experience’ to the fore is not intended to imply there is no value in drawing on this kind of knowledge. It is, however, intended to render more visible some of the deeper epistemological problems associated with it. For example, including victim-survivor lived experience in the policy consultation process does not equate with either understanding or delivering on that experience in terms of what it is that women living with violence might want from such a process. As McDermott and Garofalo (2004: 1246) observed some time ago,

. . . the emphases on offender accountability and victim protection occasionally backfire with the unintended consequence that victims of domestic violence are disempowered by the very interventions designed to assist them in recovery and protect them. That is, harsher and more certain punishment of a husband or lover will not empower a victim who simply wants the violence (not the relationship) to end, nor will victim services help a victim who wants to be left alone.

In addition, not only are women’s desires, especially in relation to justice, kaleidoscopic (McGlynn and Westmarland, 2019), very mixed, nuanced and cover the whole range of service delivery which might be available to them (Hester et al., 2023), these desires can shift and evolve as their life unfolds. They can also become increasingly more complex and complicated the more marginalized a woman’s lived experience might be (Hester et al., 2023; Miller, 2018; Nancarrow, 2019). Moreover, sometimes women’s expressed views relate to what they think other people might benefit from, rather than what they might want for themselves (on the criminalisation of coercive control, for example, see Fitz-Gibbon et al., 2023). The pointed presence of ‘love matters’ (Kuennan, 2014), especially in intimate relationships, frequently trumps everything else.

There are diverse ways in which the presence of claims made based on ‘lived experience’ can be found in the violence against women field; for example, the search to memorialize women’s lives and/or to hear and listen to their voice through the voices of others in fatality/domestic homicide reviews. In other areas of work using a range of different models of engagement, women are encouraged to share their experiences of criminal justice, social services, civil law, support agencies and so on, as they have been experienced in the here and now. Nevertheless, as much of the work cited so far in this article has illustrated, people’s lives, and hence their experiences, evolve and change over time. They are messy.

Thus, the turn to ‘lived experience’ can fall into a similar epistemological trap to that it is endeavouring to challenge: taking experience as a series of incidents and/or moments in time rather than a process-ridden journey in which women (and people more generally) live their lives. As Flanagan (2023: 45) observed, ‘Experience is but a moment. Making sense of that moment is a life’. For women who have lived with, or continue to live with violence, the past is the past, the present and the future, all at the same time. The epistemological problem alluded to here is both empirical and theoretical and captured by the following two questions: How can we know another person’s experience? On what basis can knowledge claims be made about that experience when life is complicated?

To summarize, unpacking the turn to lived experience is important since without doing so, we fail to appreciate the elisions on which it is based and the contradictions implicated in it. The turn to lived experience in the VAWG policy field runs the risk of erasing the messiness of life. Viewed as a journey (Miller, 2018) life is full of twists, turns, roundabouts, one-way streets, traffic lights and dead ends. No less so when living with violence and when that violence is ‘just part of life’. Living with violence (in whatever form) and moving to a life in the absence of that violence, is not a simple or straightforward process. In moving on from one condition to the next, people change, evolve and make choices. It is a dynamic process. The possibilities can be infinite. Recognizing this ‘reality’ does not necessarily mean that any former life (with violence) is left behind (becomes absent in the one without violence). That former life remains a constituent element of the present; it is part of lived experience. It is part of life’s messiness. None of this necessarily implies that for anyone to move on in their life policy responses need to be trauma-informed or that resilience needs to be built. These policy orientations can also miss the mark in understanding real lives. They can, as Pemberton and Mulder (2024) and Miller (2018) observe, be marked by stereotypes and expectations rooted in assumptions of the victim-survivor. This is especially illustrated by Miller’s (2018) respondents. This danger slips inexorably into another: that policy responses, however informed, remain wedded to incident-based understandings of violence rather than focused on the processes generating such violence some of which people are aware of, some of which go on behind their backs. Both of which have a ghostly presence in women’s lives.

Evidencing the ghost(s)

Implicit to much of this discussion has been the question of the evidence base required in order to construct responses to the wicked problem of violence against women. Indeed, it is self-evident that much effort and resource across the globe have been directed to this question over the last 50 years. Over that time, the conceptual framing of this problem has evolved, from wife battery to coercive control, from homicide to femicide, from a private issue to a public problem and so on. Thus, the evidence base documenting women’s experiences of violences at the hands of men (in peace-time, war-time and all the spaces in between, Barberet, 2014) has grown exponentially involving researchers from a wide range of disciplines. As stated earlier that knowledge base has led predominantly, though not exclusively, to policy responses focusing on various ways of intervening in order to protect women from such violence as well as to prevent it. However, much of this effort, even in those jurisdictions in which such violence has been declared a national emergency, has been largely piecemeal, never quite going far enough. (See chapter seven in Fitz-Gibbon and Walklate, 2024 on the State of Victoria in Australia.) Even more piecemeal have been policy efforts to address the behaviour of men. However, importantly and as alluded to earlier, the policies which flow from this evidence do not always, if ever, match the complexities of women’s (or men’s) lives. The ghostly presence of their lives as actually lived, (characterized more theoretically as the interdependent impact of structure and agency on everyday lives), can and does, come into tension with what policies expect of women alongside what it is, if anything, such policies can deliver for women.

To reiterate, in the search for effective policy responses, as Kimball et al. (2024) mooted, there is a requirement for some agreement on cause. Yet, as they have also pointed out, such an agreement has proved to be elusive in the violence against women field. Of course, in some respects, this observation is both correct and incorrect at the same time. While it is well-known that most violence(s) against women are perpetrated by men, why this is the case remains moot, with answers to this question having the capacity to be both ideologically and evidence-driven. Put in more abstract terms, as Gordon (2008: 20) might, while much has been accomplished in asking questions about power and knowledge and the representations of these in policy (exampled in the observations of Price et al., 2016 cited earlier), less has been achieved in understanding what goes on behind our backs and the sense we make of our everyday lives: the ghosts of structure and agency and the relationship between the two. If we put this relationship to the fore, what might it imply for work in this field?

Exorcizing the ghosts

There has been a recent resurgence of interest in Avery Gordon’s work first published in 1997. For example, Fiddler et al. (2022) in the introduction to their edited collection draw attention to two features of Gordon’s analysis pertinent to the discussion here. First, how the harms of those subjected to structural violences are less well seen, if seen at all, and second, the ways in which Gordon’s work offers a way to explore the fluidity (processes in my terms) between the past, present and the future. They suggest, ‘ghost criminology sets out a framework to illuminate and make visible those who have been shadowed and give voice to those who have been silenced in a present haunted by both the past and the future’ (Fiddler et al., 2022: 5). Whether or not the ideas presented in this article contribute to such a criminology is not of concern but the desire to make visible the experiences of those in the shadows, how they find themselves in the shadows and what is to be done about it, certainly is. Gordon (2008: 20) makes the case for the need to understand how ‘a form of social figuration’ can impact people’s lives. The social figuration of concern here is the network of interdependencies whose collective endeavours drive the policy field of violence against women.

Drawing on complexity theory, Hopkins and Walklate (2019) offered one way of thinking about how this social figuration is manifested. Their analysis suggests a range of policies and practices have become ‘locked in’ over time, across a range of international jurisdictions. These policies and practices exampled in their analysis are the ever-increasing use of risk-assessment tools, the presence of multi-agency partnerships in managing responses to those deemed at risk, and information-sharing. An enormous amount of energy and resource across the globe has been committed to the introduction and development of policies such as these and the evidence base pointing to the strengths and weaknesses, problems and possibilities, of them is vast. Yet the evidence of their efficacy remains moot. For example, as indicated earlier, risk-assessment tools have been shown to be gendered (Barlow and Walklate, 2021), and as Davies et al. (2023: 149) have observed on multi-agency risk-assessment conferences, there is little published robust evidence on what works within them and for whom. Importantly much of the research which underpins and provides support for policy developments such as these has treated violence against women as if it is separate and separable from the recourse to violence (by men) more generally (Iratzoqui and McCutcheon, 2018; Sechrist and Weil, 2017); however, see the work of Smith (2019) on this point. In addition, these kinds of policy responses remain implicitly wedded to understanding such behaviours as not only preventable but also as preventable incidents (Brennan, 2016; Genn, 1988; Sheehy, 2018). Yet, as has been argued earlier, people’s real lives are messy. They cannot be separated into discrete identifiable incidents. At the same time, organizational life is also messy, and translating policy into practice is itself fraught with difficulties and potential for failure (Lewis and Greene, 1978). Moreover, in the absence of an agreement on cause, the impact of these ‘locked in’ policies can be compounded.

Of course pointing to the inherent complexities involved in addressing violence against women is not new. However, it is within these complexities, especially the interdependent social figuration of policies driving the violence against women field, whatever shape of the specific policies making up this figuration, women’s real lives become lost both in terms of their structural location and in terms of their life experiences. Not only do their lives become lost, in losing those lives women are sustained as liminal: neither here nor there, neither included nor excluded, but nonetheless ‘real’: a ghostly presence for policy and practice. So in redacting (using Fiddler et al.’s, 2022 term) structure as well as agency, as a feature of the complexities underpinning the violence in their lives (what Collins, 2024 refers to as lethal intersections), the space for tame policies is maintained.

The central purpose of this discussion has been to bring to the fore the ghostly presence of women’s real lives (their agency) and the relationship between these real lives and the policy social figurations designed to respond to the violences in their lives (the structural condition in which women find themselves). The case has been made that in the absence of understanding the inter-relationship between these two levels of analysis, they can stand in contradiction to one another. Of course this is not an even or a uniform process resulting in the same or similar contradictions everywhere and for everyone (Collins, 2024). However, in the continuing drive to assert tame responses to a wicked problem, policy responses to violence against women look to be set on a direction of travel which makes such contradictory outcomes ever more likely. Importantly, in this same context in which tame policies are perpetuated, men’s violence(s), from femicide, to rape, to stalking and so on, are often met with impunity (Fragoso, 2018, see also the review by Hester et al., 2023). While individual cases can provoke public outrage (e.g. the experiences of Gisele Pelicot at the hands of her husband in France widely reported in 2024), the silent efficacy of the ‘boys’ club’ (Dekeseredy, 2021) continues relatively unchallenged and unchanged, #MeToo and like movements notwithstanding.

It is the case of course that huge strides have been made in documenting the nature and extent of VAWG, with a greater awareness of this kind of behaviour as problematic also being self-evident. Hague’s (2021) charting of the history of the domestic violence movement intimates we have travelled further than we think. Nevertheless, the roots of the boys’ club run deep. As Gillard (2022: 211) states: ‘We are so used to this baggage [misogyny], most of the time we don’t even recognize how heavy it is’. Why is this? Fitz-Gibbon and Walklate (2024) offer three reasons for this: the rise of neo-liberalism; the persistent power of misogyny and the failure to think otherwise. It will be of value to say a little about each of these in turn.

The power of the ghosts

The powerful presence and impact of neo-liberal economic agendas, and the rising presence of this version of capitalism, has been the backcloth against which pre-occupations with violence(s) against women have risen on public policy agendas. The neo-liberal subject is a subject for whom questions of identity are privileged with the resultant effect that the ability to recognize collectivities is compromised. This is the cunning of history (Fraser, 2009) which, when combined with the contemporary often favoured use of neutral language in talking about violence against women (the use of the term ‘domestic abuse’ as an example), contributes to the ‘cunning of sequestration’ (Abu-Lughod et al., 2023). For these authors, this cunning denies the presence of patriarchy, fundamental to radical feminism, and re-assigns, in the case of their work on femicide-feminicide, as being a problem of gender inequality. Resisting such re-assignment is crucial, as Shalhoub-Kevorkian (2023: 252) observes, ‘otherwise we fail the subject about which we care’. Thus, the processes of sequestration enhance the power of misogyny.

The work of Schwartz and Dekeseredy (2013) has been significant in drawing attention to both the formal and informal ways male peer support operate to both maintain and sustain problematic attitude and behaviours towards women; illustrated in the 21st century by the power of online influencers on pubescent and pre-pubescent young males (Sugiura, 2023), the interconnections between online behaviours and other forms of extremism (Bates, 2020), and specifically the interconnections and denials with violences against women (McCulloch et al., 2019; Smith, 2019). The presumptions of this thinking, characterized by the boys’ club, leaves so many of these interconnections off the agenda. The acceptance of this thinking contributes to the construction of wicked problems to the detriment of women, especially marginalized women. His presence has been well-documented (from the work of Smart, 1989 to that of (Gribaldo, 2021; Nancarrow, 2019; Goodmark, 2023). His presence ensures that the role and power of men often remains unremarked upon and thereby men become unremarkable: that is, not to be questioned. Such unremarkability can apply in a wide range of institutional settings and practices including service delivery of all kinds. Importantly it is not solely practised by men. It is a way of thinking, articulated in the aforementioned discussion, which denies the complications of life. It is also a way of thinking which takes an especial toll in cases of domestic and family violence (Douglas, 2021). Exorcizing this structural ghost, his interconnections with her lethal structural conditions (Collins, 2024) and their combined impact on women’s real lives (their agency) might be one way for policy responses to be less tame in their orientation.

Conclusion: Pausing for thought?

It is perhaps the case that this article has come full circle. Its intention has not been to imply either that nothing has changed in addressing violence against women or that there is no way out of the conundrums it has put to the fore. It is possible to think otherwise. Such thinking might start with the refusal to erase gender from policy frameworks designed to focus on violence against women (Aldridge, 2021). It could start with centring men in such policies and information sharing on repeat offenders as much as focusing on repeat victims, as some police forces in England and Wales already do. Importantly it could start with listening to women with ears fully open as opposed to partially closed; in other words, listening to what is being said in its entirety including that which might be unpalatable to policy ears. For example, the challenges posed for practitioners when women return to violent male partners (Meyer, 2011) and the stereotypical responses women receive to their victimization (Miller, 2018; Pemberton and Mulder, 2024); taking children into care when they refuse to leave a known violent partner after a domestic violence (Clare’s Law) disclosure (Hadjimatheou, 2022). All these practices add to women’s liminality. As Hester et al.’s (2023: 22) work found, their participants experienced a ‘profound lack of justice . . . leaving them subject to or concerned about revictimization and blame by both formal systems and communities’. At the same time, some of their interviewees were ‘finding ways to create some positive outcomes and forms of “justice” for themselves, including engagement with social justice’. This frequently included calling the men in their lives to account (see also Renehan et al., 2023).

Thinking otherwise involves a process which inexorably leads back to knotty debates about cause. It is challenging. Taking time for a pause, whatever form that takes, will facilitate that process. In taking stock of what is already known, it may be possible to spend more time joining up the dots between the different disciplinary voices increasingly occupying this field. Rendering men remarkable as opposed to keeping them unremarkable is one place to start. Failure to do so will only perpetuate the ghostly presence of women’s structure and agency in such ways as to further their liminality despite their resilience and capacity to do otherwise.