Book Review: Domestic Violence at the Margins: Readings on Race, Class, and Culture

• Author: Yoko Baba
• Published date: 01 September 2006
• Date: 01 September 2006
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0734016806292926
• Subject Matter: Articles

Within such a bereft cultural and political milieu, it is perhaps not surprising that “crime

control” measures such as California’s three strikes legislation—and countless initiatives of

a similar stripe—have continued to cascade forth with such unremitting regularity and with

the ardent backing of an oft-misguided public.

Robert Menzies

Simon Fraser University,

Burnaby, British Columbia

Sokoloff, N. J., and Pratt, C. (Eds.). (2005). Domestic Violence at the Margins: Readings

on Race, Class, and Culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

DOI: 10.1177/0734016806292926

This edited book is organized in three parts: “Part I: Frameworks and Overreaching

Themes,” “Part II: Culture, Resistance, and Community,” and “Part III: Structural Contexts,

Culturally Competent Approaches, Community Organizing, and Social Change.” The book

has clear themes in each part that provide theoretical frameworks for the examination of

domestic violence beyond feminist discourse. The book examines domestic violence prob-

lems in specific racial/ethnic and socioeconomic groups and cultural contexts and offers

various culturally competent and structurally based solutions for domestic violence victims

and for violence directed against marginalized communities.

The purpose of Domestic Violence at the Margins is to challenge past domestic violence

studies, which often examine violence against women without closely looking at the inter-

section of race/ethnicity, economic status, sexuality, and immigration status and to link

domestic violence issues to the structural-level inequality. The editors approach domestic

violence from multiple directions and connect seemingly personal experiences of domestic

violence victims to macrolevel issues rooted in culture, community, social structure, and

economy. They conclude the book by uniting theory and practice and providing various

victim-centered strategies and models to end violence. The strength of the book is its com-

prehensive approach to domestic violence. To convey the central theme to the reader, the

editors include a short introductory statement in each chapter that reinforces key concepts,

such as intersectionality. The book is carefully crafted to provide the reader powerful

messages about victims of domestic violence at the margins.

The introductory overview chapter provides a clear description of the book by high-

lighting the contributions of chapters to the piece as a whole and by demonstrating the rela-

tionships among chapters. Each of the three parts has an introductory statement about its

chapters, and each chapter has its own brief description in relation to other chapters and

asks the reader a set of questions. Seven chapters in Part 1, starting with intersectionality

of race, class, sexual orientation, and gender as a theoretical framework, deal with multi-

culturalism, Black feminists and antiviolence, immigrant battered women’s struggles with

cultural ideologies and institutional constraints, battered lesbians of color, battered poor

women and state regulation, and interpersonal and state violence against women of color.

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