Book Review: Hard Knocks: Domestic Violence and the Psychology of Storytelling

• Published date: 01 December 2011
• DOI: 10.1177/0734016811421538
• Date: 01 December 2011
• Author: Annette Jolin
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

arranged by chapter, and provides readers with extensive resources to enhance their understanding of

the event within the chapter.

Overall, Porter provides ample introduction into the inexplicable realm of political assassination.

Readers will be left with a more thorough understanding of the reasons behind these acts, as well as

their aftermath. Seven assassinations comprise only roughly 130 pages of the book with the remain-

ing pages examining the implications of assassinations. Assassins provide a thorough introduction to

political murder throughout history, as well as its implications for the future, with the understanding

that while political dissatisfaction remains, so too will political assassinations.

Janice Haaken

Hard Knocks: Domestic Violence and the Psychology of Storytelling Hove, East Sussex: Routledge, 2010. x, 196 pp.

$80.00. ISBN 978-0-415-56338-3

Reviewed by: Annette Jolin, Portland State University, Portland, OR, USA

DOI: 10.1177/0734016811421538

The mid-20th-century feminist movement was the catalyst for the most recent domestic violence

reform efforts in the United States. In the 40 years since then feminist advocates have shaped

perceptions, policies, and laws. This book tells and analyzes their stories. While Haaken relies on

a broad range of sources, she structures the book primarily around conversations with domestic

violence advocates in the United States and overseas to show how broader historical and cultural

forces shape activists’ perceptions of domestic violence reform. The reader is treated to a wide-

ranging and stimulating treatise on what would otherwise be yet another retelling of policy changes

and the successes and failures linked to their implementation. Using a multilayered conceptual

framework that enlists the social psychology of story telling, psychoanalysis, and several feminist

perspectives, Haaken’s book lays bare themes of unity and strife in three distinct stories told by

advocates—stories of captivity,stories of deliverance, and stories of struggle and reparation.

Stories of captivity call attention to domestic violence victims as captives of the men who beat

them. Haaken detects little strife among advocates around stories of captivity, at least at the outset

of the movement. The story of captivity was unequivocal: male-perpetrated domestic violence cut

across all social and racial divides. No woman was safe. To say otherwise would have weakened

advocates’ efforts to gain the support from mainstream society. But, as Haaken notes, stories at the

beginning of a social movement may not serve the movement well during later stages. Thus, she

warns that to continue to ignore minority and poor women’s greater risk of intimate partner violence

would be a grave mistake. Stories of deliverance, which assert the right of women to be safe from the

men who beat them, also generated little strife among activists early on but became part of the strug-

gle and reparation theme of today. Struggles, according to Haaken, occur primarily in four key loca-

tions that invite ‘‘border tensions’’ between groups in the battered women’s movement. These

tensions, ‘‘sites of anxiety and defensiveness,’’ can be seen when questions are raised about (a)

working with the police and courts; (b) the nature of domestic violence; (c) the status of the reform

movement; and (d) women’s capacity for violence. The last, she says ‘‘generates the most heat.’’

Here, Haaken goes beyond a review of the many arguments on both sides of this issue and provides

us with an example of the reparation component of the struggle and reparation theme that

characterizes reform stories today. She points out that moving from struggle to reparation requires

that feminists acknowledge women’s capacity for ‘‘destructive rage.’’ Doing so does not, as some

feminists have feared, place the social responsibility for family violence onto the shoulders of

472 International Criminal Justice Review 21(4)