My back pages: reflections on thirty years of domestic violence research.

131 TRAUMA, VIOLENCE, & ABUSE, Vol. 9, No. 3, July 2008 131-143 DOI: 10.1177/1524838008319146 © 2008 Sage Publications I WAS HONORED to be asked to write what amounts to a research biography by the Journal of Interpersonal Violence (JIV Career Researcher). I review this work below—it touches on criminal justice policy to “domestic violence,” profiles of abuse perpetrators, reactions in victims, and argues, in the final analysis, that our conceptualization of intimate partner violence (IPV) in gender terms is erroneous and misleading. My work on domestic violence (later called IPV) began with my frustration with solely “basic research” in social psychology (in which I was initially trained) coupled with an opportunity (in 1974) to advise my provincial government on psychological perspectives to improve police training. I started by riding on police patrol and asking the police what part of their job they felt least equipped to handle. The answer was “domestic disturbances.” I developed a police training manual and was then asked to assist with the police intervention training. It led to a 6 year commitment to developing police training in the 1970s. An upshot of this work was the discovery that training police how to more effectively handle “domestics” would not have any desirable outcomes if the rest of the criminal justice system was not on the same page. Police, at that time, viewed domestics as social work, not as part of their job and having a serious violence potential (Dutton & Levens, 1977). Consequently, the police response to 911 calls for domestic disturbance was, to say the least, underwhelming (Levens & Dutton, 1977). I reviewed all published studies on police response both in Canada and the United States and determined that only about 15% of men who assaulted their wives were arrested and only about 2.5% were punished by the criminal justice system (Dutton, 1987), although evidence for assault existed in far more cases (punishment being defined then as jail or a fine; Worden & Pollitz, 1984; Smith & Klein, 1984). At that time, the zeitgeist was moving toward more aggressive proarrest policies coupled with an effective outcome for judges to clear a case. It is hard to remember now but prior to the push for increased arrest, researchers had argued that draconian police intervention may inadvertently make matters worse or produce unintended negative consequences (Bard, 1971). Instead of arrest, they envisioned police focusing on conflict resolution. What goes around comes around. This argument has been revisited recently (Dutton, 2006b; Garner & Maxwell, 2000; Mills, 1999) by some (including myself) who have seen the policy shift from nonarrest to mandatory arrest as going too far in the opposite direction. Clearly, varied responses from coordinated criminal justice and mental health teams are required, but are rarely in place. At that time (1979) there was no courtmandated treatment available and I had just completed a summer internship in group therapy. I set out with Dale Trimble, and the then