Theorizing public housing woman abuse as a function of economic exclusion and male peer support

The physical, sexual and psychological abuse of women in intimate relationships cuts across all sociodemographic groups. However, women who are socially and economically disenfranchised, such as those who live in urban public housing estates, report much higher rates of such victimization than do their more affluent counterparts. Still, a review of the literature on violence against women reveals a conspicuous absence of in-depth theoretical work on key areas related to class. The main objective of this paper, then, is to provide an economic exclusion/male peer support model of woman abuse in North American public housing, one that takes social and economic marginalization seriously. [F]eminists have dealt inadequately with the question of whether some women are more vulnerable than others. Eager to repudiate class and race-biased analyses of abuse, we have promoted universal risk arguments, criticizing methodologies that define some women as more vulnerable than others. But this refutation of classism and racism obscures our ability to wrestle with this question of vulnerability and therefore eligibility criteria (Fine, 1985, p. 397, emphasis in original). Only a few social scientific areas of inquiry have moved as far and as fast as the study of male-to- female physical, sexual, and psychological abuse. Only 30 years ago, a comprehensive bibliography of North American sources on wife beating would fit on an index card (Schwartz & DeKeseredy, 1988). Today, hundreds of journal articles, scores of books, and several important journals specifically address a variety of forms of woman abuse. We now have rich empirical information and a wid