COMMUNITY CONNECTIONS: MEN, GENDER AND VIOLENCE FERNANDO MEDEROS AND JULIA PERILLA

The battered women’s movement made intimate partner violence a public issue in the 1960s. Since then members of this movement have engaged in a cultural conversation about the oppressiveness of masculinity (Connell, 1995, 2000), and have created institutional responses, spearheaded by the criminal justice system and batterer intervention programs, to re-educate and restrain abusers (Aldarondo & Mederos, 2002). This article will begin with a critical review of these institutional responses, and focuses on measures directed at abusers. The key questions we explore here are: 1) Do these institutional measures maximize safety and empowerment for all battered women? 2) Do they maximize the impact on abusers? 3) What alternatives and expansions of the current criminal justice response make sense? 4) What guiding principles should these new approaches follow? In this article, we also briefly describe five programs that are creating community-based responses to intimate partner violence and are expanding criminal justice approaches. Our companion paper posted on the Building Partnerships Initiative web site (at www.endabuse.org/bpi) describes these programs in greater detail. BACKGROUND The battered women’s movement grew out of the women’s liberation movement of the 1970