Everyone knows and doesn't know about the kind of daily violence and brutality that so many women still face in their own homes. The metro section of the newspaper is filled with these stories almost every day. Friends, family members, and co-workers share their private agonies. And yet there is little public discussion or outcry about it. Not from the mainstream press, not from women's organizations, and not from any feminist faction.

Where you will find plenty of information, however, is in research journals, public policy papers, and professional newsletters of domestic violence programs and services. It seems that wife/girlfriend/partner beating has become one of many specialized, run-of-the-mill, intractable "social problems." We all know it exists, and yet like other intractable social problems, it has disappeared into an increasingly "naturalized" warp of social ills whose activist voices have become increasingly part of the social welfare state apparatus, the social services establishment, or the towers of academic research. As a significant and widely acknowledged "social problem," "domestic violence" has become increasingly domesticated and mainstreamed.

Ironically, what was once a very private and dirty secret about "family life" is now common knowledge. This is due in no small part to the unflagging work of thousands of advocates in the battered women's movement. The feminist-driven battered women's movement that flourished in the late 60's and early 70's proposed that analyzing men's violence against women was integral to understanding and changing institutionalized sexism. Feminism, in all its various forms, provided a politically theoretical analysis of men's violence and revealed the deleterious impact on women's lives. Feminist voices critically called attention to (what still seems obvious) the relationship between sexism and male violence. The battered women's movement, fueled by feminist steam, created refuge and recourse in every state in the country. Public arenas -- where concerns about sexism and violence against women had rarely been heard -- were flooded with demands for change, thanks to the actions taker by feminists to create shelters and introduce new laws.

Now, years later, we must ask, what kind of common knowledge do we have? Look at the banal and sanitized euphemisms, the professional lexicon used to describe the violence and brutality that women stil face. Terms like "family violence," "intimate partner violence," and even "domestic violence" are indicative of the depoliticization of women's issues in general, and violence against women in particular.

So what do I mean that violence against women has been depoliticized when it's also obvious that so many more people know about it and are now involved in addressing it? By depoliticization, I am referring to a reframing process that directs attention away from (and recreates knowledge about) sexism, male dominance, patriarchy, and female subjugation. Depoliticization moves the discussion of domestic violence away from a structural, social analysis of the dynamics of interests and power and re-situates it in the realm of individual behaviors and pathologies of victims and perpetrators.

In lieu of debate and struggle in the public, political arena, the issue of violence against women becomes assimilated into a hyper-individualist rhetoric of impartial expert knowledge. It is this rhetoric that provides scientific explanations and solutions for domestic violence.

The expert rationalities of law, medicine, planning, criminal justice, psychology, and public administration describe men's violence and women's victimization as individual problems, problems of particularly troubled people. The problem of domestic violence is administered through these institutions, and the rationalities of these institutions influence the delivery of services and direction of research for domestic violence. This has led to the growth of professional involvement in what is now referred to as the "field" of domestic violence.

There is nothing inherently wrong with trying to improve the conditions in which battered women live, but when putative efforts to just "make it better" become the end goal, the political vision and motivation to address the real reasons for male violence become sublimated. The search for the root cause of violence against women is replaced by uncontestable scientific claims that legitimize bureaucratic and instrumental approaches. The political disappears and domestic violence becomes a naturalized part of what appears to be an unchanging or unchangeable social landscape.

The processes of depoliticization are insidiously effective and often difficult to pin point. The proliferation of public discourse that detaches women's oppression and abuse from an analysis of gender inequality and exploitation has contributed to the ongoing erosion and dampening of grassroots feminist activism. For the last twenty years there has been a demise in radical feminist organizing and an increase in the incorporation and cooptation of the battered women's movement. This demobilization of feminism has led to a lack of radical critiques of the increasingly mainstream efforts done under the banner of the "battered women's movement." This is not to say that there are not programs, or activists, or researchers who are doing good, critical and progressive work. But in general, there is not a grassroots feminist mobilization addressing the state of the battered women's movement, providing vision and strategy for change, and keeping feminist concerns about violence front and center in the public domain.

A feminist critique should question the vastly growing paternalism of the state, its interests, and its impingements on battered women and their children. A feminist critique should analyze where current trends are leading and what kinds of interventions are needed. We need the vision, participation, and analysis of a grassroots feminist movement. Without a feminist movement that includes battered women as its leaders, that identifies the oppressive, patriarchal (a word that now feels like an antique) social structure as central to male violence, the battered women's movement will quietly disappear into the regime of social ills management. We are in dire need of a revitalized and diverse feminist movement that struggles to end the tyranny of patriarchal violence.