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Violence against Women: The Bloody Footprints, edited by Pauline B. Bart and Eileen Geil Moran. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1993. 294 pp. $46.00 cloth. ISBN: 0-8039-5045-4. $23.95 paper. ISBN: 0-8039-5044-6.
Violence against Women comprises a number of articles previously published as a special issue of Gender and Society, and several other pieces. It is an angry collection. As the editors point out, male violence is a pervasive problem which now permeates every level of society. Yet, although it appears to have reached epidemic proportions, much of it goes unchallenged, remains invisible, and is even taken for granted. Conventional explanations tend to regard such violence as the behavior of a few "sick" or mentally deranged men. They focus on the supposedly pathological or deviant characteristics of individual abusers, ignoring the social and cultural contexts of violent acts. For many of the contributors to this book, violence against women has to be understood in terms of how the relations of domination and subordination between the sexes have been sexualized and eroticized. They argue a feminist case that all...