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British Journal of Criminology Advance Access originally published online on April 11, 2006
British Journal of Criminology 2006 46(5):837-858; doi:10.1093/bjc/azl003
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The British Journal of Criminology 46:837-858 (2006)
© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies (ISTD).All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Respecting Boundaries

The Symbolic and Material Concerns of Drug-Involved Women Employing Violence against Violent Male Partners

Valli Rajah*

* Department of Sociology, John Jay College, City University of New York, 899 Tenth Avenue, New York, NY 10019, USA; vrajah{at}jjay.cuny.edu.

This ethnographic interview study of poor, minority, drug-involved women seeks to fill a gap in the existing research on partner violence by examining the meaning women attach to their own use of violence in their intimate relationships. This paper uses theory and research on symbolic boundaries and resistance to examine what symbolic boundaries study participants draw around violence, and how their desire for respect and respectability influence the boundaries that they draw. This paper highlights the interpretive flexibility of violence as a social phenomenon—a flexibility that allows the women in this study to maintain respectability. Yet, these various interpretations, it is argued, are constrained by the matrix of domination (Collins 2000a) within which women live out their lives.


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