Intimate Partner (Sexual) Violence: Danish Research and Policy

In this article the authors seek to describe state responses to figures showing that the rates of physical and/or sexual violence against women in Denmark are among the highest in Europe. The authors do so by investigating the representations of intimate partner sexual violence, framing contemporary political developments of the Danish field of welfare work addressing violence in intimate relationships as well as the dominating knowledge production substantiating these. Theoretically, Slavoj Zizek and his concept objective violence inform the paper, in order to analyze authoritative representations of "intimate partner sexual violence" in two areas: Danish research on sexual violence and Danish policy-papers. On the basis of a descriptive analysis we conclude that intimate partner sexual violence is essentially an unexplored problem in a Danish research context and we show that an incident-oriented conceptualization of rape and sexual assault dominates most of the research on sexual violence. Furthermore, in the political context we identify strong tendencies toward de-gendering violence as an outcome of strategies working to mainstream the field of welfare work addressing violence. This means that in a Danish context working with violence is now taking place within an ideological environment where the idea that equality between the sexes has been achieved dominates.