Sharon Hayes and Samantha Jeffries, Romantic terrorism: An auto-ethnography of domestic violence, victimization and survival
| Author | Colin Atkinson |
| DOI | 10.1177/0004865815600619 |
| Published date | 01 September 2016 |
| Date | 01 September 2016 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Australian & New Zealand
Journal of Criminology
2016, Vol. 49(3) 455–460
!The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/0004865815600619
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Book Reviews
Sharon Hayes and Samantha Jeffries, Romantic terrorism: An auto-ethnography of domestic violence,
victimization and survival. Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke, 2015; 120 pp. ISBN 978-1-137-46848-2,
£45.00 (hbk)
Reviewed by: Colin Atkinson, Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research, University of Glasgow,
Scotland, UK
The name of this book – Romantic Terrorism: An Auto-Ethnography of Domestic
Violence, Victimization and Survival – is equally provocative and promising. The beating
heart of this book is the concept of ‘romantic terrorism’, the emotional and psycho-
logical tactics used by perpetrators of domestic violence to ensure compliance and iso-
lation of their partners. Hayes and Jeffries argue that what makes this type of violence
‘terroristic’ is the use of control – akin to torture – in order to instill fear in their victims
and to ensure their agenda is met (p. 2). Whilst this is clearly a provocative approach, it
is also problematic. By recasting domestic violence as ‘romantic terrorism’, the authors
inevitably – and, more importantly, unnecessarily – invite comparisons that divert atten-
tion away from the issue of domestic violence itself. On the contrary, it is the rather more
illustrative subtitle – An Auto-Ethnography of Domestic Violence, Victimization and
Survival – that describes the contributions made in the book’s 120 pages.
The first two chapters of Romantic Terrorism are spent juxtaposing terrorism and
intimate partner abuse (Chapter 1) and re-conceptualising domestic violence as ‘roman-
tic terrorism’ (Chapter 2). It is noted here that domestic violence is a pernicious problem
in contemporary Australian society, and one that has failed to attract either significant
public attention or an appropriate government response. This seems to be a perfectly
valid and justifiable proposition. However, when Hayes and Jeffries progress to juxta-
pose terrorism and intimate partner violence and delineate ‘romantic terrorism’, their
approach becomes troublesome. An illustrative case in point occurs here when the
authors compare the number of Australians killed by partners/ex-partners in domestic
violence cases against the number of Australians killed in terrorist attacks (pp. 14–15).
This is a crude and unsophisticated approach to measuring the extent of, and responses
to, these respective issues. Even if one was to consider a body-bag count as an appro-
priate measure of severity and impact of a specific crime type (which one should not),
Hayes and Jeffries do not account for other, important factors. For example, there is no
recognition that Australian law enforcement and security agencies have successfully
prevented a number of terrorist attacks that might otherwise have resulted in mass
casualties. The failure of the authors to consider such issues is indicative of the compli-
cations that arise from the invocation of terrorism in the first two chapters of this book.
This is not to say that both domestic violence and terrorism are (separately) major issues
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