Lecouteur2010 Perpetrators Talk

F eminism
&
Article
Psychology
Feminism & Psychology
21(1) 5–28
Managing accountability ! The Author(s) 2011
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DOI: 10.1177/0959353510375406
Identities, membership fap.sagepub.com
categories and morality

in perpetrators’ talk
Amanda LeCouteur and Melissa Oxlad
The University of Adelaide, Australia
Abstract
Psychological research and popular discussion around domestic violence/intimate part-
ner abuse have focussed on broad features of descriptive accounts such as victim pre-
cipitation, excusing of aggressors, and minimizing or denying the violence. Few studies
have examined the finer detail of how such matters are routinely invoked in talk, and
how they are regularly built in ways that make their authors appear credible and war-
ranted. This study uses a discursive psychological approach to examine the talk of men
recruited from domestic violence counselling groups who participated in one-on-one
interviews about their violent/abusive behaviour. The analytic focus is on instances of
situated identity categorization in these men’s accounts that involved the consequential
moral assessment of self and partner in ways that justify or warrant violence/abuse.
Routinely, in these men’s talk about their abused partner, subtle and particular catego-
rizations associated with being a woman were worked up sequentially to depict her as
having breached the normative moral order. These warranting practices were evident in
the talk of both men who denied, and who overtly acknowledged, the wrongness of
their violent/abusive actions. The findings raise important issues for understanding how
commonsense reasoning around the causes of domestic violence and its justifiability is
sustained, as well as having practical implications for theory, prevention and treatment.
Keywords
accountability, discursive psychology, domestic violence, gender, intimate partner abuse,
membership categorization
Corresponding author:
Amanda LeCouteur, School of Psychology, The University of Adelaide, Adelaide 5005, South Australia
Email: amanda.lecouteur@adelaide.edu.au
Downloaded from fap.sagepub.com at GRAND CANYON UNIV on March 18, 2015

6 Feminism & Psychology 21(1)
Introduction
Psychological research and commentary around the significant societal problems of
rape and violence towards women in intimate relationships have focused on partic-
ular features as key components of theory, prevention and treatment: (1) the role of
victims as precipitators (e.g. Bushman and Baumeister, 2002; Horney, 1973;
Tangney et al., 1996); (2) the excusing of aggressor responsibility (e.g. Ferraro,
1996; Thornhill and Palmer, 2000); (3) the minimization of violence (e.g. Adams
et al., 1995; Edwards, 1995, 1996, 1999; Lamb,1991); and (4) denial of the violence
(e.g. Laflen and Sturm, 1994; Salter, 1988; Schneider and Wright, 2001). In terms of
method, most psychological studies have involved quantitative analyses, either of
types of accounts, or of their behavioural associations (e.g. Dutton and Starzomski,
1997; Lloyd, 1996; Schneider and Wright, 2001; Scott and Strauss, 2007). Qualitative
investigations have tended to be broadly content-analytic in style, involving identi-
fication of themes in texts and talk (e.g. Berns, 2001; Lamb, 1991; Lloyd and Emery,
2000). Wood and MacMartin (2007: 344) argued that, typically in such analyses,
‘excerpts are not analysed, but are included as illustrations of themes’. As has been
pointed out, such approaches to the problems of men’s abuse of women that focus on
identifying individual perceptions, attitudes and motivations regularly fail to engage
with broader social and cultural issues (e.g. Lea, 2007; Crawford, 2004; Crawford
and Unger, 2004; Hansen, 2001; Hansen and Harway, 1993; Potts, 1998; Yllo and
Bograd, 1988). What remains unexamined are the mundane practices through which
ordinary meanings become sedimented, and everyday relations of power are pro-
duced and become taken for granted. Likewise, little is known about the everyday
experience and maintenance of such problematic interactions within intimate
relationships.
Analyses that adopt a discursive perspective seek to understand human action in
a different way – fundamentally in terms of its accountability. By examining peo-
ple’s attempts to make their actions intelligible and accountable, discursive analysts
aim to understand the complex ways in which issues such as blame, responsibility
and minimization are accomplished (Edwards and Potter, 1992). In this article, our
focus is on how constructions of violence in intimate relationships are routinely
worked up, how interactants’ accountability is managed, and how particular iden-
tities around such violence are accomplished and maintained.
We examine accounts provided in interviews by men who were participating in
domestic violence counselling groups (run by Community Health Centres or the
State Department of Correctional Services in South Australia). We explore how
these men, as ordinary cultural members, perform particular identities for
themselves and their partners. Our aim, in analysing their methods and
resources for doing accounting is to contribute to empirical understanding of
the discursive practices through which power and oppression are accomplished
as part of the taken-for-granted social order. Our approach is informed at a
fundamental level by considerations of the accountability of descriptions, as

LeCouteur and Oxlad 7
described by Drew (1998: 295):
descriptions are themselves accountable phenomena through which we recognizably

display an action’s (im)propriety, (in)correctness, (un)suitability, (in)appropriateness,
(in)justice, (dis)honesty, and so forth. Insofar as descriptions are unavoidably incom-
plete and selective, they are designed for specific and local interactional purposes. Hence,
they may, always and irretrievably, be understood as doing moral work – as providing a
basis for evaluating the ‘rightness’ or ‘wrongness’ of whatever is being reported.
Descriptions, then, can be examined for the inferences they make available
about motive and causation. As Edwards and Potter (1992) point out, by con-
structing versions of events, people do attributions. Attributional matters such as
agency and blame can therefore be examined as discursive accomplishments: we
can analyse how descriptions are put together to make the accepting or refusing of
responsibility come off as credible or acceptable. Our analysis takes up this con-
structionist line of inquiry by focusing on how men’s descriptions of their female
partners are constructed and managed sequentially in talk in ways that warrant
their violence/abuse. In doing so we will contribute to the cataloguing of what such
practices as victim-blaming, aggressor-excusing and minimization of violence might
look like in terms of the linguistic actions, membership categorizations and discur-
sive devices in and through which they are typically accomplished. In addition, by
focusing attention on the fine detail of such representations, our aim is to contrib-
ute to understanding how violence against women is routinely described, justified,
excused – and thereby, sustained – as part of a commonsense, taken-for-granted
world.
The present study continues discursive work on domestic violence and rape.
A range of rhetorical devices (e.g. reference ambiguity, metaphor) were identified
by Adams et al. (1995) in interviews with men enrolled in ‘stopping domestic vio-
lence’ programmes in New Zealand. At a broader level, various ‘arenas of discourse’
were identified by Lloyd and Emery (2000) in their review of research findings
dealing with violence in intimate relationships. In studies on intimate relationships,
three discourses were identified as having particularly powerful influences on con-
structions of meaning: ‘equality between the sexes’, ‘romance’ and ‘sexuality’. In
research focusing on aggression, four discourses were seen to dominate: those of
‘aggressor excusing’, ‘victim blaming’, ‘defining aggression’, ‘rendering invisible the
aggression’s intimate nature’. In an analysis of media representations of domestic
violence, Berns (2001) surveyed articles published in widely read British and
American political and men’s magazines between 1970 and 1999. She identified
two key discourses (‘degendering the problem’ and ‘gendering the blame’) that orga-
nized what she referred to as ‘patriarchal resistance’ to feminist constructions of
domestic violence.
O’Byrne et al. (2006) used male undergraduates’ focus group talk to demonstrate
the inadequacy of Tannen’s (1990) ‘miscommunication’ model of gendered conversa-
tional style, which is often assumed to explain a so-called ‘communication failure’ that

ends in rape. The young men showed sophisticated understanding of the pragmatics of
indirect and non-verbal refusal in both everyday and sexual situations. In particular,
they demonstrated clear understanding of verbal refusals that did not contain ‘no’, and
of subtle non-verbal refusals. Lea (2007) analysed therapy and interview interactions
between convicted British sex offenders and professionals, identifying two discourses
that repeatedly served to attribute responsibility to the victim, and to conceptualize
rape as sex. Members of both groups drew on a ‘discourse of desire’ involving refer-
ence to the victim’s physical attractiveness, whereas a ‘discourse of commonsense’ was
regularly used by professionals to attribute some responsibility to the victim while
disclaiming the idea that victims had ‘asked for it’. Most recently, Boonzaier (2008)
reported a narrative analysis of interviews with heterosexual South African couples
attending educational courses for perpetrators of violence against women.
Participants’ narratives were argued to be characterized by features such as ambiguity
around ‘perpetrator’ and ‘victim’ subject positions; constructions of violent relation-
ships as cyclical; and of abuse as a ‘psychological’, or a reciprocal/mutual, problem.
In this article, we extend the focus of such broadly discursive work to include
more fine-grained analysis of the discursive practices and rhetorical techniques in
terms of which gendered moral identities around men’s acts of violence toward their
female partners are worked up. Although it has been demonstrated that perpetrators
often seek to excuse themselves, minimize their violence and blame their victims,
there are few studies that examine the detail of how such attributional practices are
regularly accomplished in ways that make their authors appear credible and war-
ranted. Our wider concern, in examining how such descriptions are produced, is to
shed light on what Seymour-Smith et al. (2002: 254) referred to as the ‘prevailing
discursive environment’ that ‘sets up the taken for granted’ – in this case, with respect
to the naming, justification and continuation of violence towards women. The con-
sequences and implications for feminist research of a focus on the detail of mundane
methods and resources for doing power and oppression are discussed.
Materials and method

The data for this study consisted of audio-taped interviews conducted by MO1 with
men who had engaged in violent/abusive behaviour towards a female partner.
Participants were recruited following initial contact with domestic violence groups
run by Community Health Centres and the Department for Correctional Services in
South Australia, which provide counselling and educational services for perpetrators.
Group co-ordinators were asked if any of their participants would consider being
interviewed about their violent/abusive behaviour. Nine Caucasian men subsequently
volunteered. All but one were voluntary attendees at domestic violence groups; the
other had been court-mandated to attend. Interviews ranged from 30 to 90 minutes in
duration. Further details concerning participants are provided in Table 1.
Prior to each interview, the purpose of the study was explained and participants
were offered the opportunity to read the interview questions. They were informed

Table 1. Summary Information about Participants
Number of
Age intimate Reported duration Current Abusive to
Name* (years) relationships of abuse Professional help received relationship current partner
LeCouteur and Oxlad
Nick 27 1 5 years Correctional Services domestic No N/A

violence (dv) group
Simon 42 4 16 years Psychiatrist, Grow group, community No N/A
health centre dv group
Colin 24 1 3 months Correctional Services dv and anger Yes No
management group – court ordered
Rob 49 2 24 years Psychiatrist, individual counselling, No N/A
community health centre dv group
Laurie 32 5 Verbal most of adult life, Relationship counselling, dv holding Yes Yes
Physical 12–15 months group, community health centre
dv group
Mark 27 5 or 6 2 years Community health centre dv group Yes Yes
Kevin 42 Lost count 8 years Men’s network association men’s group, Yes Yes
Jim 22 2 or 3 12 months Individual and relationship counselling, Yes Yes

Alan 42 4 6 years Anger management group, dv holding No N/A
group, one counselling session,
* Participants’ names have been changed to maintain anonymity.
9
that they were under no obligation to answer any question they did not
want to; were free to withdraw at any time; and that anonymity would be pre-
served via use of pseudonyms. Interview topics included participants’ descrip-
tions of themselves and their abused partner (current or former); notions of an
ideal relationship; first, most recent, and most serious instances of abusive behav-
iour; and experiences of professional help. Interviews were transcribed using a
simplified version of Jeffersonian notation that emphasizes readability rather
than details of pitch, prosody and precise timing (see O’Byrne et al., 2006;
Wetherell, 1998).
In analysing this interview material, we paid particular attention to the context
of interaction as one in which matters of accountability, blame, justification,
motive and competing versions were all central to the business of talk.
We acknowledge that research interviews are characterized by particular interac-
tional demands, and have striven to attend to the sequential construction of the
talk that occurred. We adopt the analytic approach of discursive psychology
(Edwards, 2004; Edwards and Potter, 1992; Potter, 1996) that combines the tradi-
tions of discourse analysis and rhetoric (Billig, 1991; Potter and Wetherell, 1987)
with those of conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis (Sacks,
1972, 1992; Sacks et al., 1974; Schegloff, 1968). Discursive psychology focuses on
the action orientation of accounts, emphasizing their constructed (from linguistic
resources, rhetorical devices) and constructive (of identities, versions, realities)
nature. In particular, it treats accounts as pervasively rhetorical in that they
are always ‘oriented to alternative possible ways of describing things’ (Edwards,
1998: 16).
Analysis
The analytic focus of this article is on the use of identity categorizations in
perpetrators’ accounts of domestic violence. We are concerned with identifying
the ways in which such person descriptions were routinely used by interview
participants to ‘perform and manage various kinds of interactionally sensitive
business, including their motives and reasons for doing things and saying things’
(Edwards, 1998: 19). The analysis draws on Sacks’ (1972, 1992) work on member-
ship categorization, which explains how membership of categories (classifica-
tions used to describe persons, such as ‘girl’ or ‘wife’) is accomplished and made
interactionally relevant in talk. This is an approach concerned with investigating
‘the organization of commonsense knowledge in terms of the categories mem-
bers [of society] employ in accomplishing their activities in and through talk’
(Francis and Hester, 2004: 21). According to Sacks, membership categorizations,
and the relevant rules for their application, are conventionally grouped together
into what can be referred to as membership categorization devices (MCDs).
The notion explains, for example, how an MCD such as ‘family’ makes it possible
for members of a culture to ‘hear’ the categories, ‘mother’, ‘father’, ‘daughter’,

‘son’, etc., as linked or collected together. Sacks also argued that particular
categories are commonsensically associated with particular actions (i.e. there
are sets of expected ‘category-bound activities’ for incumbents) or with classes of
predicates or attributes that can ‘conventionally be imputed on the basis of a
given membership category’ (Watson, 1978: 106). These predicates ‘reference
motives, rights, entitlements, obligations, knowledge, attributes and competences’
(Psathas, 1999: 144) that, like category-bound activities, lead to expectations
about normative behaviour. As Stokoe and Edwards (in press) point out, ‘because
activities are category-bound, the naming of present or absent activities is central to
praising or complaining about members’. Furthermore, the attributes and activities
selected for description in particular accounts are involved in the production of a
moral order. That moral inferences flow from the gender-relevant attributes out-
lined in a description of ‘what happened’ between a male perpetrator of violence
and a female victim has been demonstrated by Wowk (1984: 77), who identified
‘casting aspersions on the character of the victim on the basis of her gender’ as an
important cultural procedure for the accomplishment of sexual politics.
Across our data set we noted that when men were asked to describe their abused
female partners, they regularly drew on categorizations that highlighted her exclu-
sion from the commonsense, moral order of proper gendered behaviour. Various
categories were invoked and worked up in sequential fashion throughout the inter-
views. Routinely, the moral assessments implicated in these categorizations pro-
vided a general warrant for the violence that was under discussion – even in cases in
which the perpetrator also explicitly admitted responsibility for, and reported rec-
ognizing the wrongness of, his violent acts. The analysis focuses on sequences of
talk in which such categorizations were used by men in accounting for their vio-
lence. Eleven extracts from interviews are used to illustrate the general pattern of
person description that we identified.
Housekeepers, mothers and morality

We start the analysis with Extract 1, in which Nick describes a previous partner he
had been violent towards. The extract begins immediately following Nick’s
response to the interviewer’s initial request to ‘describe yourself to me’– to which
he replied: ‘arrogant’, ‘confident’ and ‘good at what I do’.
Extract 12
1. Interviewer: And how would you describe your former partner?
2. Nick: (Clears throat) Pretty arrogant as well. I’ve just put it away for so
3. long just (.) pretty (.) gives as good as she gets (.)
4. messy in the house (.) lazy.

This brief description could be viewed as a straightforward reflection of the speak-

er’s experience of his partner’s character or enduring behavioural style. It can also
be seen as the first move in an organized sequence that builds a particular version
of what happened, and its moral accountability. Nick begins by describing his
partner as similar in some senses to himself. She is ‘arrogant as well’, and ‘gives
as good as she gets’, although these initial negative character assessments are qual-
ified by the repeated use of ‘pretty’ (see Edwards and Fasulo, 2006, on the delicacy
that typifies broaching of negative third-person assessments). His description can
be seen as promoting a symmetrical or transactional warrant for the violence that
he is there to explain; his partner is depicted as involved in a reciprocal exchange.
It is also built to show a recurring pattern of interaction. Such ‘script formulations’
(Edwards, 1994, 1995) typically involve features such as verbs with continuous
aspect (‘I’ve just put it away’, ‘gives as good as she gets’), as well as temporal
phrases (‘just’, ‘so long’). Edwards (1995: 325) demonstrated how, in relationship
accounting where a speaker’s ‘identifiable stake or interest’ puts descriptions at
particular risk of being discounted, formulating events as routine is a powerful
rhetorical resource.
These are all interesting features, but it is the last part of Nick’s turn to
which we want to draw attention. He ends by mentioning that his partner is
‘messy in the house (.) lazy’. Of all the aspects of her character he could have
mentioned that might be relevant to an account of why the abuse occurred, this
choice of descriptors signals something that he will go on to do throughout the
interview: invoke particular activities or dispositional characteristics in ways that
do considerable moral work. Here an interpretative frame of reference around
housework is invoked. Interestingly, Nick does not categorize his partner explic-
itly in terms of gender here, nor does he present her as accountable for house-
work because she is a woman. Explicit linking of gender to household duties
could lay him open to charges of blatant chauvinism, a dangerous position for a
man engaged in stake management around domestic violence, particularly in the
context of an interview by a female researcher. However, given common
assumptions about gendered domestic responsibilities in western culture, describ-
ing a female partner as ‘messy’ and ‘lazy’ arguably creates a ‘relevant category
environment’ (Jayusi, 1984: 135) in which subsequent accounts can be under-
stood. According to Wowk (1984) this sort of elliptical invocation of activities/
attributes that have derogatory implications inevitably involves the account’s
producer trading on shared cultural values and conventional knowledge about
how women should behave. Direct forms of disparagement of female victims
can thus be avoided.
The next extract from this interview illustrates the speaker presenting an account
of his violent actions in terms of another failure on the part of his partner, this time
in relation to her category-bound partnered responsibilities. In response to the
interviewer’s question about his own intentional state (line 1 below) in relation
to the abuse, Nick re-topicalized something that he had offered as a reason for

his violence a few lines earlier in the interview: his partner, who he described as
‘pregnant at the time’ had ‘picked up a hitchhiker’.
Extract 2
1. Interviewer: And have you thought about why you behaved abusively that day?
2. Nick: Yeah because she picked up a hitchhiker.
3. Interviewer: So what did that mean to you? Was that sort of scary (.) that she
4. shouldn’t have done that?
5. Nick: Yeah.
6. Interviewer: Something could have happened to her?
7. Nick: No (.) she shouldn’t have done that. That’s just commonsense ya
8. know? A, a single girl in a (.) in a car picking up a male hitchhiker.
9. That’s stupid.
In this sequence, Nick’s re-statement of the critical action by his partner that led to
his abusive behaviour is followed by an extended evaluation (‘she shouldn’t have
done that’ . . . ‘That’s stupid’) after prompting (lines 1, 3, 4) and a candidate
account (lines 3, 4, 6) from the interviewer. He resists the interviewer’s interpreta-
tion focusing on the harm that could have happened to his partner, opting instead
for an evaluation of her action which, by its use of the modal3 ‘shouldn’t’, implies a
level of moral deficiency on her part (Sneijder and te Molder, 2005). Here, too,
Nick uses another gendered category to refer to his partner: ‘a single girl’.
As Stokoe (2006) points out, the detail here is important; the indefinite article
‘a’ places her as an incumbent of that category and, together with the use of
‘a male hitchhiker’, invokes a standard relational pair in a scripted event that
generalizes the situation beyond the reported incident. The use of continuous or
iterative present tense (‘picking up’) helps build this sense. There is also explicit
reference to general understanding (‘That’s just commonsense ya know?’) that
reinforces the appeal to a normative expectation that single girls and male hitch-
hikers are a pairing for which there are no morally appropriate associated activities
or predicates.
It is worth noting that at other points in the interview, Nick responded to the
interviewer’s questions about the problematic nature of his abusive behaviour in
ways that acknowledged its wrongness. Extract 3 contains an example.
Extract 3
1. Interviewer: Did you ever think that your abusive behaviour was a problem?
2. Nick: Um (.) yes.
3. Interviewer: And how did you know it was a problem?
4. Nick: That’s what the old (.) my old man used to do to mum.
5. Interviewer: You thought it was a problem because you’d seen it happen to your
6. mum?

7. Nick: Oh yeah, yeah. Same thing (.) common sense. You know it happened
8. but you know it shouldn’t have (.) but you know it did.
Although here Nick acknowledges that his behaviour was a problem (line 2) – even if
only minimally, and in a way that indicates that what he is saying is difficult to for-
mulate (‘um’ token and pause) – in other places, he builds an account using gendered
descriptions of his partner’s category-disjunctive activities that reinforce her moral
accountability and blameworthiness. Notably, here he responds to the interviewee’s
prompting for an explanation (lines 3 and 5) by recruiting biographical detail that
makes an intergenerational transmission account available as an additional justifi-
cation for his violence. His own agency and responsibility is further deflected in his
answer-plus-elaboration at lines 7–8. Nick refers to an event that lacks agency (‘it
happened’) rather than to an action that he performed, and a modal construction
(‘shouldn’t have’) is used to reference what he, as a member of the category of
morally responsible people-in-general (‘common sense’, the indefinite ‘you’) ‘know’
about the inappropriateness of such actions.
An inappropriate wife
In the next example from the corpus, the interviewee, Simon, also presents a par-
ticular categorization of his partner at the interview’s outset that builds the basis
for significant moral work when the account of the abuse unfolds. Again, this
description highlights his partner’s exclusion from the commonsense moral order
of proper gendered behaviour. In Extract 4, Simon responds to the Interviewer’s
initial questions.
Extract 4
1. Interviewer: Okay (.) could you start by describing yourself to me?

2. Simon: Um I suppose I’m very quiet . . . That’s a hard one. Probably say
3. lacking a lot in self-confidence. I think I’m very gullible.
4. Interviewer: Would you please describe your former partner to me?
5. Simon: Very dominating (.) possessive (.) just seems very involved with
6. working all the time (.) um very very loving person towards the kids.
Simon’s response to the interviewer’s request to describe himself is notably hesi-

tant, hedged (‘Um I suppose . . .’, ‘Probably say . . .’), and indicative of the difficulty
he reports experiencing in formulating a response (‘That’s a hard one.’). The
impression is of someone who has never before thought of how to describe himself.
His self-presentation is displayed as spontaneously put together. If we look at these
aspects of his description as features that are designed, like all aspects of talk no
matter how apparently trivial, to achieve things sequentially in and for interaction,
we might also speculate that they serve an important function in terms of stake
inoculation.4 Here a man is talking as part of an interview for which he was

given the questions in advance. He describes his partner in terms that counter the
traditional order associated with marital gender roles (she is the one who is ‘very
involved with working all the time’). And this description is worked up in terms of
a clear contrast with the character that he has just depicted for himself (she is ‘Very
dominating (.) possessive’; he is ‘very quiet . . . lacking a lot in self-confidence . . .
very gullible’). In this context, such a contrast might open the speaker to accusa-
tions of self-interest, and so work needs to be done to build the credibility of his
version. Arguably, stake attribution is headed-off by this form of hesitant, qualified
self-presentation as a category-disjunctive (‘quiet’, ‘lacking in self-confidence’,
‘gullible’) ‘husband-of-an-abused-wife’.
Simon’s initial description of his partner is consequential, too, for the account he
offers at a later point – she ‘just seems very involved with working all the time’ and is
a ‘loving person towards the kids’. An appearance/reality distinction5 is invoked by
the use of ‘seems’, which he will return to later, as he will to the implication-
by-omission that she is not loving to him (see Extract 5, where accusations of his
wife’s work-related infidelity occur). After several other questions from the inter-
viewer, the talk turns to a specific instance of abusive behaviour when Simon relates
what happened on the occasion he was ‘most abusive’ towards his wife. In including, at
the start of his story, information about his own drunkenness and her prior behaviour,
Simon manages an accountable basis for his actions. The violence is depicted as an
understandable event in a narrative sequence (Edwards, 1996). The particular
descriptive features that are presented on this occasion construct his violence as a
category-appropriate (husband’s) reaction to a wife’s neglect of her family, and
other men’s attempts to usurp his role. The temporal ordering of events in this descrip-
tion allows for inferences to be drawn concerning ‘responsibility for consequences and
characterological imputations about the parties concerned’ (Wowk, 1984: 77).
Extract 5
1. Interviewer: Okay (.) can you tell me about the time that you were most abusive
2. towards an intimate partner?
3. Simon: Yeah. We went up to um Surfers’ Paradise. My wife was having a
4. conference up there. We were (.) the second day into it (.)
5. the conference (.) and we had a (.) a tea that night (.) function and
6. um I was drinking red wine that night (.) got really drunk (.) and I
7. was sitting at the table (.) um . . . I was talking with one of the
8. doctors (.) um (.) about my wife and the direction she was heading
9. in (.) and at that time I was wanting my wife to spend more time
10. at home rather than um doing the courses and things that she was
11. quite involved in (.) going to conferences and studying all the time.
12. And doctor ended up turning around and telling me to shut up (.)
13. and she should be doing this and (.) I found it (.) very offensive
14. that he was tryin’ to (.) tell me how my wife should (.) what my
15. wife should do. And when we left the dinner (.) I think she ended

16. up leaving because I was actually carting her off. When we

17. walked out (.) she was having a go at me about the way I was
18. going on and then (.) so I started grabbing her and (.) pulling her
19. hair and threatening to hit her and asking her if she’s having an affair
20. and who it is. And then I just (.) just went sick. I think the security
21. guards came along and (.) escorted me away (.) back to the room.
22. Interviewer: So what were you thinking when all this was happening?
23. Simon: While the violence was going on?
24. Interviewer: Mm mm.
25. Simon: (.) I was thinking she was having an affair.
Simon’s repeated references to ‘my wife’ invoke western-normative notions of the

marital contract with its assumptions of fidelity, shared nurturance and orientation
to home life. His wife’s behaviour is complaint-worthy in that she does not fulfil
these expectations of how a wife should behave. She spends too much time
outside of the home; the point is established in its extent and generality with a
standard three-part list: ‘doing the courses and things that she was quite involved
in (.) going to conferences and studying all the time’. The combination of
vague reference to multiple and repeated occasions of absence (‘doing the courses
and things . . . going to conferences’) together with an extreme-case formulation
(‘studying all the time’) works to imply that she is away from the family home
sufficiently often for an infidelity to be possible, and in locations where infidelities
are, stereotypically, assumed to occur. At lines 13–15 there is also explicit reference
to the inappropriateness of another man attempting to usurp Simon’s position in
his category-bound marital relationship: ‘I found it (.) very offensive that he was
tryin’ to (.) tell me how my wife should (.) what my wife should do.’
Another specific narrative detail that Simon provides about what happened
before the violent episode does considerable business in terms of accountability
management. At lines 17–20 he describes how his wife had been ‘having a go’ at
him as they walked out of the dinner venue,6 and that it was then that he became
violent (‘and then (.) so I started grabbing her and (.) pulling her hair and threat-
ening to hit her . . . And then I just (.) just went sick.’7). He depicts a sequence of
events in which his wife’s neglect of her family, another man’s offensive behaviour
in telling him how she should behave, and his wife’s having a ‘go’ at him, all lead up
to his violent eruption. Notably, too, Simon’s request for clarification in response
to the interviewer’s question about his thinking at the time (line 22) references an
action that lacks an actor/agent (‘While the violence was going on?’). It is shaped in
terms of an ‘event that happened’ rather than an action that he performed
(Pomerantz, 1978: 117). The extract ends with an explicit statement of a mor-
ally accountable, category-disjunctive activity (‘I was thinking she was having an
affair’) that has been built indirectly throughout the description (e.g. ‘asking her if
she’s having an affair, and who it is’ (lines 19–20). Simon’s actions are thus dis-
played as potentially rationally grounded – the inevitable result of a mental state
brought about by a series of provocations occurring over a long time.

Here, again, we see evidence of a form of accounting in which implied breaches

of the moral order on the part of a female partner are invoked as warrants in
descriptions of domestic violence. As in the previous example, it is noteworthy that
at other points in the interview, the speaker appeared prepared to acknowledge the
problematic nature of his abusive behaviour when questioned:
Extract 6
1. Interviewer: Mm mmm. Did you think your abusive behaviour was a problem?
2. Simon: Yeah I see it as a problem.
3. Interviewer: How did you know it was a problem?
4. Simon: (.) that’s just not the sort of thing you should do in a relationship.
Simon’s response (line 4) to the interviewer’s request for elaboration (line 3) is in a

form that, by deployment of the ‘just’ marker, the indefinite ‘you’ and a
modal (‘should’), references his knowledge that such behaviour is not permitted by
morally responsible actors. That speakers routinely offer such acknowledgements
in local contexts of explanation at the same time as they work up sequential
moral attributions of blame in respect of their partners, is a feature of accounting
practices around domestic violence that has significant practical implications for
accountability in other institutional arenas – therapeutic, educational and legal.
The aim of focusing attention on the detail of such methods for doing accounting
is to lay these practices open to wider scrutiny as powerful rhetorical devices that are
fundamentally constitutive of matters of blame and responsibility, power and
oppression.
A boyfriend to support her

In the next example from our corpus (Extract 7, below), initial categorization
practices can be seen as consequential in setting up an interpretative framework
for subsequent accounts of violence. The significance of the basic discur-
sive/conversation-analytic research question, ‘why this here, now?’, can be seen
in relation to Colin’s framing of an identity description in the first few turns of
the interview. This type of sequential organization appears similar to that observed
by Pomerantz (1978) in a corpus of naturally occurring attributions of responsi-
bility for wrong-doing. She identified that when blamings occur, ‘the materials used
for understanding what it is that is the blameworthy event’ are routinely to be
found in a person’s ‘initial report’ (p. 116).
Colin describes himself, at the outset, as ‘easy-going, relaxed’ and, following
the interviewer’s prompting for ‘Any qualities that you don’t particularly
like about yourself ?’, as ‘not taking things serious enough’ and spending ‘a little
bit too much than what I should, like most people’. He then responds to a request

to ‘Describe your former partner to me’ by providing a qualified negative

assessment:
Extract 7
1. Colin: Um yeah. She was um young (.) she had a few background problems and
2. (.) lazy um um (.) very attractive. You know just no real ambition in life
3. (.) that’s all. Just was party time sort of thing. (.) oh, we both liked to go
4. out but you know she didn’t want to go out and get a job and get into
5. the world and that (.) with a life (.) and then sort of like (.) go out and
6. have a few drinks after work. She just wanted to have a boyfriend who
7. went out and worked and sort of like (.) he supported her sort of.
Colin orients initially to his partner’s age, making her youth immediately discursively
relevant (‘She was um young’). Arguably, in terms of the account that unfolds, this
descriptive feature makes available the inference that she was not developmentally
ready for a committed, ongoing relationship. Colin also refers vaguely to her ‘back-
ground problems’ and mentions that she was ‘lazy’. These features provide an inter-
esting contrast to the less morally accountable formulations he uses to describe
himself: ‘easy-going, relaxed’. He also mentions that she was ‘very attractive’ and
lacked ‘ambition’, using an extreme-case formulation to highlight the point (‘just no
real ambition in life’), providing the additional detail that she did not ‘want’ to ‘get a
job’ but preferred to be supported (‘just wanted to have a boyfriend who went out
and worked’). The repeated use of the preface ‘just’ in this description of a general-
ized pattern of behaviour works to reinforce specific dispositional characteristics
(young, lazy, lacking ambition and willingness to work) as the prime source of sub-
sequent problems. He presents a picture of an immature and potentially psycholog-
ically-troubled woman, who is trading on her youthful attractiveness to avoid
working for a living. She is someone who is in a relationship for the wrong reason
(‘She just wanted to have a boyfriend who . . . supported her’). Moral accountability
is clearly at issue. The description is replete with hedges and qualifiers (‘um’, ‘sort of’,
‘like’) that display the delicate broaching that is typical of negative other-assessments
(Edwards and Fasulo, 2006). It comes across as having an off-the-cuff quality that
fends off the impression that the negative evaluation has been worked up in any
calculated way to blame an ex-partner.
A few minutes later, Colin relates an example of his violence that displays a
similar pattern of categorization accounting. In response to the interviewer’s
prompt, ‘tell me about the time that you were most abusive’, Colin describes
how he had broken up with Kylie after she ‘disappeared’ with her ‘ex-boyfriend’
for three days following his release from a ‘juvenile home’.
Extract 8
1. Colin: Then she came round the next night drunk and I was just in bed (.) and

2. had a few (.) and she came round knocking at my door (.) it was actually
3. me mum’s sort of like, I was looking after it. She was overseas at the
4. time. It was a housing trust (.) block of units with eight units so it’s all
5. elderly people. She’s banging on the door at one o’clock in the morning.
6. I sort of like told her to shut up (.) she’s cryin’ ‘I want to talk, I want to
7. sort things out’, and (.) just told her to f-off. She wouldn’t (.) banging on
8. the windows, screaming, cryin’, that’s when I went outside and just sort
9. of like dragged her out the driveway and kicked her up the bum (.)
10. called her some bad names.
The analytic focus here is on Colin’s construction of his own, and his part-
ner’s, activities, and the function of these descriptions in working up normative
identities as a warrant for his violence. He builds his partner’s moral account-
ability by describing her as ‘drunk’ when she tries to gain access to his
mother’s house at night – a feature that he subsequently upgrades with the
specific detail of ‘one o’clock in the morning’, which will make the inappro-
priateness of her behaviour even clearer. She is repeatedly described as creating
a great deal of nocturnal noise: ‘she’s banging on the door’, ‘banging on the
windows, screaming, cryin’’, and her offences against mundane morality
(Stokoe and Edwards, in press) are emphasized in terms of the local context
in which they are occurring. Notably, at line 2 in his account, Colin issues a
self-repair that makes relevant the fact that it was his mother’s house that he
was living in. This informing is marked by ‘actually’ in a way that addresses
the commonsense presumption that he would be in his own home (Clift, 2001),
and he provides a level of detail that will be relevant to the subsequent blam-
ing (‘eight units so it’s all elderly people’). His own behaviour, by contrast, is
described in ways that minimize features that might imply responsibility for the
violence that ensued. He was not up late, but was ‘just in bed’. He was not
drunk but, more ambiguously, had merely ‘had a few’. He only resorts to
abusive language (line 7) after his first attempt (line 6) to quieten her fails,
and he uses two standard discursive practices that bolster the facticity of his
version (Potter, 1996): direct reporting of her speech (‘I sort of like told her to
shut up (.) she’s cryin’ ‘I want to talk, I want to sort things out’) and three-
part listing (‘banging on the windows, screaming, cryin’). Moreover, in this
account, he only resorts to violence as a reaction to repeated events – when
she ignores his pleas to shut up and go away (‘that’s when I went outside’).
His description also softens the violence: ‘just sort of like dragged her out the
driveway and kicked her up the bum’. The account depicts him as removing a
noisy, remonstrating drunk who is creating a disturbance in a housing block
for elderly residents. To give someone a ‘kick up the bum’ in such circum-
stances might generally be acknowledged as, metaphorically and even perhaps
literally, just what they need.
It is worth noting that unlike previous interviewees discussed above,
Colin does not report thinking that his abusive behaviour was problematic when

prompted, towards the end of the interview, with a direct question (Extract 9,
line 2).
Extract 9
1. Interviewer: Did you think your abusive behaviour was a problem?

2. Colin: Nuh nuh I don’t think it is (.) or was. But I think every relationship
3. has er little differences and I basically put that bad relationship
4. down to um just not my type of person and she has got a lot of
5. problems . . .
His negative response is elaborated via an account component typical of dispre-

ferred8 second parts (Edwards and Fasulo, 2006), making clear the grounds for the
stance he has taken (Schegloff, 2007). In this case a ‘but’ preface sets up a con-
trasting personal-perspectival ‘I think’ report (Edwards and Fasulo, 2006) that
downgrades the interviewer’s reference to his ‘abusive behaviour’ by presenting it
as the routine sort that everyone experiences (‘But I think every relationship has er
little differences’). He ends his turn by constructing a transactional pattern as the
main reason for his violence (‘I basically put that bad relationship down to um just
not my type of person’), closing with a negative assessment of his partner’s char-
acter (‘she has got a lot of problems’). It was not the case, then, that intricate,
sequential construction of gendered categorization was only deployed as a regular
discursive practice by those speakers who were trying to pass as ‘repentant’ or
‘remorseful’ in the context of interview.
An untidy woman
The final extracts for analysis also illustrate a speaker working up a contrasting
construction of his own, and his partner’s, category-based activities. These descrip-
tions build normative identities that can again be seen as providing a warrant for
violence.
Extract 10
1. Interviewer: Thinking back, can you describe to me the first time you were
2. abusive towards an intimate partner and what led to it?
3. Jim: Uhh um probably, I don’t know (.) probably about twelve months
4. or so ago when it first started. It just ah it was over er because I’m
5. a tidy person and I don’t like to leave things too untidy for too
6. long and yeah I tend to jump up and down a little bit over that. So
7. yeah, so that’d probably be the main one yeah. Just because I’m a
8. tidy person and she likes to just do it whenever she wants to do it.

Here, in response to the interviewer’s question, ‘what led to it?’, Jim engages in
hesitation, qualification and repair, as well as an ‘I don’t know’ formulation
(lines 3, 4) before offering a reason (line 4): ‘because I’m a tidy person’. His
elaboration around this point is a nice identity presentation depicting him as
someone who places a high value on tidiness, but is not unreasonably concerned
about it. Notably, it is not the untidiness, itself, that he is concerned with, but
the leaving of ‘things too untidy for too long’. In such circumstances, he
reacts as might anyone who has developed the appropriate level of mundane
morality around self-discipline; and his depiction minimizes any implication of
over-reaction or violence: ‘I tend to jump up and down a little bit over that’.
In the final part of his turn, he reiterates the reason, or trigger, for his abusive
behaviour in terms of a direct contrast between himself and his partner that
shows her as lacking self-discipline: ‘Just because I’m a tidy person and she likes
to just do it whenever she wants to do it’. The continuous or iterative present
tense reinforces the character-implicative nature of this account (Edwards,
1995).
Several turns later, in responding to the interviewer’s question about the
most recent time he had been abusive, Jim returns to this self-categorization to
describe a situation in which he ‘just snapped’. The interviewer then questions him
on this:
Extract 11
1. Interviewer: Yeah, like what leads up to that point?
2. Jim: Um I supp (.) I suppose like um for example if, er, if, if the floor’s
3. untidy and I said like ‘Well’, you know (.) ‘Why haven’t you
4. cleaned the floor yet?’ and (.) and she will say you know
5. something and (.) rah rah, say something to me and then I go into
6. a huff and do it myself, and after I’ve did it (.) you know I’m sort
7. of like, you know, ‘It’s not that f’en hard to do and er I don’t see
8. how yous couldn’t’ve done it’, and er (.) just leads on from there
9. (.) just little things.
10. Interviewer: So just little things like that just kind of build up?
11. Jim: Just the little things yeah. It does yeah. Coz like you get (.) you
12. know, it’s just the simplest thing too, like just asking her to take a
13. dish to the sink and (.) and she’s like ‘Yeah, yeah, I’ll do that.’
14. Then, you know, like an hour later it’s still there. So I go (.)
15. ‘Can you put your dish in the sink?’ ‘Yeah, Yeah’, and it doesn’t
16. go anywhere. Then you know the next day (.) it’s there and I think
17. ‘Well fuck’, you know (.) ‘Why couldn’t you just put it in the
18. sink?’ It’s not hard to do it. It just takes five seconds to do it.
Jim’s description involves the fleshing out of scripted or general patterns via fea-
tures that Edwards (1995) demonstrated as typical: an if–then structure (lines 2–6),

continuous tense (‘then I go into a huff’, ‘asking her to take a dish to the sink’, ‘the
next day it’s there’), and reporting of dialogue in a way that formulates the specific
instances as exemplars. His account is also interesting for the way in which it
manages stake by avoiding the explicit use of gender categories. As noted for the
speaker’s account in Extract 1, it might be argued that Jim is working up a non-
sexist self-presentation; he does not refer specifically to his partner as neglecting her
‘womanly’ domestic duties. Yet the specific examples of deficiency that he reports
are implicative of normative expectations relating to gendered domestic responsi-
bilities. After some displayed difficulty in responding to the interviewer’s request
for continuation of his account of ‘snapping’ (line 2), he produces an example that
arguably provides the upshot that it is his partner’s responsibility to clean the floor:
‘And I said like ‘Well’, you know (.) ‘Why haven’t you cleaned the floor yet?’ The
fact that he reports that he then goes ‘into a huff’ and does it himself reinforces the
idea that floor-cleaning was a recognized part of her duties. He gives no details of
his partner’s account of why she had not cleaned the floor – she might have felt it
was not her responsibility or not her turn to do it, but no such information is
provided. We are merely told ‘she will say you know something and rah rah, say
something to me and then I go into a huff’, in a way that presents the situation as
an exemplar of a regular pattern. Her lack of an adequate reason for failing to
perform an expected duty is addressed explicitly at the end of his first turn (lines
7–9), where the generality of the event is again highlighted via direct speech report-
ing: ‘It’s not that f’en hard to do and er I don’t see how yous couldn’t’ve done it’.9
The interviewer’s subsequent question at line 10 invites agreement and gets it
(‘Just the little things yeah’). The elaboration that follows provides another
instance of his partner’s generalized pattern of behaviour using continuous present
tense, here drawing on an extreme formulation ‘it’s just the simplest thing’. Direct
reporting is also employed to build the instance as exemplary. Even when asked
politely in the form of a standard request ‘Can you put your dish in the sink?’ she is
presented as failing to comply, over a period that extends from one hour in the first
telling, to ‘the next day’ in its upgraded form. And, again, Jim ends his turn with a
formulation that emphasizes the normativeness of the activity that she has failed to
engage in. The absence of any forthcoming reason – other than implied character,
or moral, deficiency – as to why she could not do it is highlighted using a ‘my-side
reporting of a personal perspective’ (Edwards and Fasulo, 2006: 357) in which
repeated ‘just’ qualifiers serve to minimize the nature of the activity required on
her part (‘I think ‘‘Well fuck’’, you know (.) ‘Why couldn’t you just put it in the
sink?’ It’s not hard to do it. It just takes five seconds to do it.’).
Discussion
We have examined ways in which person descriptions and membership categori-
zations were used to assign social identities, invoke normative expectations and
warrant acts of abuse/violence towards women. We focused on the situated

production and sequential development of such descriptions in the interview talk of

men undertaking counselling for domestic violence. It is important and interesting
from a feminist perspective to note that such warrants were commonly framed
around categorizations that built the accountability of their female partners
‘within a normative and moral order’ (Edwards, 1995: 320). Specifically, these
moral inferences were regularly worked up – with considerable rhetorical intricacy
across lengthy interviews – in terms of the specification of activities and character-
istics that were disjunctive for the gendered categories involved (‘wife’, ‘mother’,
‘girl’, ‘girlfriend’).
It might be argued that it is not surprising that such categories were repeatedly
invoked, given the recognizably gendered nature of intimate partner violence.
However, what we wish to highlight here, and what represents the empirical
focus of our study, is the systematic way in which situated membership categori-
zations were sequentially worked up to carry out finely-tuned moral assessments
that provided a commonsense justification for men’s violence. It was not simply
that the men in our sample were engaging in recognizable practices of victim-
blaming, or aggressor-excusing – two general types of explanatory action identi-
fied in the literature as typical features of accounts of domestic violence/rape.
What we draw attention to are some of the mundane methods and resources in
terms of which power and oppression are routinely accomplished in interaction.
As Kitzinger (2000: 168) argues, it is by taking a micro-level focus on such account-
ing practices that we can begin to understand more clearly ‘exactly where and in
what’ (Wise and Stanley, 1987:157) oppression is continually created and sustained
via the practices of everyday talk. Here, we have shown how examining the detail
of perpetrators’ accounts allows us to identify a regular pattern that forms the basis
for consequential blaming of women. These routine practices of description are the
means by which taken-for-granted understandings of such crimes are continually
produced. They constitute the practical reasoning through which the social order is
accomplished, and power and oppression are reproduced (Kitzinger, 2000). In the
pattern identified here, speakers’ juxtaposing of certain activities with person and
category descriptors was worked up as a breach of the moral order. In effect, in
these patterns of accounting, being constructed as an improper member of various
subsidiaries of the category ‘woman’ was repeatedly presented as a warrant for
violent intervention by a male partner.
In this sense, speakers in our sample used the everyday discursive practice of
membership categorization to warrant their violence in terms of the maintenance of
the broader moral order around normative gendered identities. Given that these
patterns of accounting were common to the accounts of both men who, in the
context of interview, explicitly acknowledged and who denied the problematic
nature of their own violent acts, further work on the application of these findings
to education, prevention and treatment around domestic violence/intimate partner
abuse would seem crucial. As Seymour-Smith et al. (2002: 265) point out,
‘dominant discourses are powerful because they set the horizon for what can be
articulated or thought in any particular context’); they set up and reproduce

taken-for-granted understandings, and are ‘deeply implicated in the formation and

continuation’ (2002: 254) of the ‘reality’ of domestic violence. Stokoe (2006: 475)
makes a similar point in arguing that the practical categorizations people use with
regard to particular states of affairs ‘form part of what ethnomethodologists refer
to when they describe the ongoing production and realization of ‘facts’ about social
life, including members’ gendered ‘reality analysis’ (Hester and Francis, 1997)’. A
membership categorization approach to investigating accounts of violence against
women, then, offers feminist researchers and workers in the field a way of laying
bare the processes by which ‘taken-for-granted facts about gender-appropriate
behaviour and characters are worked out routinely in talk’ (Stokoe, 2006: 476).
Although such commonsense identity-management practices may be difficult to
undermine, rich descriptions of their routine occurrence in perpetrators’ accounts,
and how they are built and made factual (Edwards, 1995), can provide a strategic
resource for counsellors, educators and those involved in training for practice.
More work is needed to consider the practical applications of findings such as
those reported here, but as Baker (2000: 112) has argued, ‘a first step in challenging
discourses and practices is to recognize the force of categorization practices in
social and institutional life’.
Although our sample of interviews was small and limited to men who were
attending counselling and willing to volunteer10, the regularity of the highlighted
pattern of gendered categorization across accounts is suggestive of its pervasiveness
as a form of moral warranting of abusive/violent behaviour. Future research might
explore how gendered identity categorizations are routinely produced and deployed
to a variety of ends by perpetrators, victims and professionals in the range of
institutional settings in which domestic violence is variously assessed, managed
and discussed. Further consideration of the consequences, for all involved, of
these dominant attributional practices might make a contribution to our ability
to challenge, resist and subvert the methods of victim-blaming and aggressor-
excusing that have been demonstrated to characterize practical reasoning around
male violence towards women. As Kitzinger (2000: 188) noted, it is in this impor-
tant sense that ‘the detailed study of talk can be used for feminist purposes – to
create social and political change’.
Notes
1. MO’s previous professional experience in the field included working as a project officer
with a Domestic Violence Regional Service in developing a training package for a
national rural violence education program.
2. The following transcription conventions are used:
. (.) denotes a brief pause;
. . . . denotes a longer pause;
. underlining indicates words emphasized by the speaker.
3. Modals forms are used to express notions of possibility (what we can know or what can
be the case) and of necessity or obligation. As Edwards (2006: 477) points out, ‘Modal

expressions include a range of ‘auxiliary’ verbs in English such as ought, will, would,
could, can, might, should, and may’. Auxiliary verbs provide further syntactic or seman-
tic information about the verb that they accompany (e.g. She shouldn’t have done that).
4. Descriptions that are seen as interested, that is as presented by a speaker who has a stake
in some course of action that the description relates to, are typically open to being
discounted. Potter (1996: 125) has described practices that are fashioned to head-off
or minimize this discounting as attempts at ‘stake inoculation’.
5. Billig (2006) describes constructions that build a distinction between appearance
and reality as a widely used rhetorical trope; such descriptions cast doubt upon
appearances that are at odds with speakers’ insider or expert knowledge of an underly-
ing reality.
6. Simon subsequently performs a parenthetical self-repair that corrects his previous asser-
tion that they had merely ‘left’ the dinner: ‘I think she ended up leaving because I was
actually carting her off’, in which the ‘actually’ marker is typical of such fact corrections
(Clift, 2001). On recommencing the account of how his wife’s actions provoked the
violent reaction, he reverts to a version of their exit that minimizes this violence:
‘When we walked out (.) she was having a go at me . . .’.
7. To ‘go sick’, here, can be understood as follows: The act of going angry or mad, often
when reacting to something. If someone wildly explodes with rage, they are ‘going sick’
(Urban Dictionary, n.d.).
8. Conversation analysts have identified the way in which certain classes of utterances
conventionally occur in pairs in talk-in-interaction (e.g. requests and grantings/declina-
tions; assessments and agreements/disagreements; invitations and acceptances/refusals)
(Hutchby and Wooffitt, 2008). The alternative ‘second-pair parts’ to the ‘first-pair
part’ of an ‘adjacency pair’ (Sacks, 1992) are typically produced in systematically
different ways. Acceptances, grantings and agreements tend to be produced straightfor-
wardly and without delay, and as such are labelled ‘preferred’ second parts. Refusals,
declinations and disagreements, by contrast, are typically marked by hesitation,
qualification and explanation. They are labelled ‘dispreferred’ second parts
(Pomerantz, 1984).
9. Jim was another interviewee who, at various times in the interview, appeared to
acknowledge the problematic nature of his abusive behaviour (see Extract below), but
still engaged in the systematic and sequential building of a category-based moral attri-
bution of responsibility to his partner:
Interviewer: So how did you explain your behaviour to yourself?

Jim: . . . Oh I just basically, I thought it was unacceptable.
[lines omitted]
Interviewer: Did you think your abusive behaviour was a problem?
Jim: Um yeah it is. Yeah. Because er I almost lost my family over it so, yeah (.) it is
a (.) it is a problem.
10. It is recognized that the men who volunteered to participate in interviews may have had
a particular stake in doing so. Arguably, they might have been more prone to present
accounts of their violence that blamed their female partners. However, as Seymour-
Smith et al. (2002: 265) have noted, ‘Interviews are an opportunity to rehearse the
taken for granted’, and in this sense we view the patterns observed in the corpus as

part of contemporary cultural understandings around domestic violence and its

accountability and, thus, to be analytically interesting.
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Amanda LeCouteur is Associate Professor, Psychology, at the University of

Adelaide, Australia, where she is Co-Director of the Discourse and Social
Psychology Unit. Her research interests are in the analysis of language and
social interaction in various ordinary and institutional settings, including men’s
relationship counseling helplines, health advice helplines, psychological therapy
sessions, and professional sports settings.
Melissa Oxlad has a Masters of Clinical and Health Psychology and a PhD in
Psychology. She currently works in independent private practice in Adelaide, South
Australia and is a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Adelaide. Her
major areas of research are in health psychology and child and adolescent
mental health.

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F eminism

categories and morality

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described by Drew (1998: 295):

descriptions are themselves accountable phenomena through which we recognizably

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Materials and method

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Nick 27 1 5 years Correctional Services domestic No N/A

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Housekeepers, mothers and morality

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This brief description could be viewed as a straightforward reﬂection of the speak-

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1. Interviewer: Okay (.) could you start by describing yourself to me?

Simon’s response to the interviewer’s request to describe himself is notably hesi-

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16. up leaving because I was actually carting her oﬀ. When we

Simon’s repeated references to ‘my wife’ invoke western-normative notions of the

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Here, again, we see evidence of a form of accounting in which implied breaches

Simon’s response (line 4) to the interviewer’s request for elaboration (line 3) is in a

A boyfriend to support her

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to ‘Describe your former partner to me’ by providing a qualiﬁed negative

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1. Interviewer: Did you think your abusive behaviour was a problem?

His negative response is elaborated via an account component typical of dispre-

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production and sequential development of such descriptions in the interview talk of

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taken-for-granted understandings, and are ‘deeply implicated in the formation and

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Interviewer: So how did you explain your behaviour to yourself?

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part of contemporary cultural understandings around domestic violence and its

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Amanda LeCouteur is Associate Professor, Psychology, at the University of

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