This research reviews and discusses the clinical and social science datasets used to identify victims of domestic violence (DV) in the archaeological record. Clinical sources are skewed by law enforcement and cost issues, dominated by Western female data and suggest that DV is a well‐documented form of abuse. Social science sources and perspectives, having arisen from activist movements, are more spatiotemporally diverse in breadth and perspective, and challenge the notion that DV is universal and well‐documented, but are biased because they rely upon self‐survey reports. Palaeopathology and bioarchaeology have adopted a clinical approach to DV, relying on a pattern of injuries (focussed on the head, face and neck), without critically evaluating whether such datasets are appropriate to the spatiotemporal and socio‐cultural diversity present in the archaeological record. A case study evaluating the injury patterns in 964 post‐medieval adult females from London (England) demonstrates that the majority of injuries that conform to the clinical model have robust alternative explanations, and only a small minority of females have injuries that may have been produced by interpersonal violence, not necessarily DV. In conclusion, the review highlights that the perspectives of the elderly and male victims are currently neglected in research, and evidence for injury, especially that which may reflect abuse, necessitates interpretation within a ‘web of violence’ approach, as DV does not occur in isolation from other violence in a community. It challenges the ‘check‐list’ approach to interpretation and suggests that a closer examination of fracture mechanism combined with injury patterning may be a more informative approach with which to identify DV victims of both sexes and identifies the need to integrate other health data into the interpretation of violence and abuse. Overall, it concurs with the minority of clinical and forensic literature that it might not be possible to differentiate DV and assault victims. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.