Domestic Violence

The term domestic means the house (domus) or home, and domestic violence broadly refers to the sustained abuse by one person of at least one other with whom he or she is in a personal relationship. The reference to the domus suggests a distinction between public (stranger violence) and private (domestic violence). Although it is possible [Page 383]to examine how often domestic violence occurs (i.e., its prevalence) and how often it results in death, it is important to find a way of distinguishing among different types of domestic violence.

Relationships are one of the key defining features of domestic violence. These domestic relationships are more likely to be called intimate, personal, or family relationships, and one feature is that they somehow preclude the possibility of violence through care, love, or responsibility. To explore domestic violence in more detail, it is useful to distinguish between dyadic intimate relationships, such as in marriage, and those between generations, such as between a child and parents. It is also important to consider the sociopolitical context, which is often complicit in domestic violence and also attempts to deal with aftermath and prevent further violence.

Dyadic Intimate Relationships

When considering domestic violence, people most often refer to the abuse between two adults in an intimate, loving, and sexual relationship. This could include homosexual relationships, but it is often limited to heterosexual relations where the man is abusing the woman. Indeed, many more men than women are violent in intimate relationships.

Life prevalence rates in domestic violence usually calculate how many people will experience domestic violence. Globally, lifetime prevalence for women is 1-in-4 to 1-in-5, whereas it is much lower for men at 1-in-10 to 1-in-20. More specifically, crime figures for assault show that women are usually assaulted by their partner in an intimate relationship, whereas the vast majority of men report that their attacker was a stranger.

Similar differences are seen when domestic violence leads to mortality where there are almost 3 times as many women than men murdered by their partner. For example, homicide estimates in the United States suggest that in the year 2000 there were 1,247 women and 440 men killed by their partners. Many of the men murdered seemed to have been persistent perpetrators of violence, and therefore the murder was most likely a result of self-defense or provocation. Of those—mainly men—who do murder their partner, some also kill other members of the family (familicide) and, subsequent to the murders, a large proportion also kills themselves (homicide-suicide).

Relationships between Generations: Older Abusing the Younger

In relations between different generations, there are at least two different directions of abuse. The first is the abuse of a child by an adult, which could be an adult within their family—a parent, uncle, aunt, or grandparent—or within their family's circle of friends. The term child would seem to suggest that this is limited to people below a certain legally defined age threshold (16 or 18, for example), but the relationship between generations—where the younger generation needs protecting and the older generation is responsible for its progeny—seems more important because it is unlikely that passing a certain age would define certain acts as less violent. As a child is often dependent upon older generations for survival, the persistent failure to provide for a child's psychological and physical health, termed neglect, is a prominent aspect of understanding relationships in which the older generations abuses the younger.

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