Domestic Violence

Domestic violence—usually defined as intentional physical, sexual, or emotional harm by an intimate partner or family member—likely has always been part of human history. The construction and reconstruction of this social problem in the United States occurred in several ways, beginning as the problem of wife abuse.

Claims makers concerned with wife abuse emerged during the 1970s out of several other moral entrepreneurial campaigns, particularly those of the second wave feminist consciousness-raising groups, the anti-rape social movement, and the child protection movement. The first two focused their attention on challenging the secondary status of women in society. Consciousness-raising groups gave women time and space away from their busy lives to share stories of harassment, victimization, and often, abuse. These groups let many women see that what they had experienced was not unusual but rather was typical of many women's experiences. These groups gave women a discourse with which to analyze their individual and collective pain: how patriarchal institutions such as the family, the criminal justice system, and religion controlled women's lives and how women and girls were vulnerable to male power from birth until death, among other issues. The anti-rape movement's claims deepened the political analysis, showing how law enforcement often revictimized women when they reported sexual assaults and how police and prosecutors often did not follow through with investigations of incest and what came to be called “date rape.” Some other women shared the humiliation and frustration of rape by their husbands; even if they called on law enforcement for protection and justice, they were often turned away for lack of an offense that could be prosecuted. Thus many women [Page 251]did not report intimate wife abuse or rape; they feared not being believed and they were loath to suffer the humiliation of police investigative techniques.

Emboldened by the sheer numbers of stories of terror at the hands of men told in consciousness-raising groups, feminist activists initiated social change by creating sexual assault centers and training law enforcement officers to understand trauma and vic-timology; in time, they began to advocate for shelters where victims of wife abuse could go to be safe and to gain a time away to rethink their lives and their futures. With much hard work, the shelter movement grew across the United States. With its successes came awareness that the term wife abuse did not adequately capture the essence of what women were enduring. Not all victims were married to their abuser; as sexual mores changed, more women were living with a male partner without benefit of marriage, and thus the term wife abuse was a misnomer. The shelter movement—now a freestanding social movement—began to refer to the problem as “family violence.” Family was understood, in a holistic way, as anyone with whom a person creates an intimate bond; this normally meant a sexual relationship between two consenting heterosexual adults. But family violence was different in another way; there was a growing recognition that children were also victims, even if they were only witnesses to the adults in their lives hitting each other. Learning lessons from the child protection movement, family violence activists emphasized that such children were more likely to grow up to be violent with an intimate partner (if a boy) or to allow a partner to hurt them (if a girl). Thus the intergenerational cycle of violence theory was born, and it resonated with many in the general public.

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