When one uses the word ‘crime’, it’s hard to avoid thinking in terms of a stranger mugging
someone in a dark alleyway, a serial killer, or a burglar breaking into someone’s house.
But a great of deal crime takes place between people who know each other, including within
relationships that are normally mean to be intimate and nurturing, like family relationships.
For example, Australian women are more likely to experience physical and sexual violence in their own home than outside it.
In 2014, one woman was killed in Australia by her current or former partner almost every week.
Let’s take a look, then, at what domestic or family violence is, how it can be defined, and what’s known about it.
It’s worth taking a close look at domestic violence when you’re thinking about crime, because it’s a good example of how a social problem gets
constructed over time, and how various actors contribute to that construction process.
Domestic violence has only become deviant, then a crime, and then a crime that actually gets
punished, over time, and because of the actions and interventions of particular social actors.
The criminality of domestic violence isn't natural, it’s not inherent to the act and the behaviour, it’s socially constructed.
How it’s thought about and responded to varies across cultures and over time.
Joseph Gusfield once argued that : “Human problems do not spring up, full-blown and
announced into the consciousness of bystanders.
Even to recognize a situation as painful requires a system for categorizing and defining events.”
Until the 1970s, violence within family life simply wasn’t recognized, reported on, studied or analysed.
This was the result of a long history of regarding it as men’s ‘right’ to ‘discipline’ their wives, as well
as the construction of the family as the ‘private sphere’.
Since Roman times, men have essentially been presumed to have the right to inflict violence on
their wives and children, who were regarded as their property.
It was only when male violence became an economic threat, because the labour of women and children was lost when they were killed, that
laws emerged to confine violence to non-fatal outcomes.
When it was recognized, which was when the injuries inflicted were extremely serious, including
death, it was regarded in psychological terms as the product of mental illness.
There was no system, then, for defining violence within the family, and it has only gradually evolved.
It began with ‘wife- abuse’ and ‘the battered woman’ in the 1970s and 1980s, and then
‘domestic violence’ and ‘family violence’ from the 1990s onwards.
Increased attention was paid to family violence for a number of reasons:
First, violence became a broader social concern, with the war in Vietnam, increased homicide rates, assassinations, and civil unrest.
Second, second wave feminist activists drew public attention to the problem, and put their critique of the ‘normal family’ into practice in the
women’s refuge movement, making it possible for women to leave their violent husbands.
Third, in broader cultural terms, there was a changed understanding of the boundary between private life and the public sphere.
One of the women’s movement’s slogans was ‘the personal is political’, and in general there was a greater willingness to talk about personal issue
in public, which some have called the rise of a ‘confessional’ culture.
TV shows like Oprah Winfrey and Dr Phil would be only the most recent examples of this kind of willingness to put private life on public display.
Fourth, there was also a general decline of the consensus model of society, with a raised
awareness of the conflicts running through all social life, including the family.
Fifth, researchers began to figure out how to do the research, beginning with agreeing on the definitions of the problems being examined.
A sense of what sort of data was required, the methods for gathering it, and then actually gathering this data, were among the initial
obstacles to a society-wide appreciation of the extent of family violence.
One important initial problem in thinking about domestic violence is that there’s no shared agreement about what violence actually is.
Some argue that violence is the use of physical force against another person which causes pain or injury.
Others argue that violence also includes things like threats, verbal abuse, intimidation, ridiculing or humiliating someone.
This has implications for how research on violence is done and how much violence researchers are likely to find in their studies.
If researchers use a narrow definition of violence to mean the use of physical force against another
person, then they will almost certainly find less evidence of violence in their study than a researcher who also includes shouting,
swearing, slamming doors, or verbal put-downs of another person as violence.
Different studies of violence may not be comparable if people understand violence in
divergent ways and collect data on very different things.
When you’re considering studies of domestic violence, then, you need to pay close attention to how violence more broadly is defined, and
especially whether a narrow or broad definition is being used.
The term ‘domestic violence’ has often been used to refer to violence between spouses or de facto partners.
But even here there are disagreements among researchers about what counts as ‘domestic’, and what counts as ‘violence.’
Some researchers only include married partners, current partners or men’s violence towards women.
Others include de facto partners, former partners, dating partners or women’s violence towards men.
Incidents of violence, including domestic or family violence are greatly under-reported in Australia.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics found that roughly two-thirds of women didn’t contact police
after their most recent incident of being assaulted by a male.
This means that you can’t rely simply on police reports or court records to know what the level of violence is.
A more accurate picture can be drawn with the help of surveys.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics recently examined people’s experience of violence by
current or former spouses and de facto partners but not girlfriends, boyfriends or dates.
This ABS survey found that just under 17 per cent of women and just over 5 per cent of men
had experienced physical or sexual violence by a partner since the age of 15.
Although it’s true, then, that men are also subjected to domestic violence, women
experience it at around three times the rate of men.
Rates of domestic violence are also higher among some groups of women than others, affected by
factors such as age, being Indigenous, living in rural and remote areas, having a disability, and cultural background.
Indigenous women, for example, are two and a half times more likely to experience physical violence than non-Indigenous women.
While the term ‘domestic violence’ historically referred to heterosexual relationships, it has now
been extended to gay, lesbian and transgender relationships.
Research on domestic violence among gay men and lesbians in Australia indicates that about one in three gay men and lesbians have been victims
of domestic violence by a partner or former partner.
Domestic violence, then, can be found in all intimate relationships, clearly including, but also
going beyond violence inflicted by men on their female partners.