Short answers, pulled from the story.
Domestic violence is violence that occurs in a domestic setting such as a marriage or cohabitation, and in a broader sense includes abuse against family members like children, siblings, or parents. Its forms include physical, verbal, emotional, financial, religious, reproductive, and sexual abuse, ranging from coercive control to marital rape, strangulation, female genital mutilation, and acid throwing.
The first known modern use of the term domestic violence to mean violence in the home was in an address to the Parliament of the United Kingdom by Jack Ashley in 1973. Before that, the term referred mainly to civil unrest inside a country as opposed to violence by a foreign power.
The World Health Organization estimates that one in three of all women are subject to domestic violence at some point in their life. Globally, about 38 percent of female homicides are committed by an intimate partner.
In 1850, Tennessee became the first state in the United States to explicitly outlaw wife beating, and other states soon followed. In 1871, courts in Massachusetts and Alabama reversed the precedent set in the 1824 Mississippi case State v. Bradley, and by the end of the 1870s most US courts had rejected a husband's claimed right to physically discipline his wife.
The cycle of abuse is a model presented by Lenore E. Walker consisting of four phases. Tension builds until a violent incident occurs, followed by a reconciliation stage in which the abuser may be kind and loving, then a period of calm, after which tensions build again and the cycle restarts.
In 2011, India's National Crime Records Bureau reported 8,618 dowry deaths, though unofficial figures estimate at least three times that amount. Dowry violence is most common in South Asia, especially India, where bride burning kills newly married women over dissatisfaction with the dowry their family provided.