Domestic violence

• 1. Introduction

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  In 1973, a member of the Parliament of the United Kingdom named Jack Ashley used a phrase in an address that, until then, had meant something entirely different. The term domestic violence had referred to civil unrest, to violence inside a country as opposed to war waged by a foreign power. Ashley repurposed it to mean violence in the home. That single shift in language marked a moment when a private cruelty began to acquire a public name. The World Health Organization estimates that one in three women worldwide will face domestic violence at some point in life. Yet for most of recorded history, the law looked away. How did beating a wife move from a husband's recognized right to a prosecutable crime? Why does a behavior so widespread remain among the most underreported crimes on earth? And what keeps a person trapped inside a household that harms them? These are the questions this documentary follows, from courtrooms and parliaments to the quiet rooms where the harm actually happens.

• 2. A Husband's Right

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  The Encyclopaedia Britannica states that in the early 1800s, most legal systems implicitly accepted wife-beating as a husband's right over his wife. English common law, reaching back to the 16th century, treated such violence as a crime against the community rather than against the woman herself. A beating was charged as a breach of the peace, and a wife could seek a peace bond from a local justice of the peace. The proceedings were informal and off the record. No rule fixed the standard of proof or the degree of violence needed for a conviction. The American colonies inherited this framework, but with notable exceptions. The 1641 Body of Liberties of the Massachusetts Bay colonists declared that a married woman should be free from bodily correction or stripes by her husband. New Hampshire and Rhode Island also banned wife-beating in their criminal codes. The American Revolution shifted power toward precedent-setting state courts. Battered women increasingly had to seek divorce on grounds of cruelty or sue for assault, which forced them to prove to a court that their lives were at risk. In 1824, the Mississippi Supreme Court went the other direction. Citing the rule of thumb, it established a positive right to wife-beating in State v. Bradley, a precedent that held sway in common law for decades.

• 3. The Tide Turns

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  In 1850, Tennessee became the first state in the United States to explicitly outlaw wife beating, and other states soon followed. The first-wave feminist movement of the 19th century pushed both popular opinion and legislation in Britain, America, and elsewhere. In 1871, courts in Massachusetts and Alabama reversed the precedent that Mississippi had set in Bradley. In 1878, the UK Matrimonial Causes Act made it possible for women in Britain to seek legal separation from an abusive husband. By the end of the 1870s, most American courts had rejected the claim that a husband could physically discipline his wife. Progress did not run in a straight line. In the early 20th century, paternalistic judges regularly shielded perpetrators to reinforce gender norms within the family. They handed harsh punishments to male offenders, then gave little or no punishment to female perpetrators when the roles were reversed. Police in the United States commonly intervened in domestic cases by the early 20th century, yet arrests stayed rare. In most legal systems around the world, domestic violence was addressed only from the 1990s onward. In 1993, the UN published Strategies for Confronting Domestic Violence: A Resource Manual, urging countries to treat the act as criminal and stating plainly that the right to a private family life does not include the right to abuse family members.

• 4. The Many Faces Of Harm

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  Not all domestic violence is equivalent, and differences in frequency, severity, purpose, and outcome all matter. Physical abuse involves contact intended to cause fear, pain, injury, or bodily harm, and it often arrives as the culmination of threats, intimidation, and isolation. Denying medical care, depriving someone of sleep, and forcing drugs or alcohol all count as physical abuse. So does harming a child or a pet to wound the victim emotionally. Strangulation has drawn significant attention as one of the most lethal forms of domestic violence. Because it often leaves no external injuries and because medical training around it has lagged, it stayed a hidden problem, prompting many US states to enact specific laws against it in recent years. Emotional or psychological abuse is a pattern that threatens, intimidates, dehumanizes, or systematically undermines a person's self-worth. The Istanbul Convention defines psychological violence as the intentional conduct of seriously impairing a person's psychological integrity through coercion or threats. It includes public humiliation, unrelenting criticism, repeated stonewalling, and gaslighting. Economic abuse gives one partner control over the other's access to money. A victim may be put on an allowance that lets the abuser monitor every dollar, blocking spending without consent. Where women depend on a husband's income to survive, this control has been associated with malnutrition among both mothers and children, and in India the withholding of food is a documented form of family abuse.

• 5. Lethal Customs

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  In 2011, India's National Crime Records Bureau reported 8,618 dowry deaths, though unofficial figures estimate at least three times that number. Bride burning, or dowry killing, is a form of violence in which a newly married woman is killed at home by her husband or his family over dissatisfaction with the dowry her family provided. The demand often continues, escalating after the wedding. Dowry violence is most common in South Asia, especially in India, where the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act was enacted in 2005 after years of advocacy by women's organizations. Honor killings are planned domestic homicides carried out because the perpetrators believe the victim has brought dishonor on the family or community. According to Human Rights Watch, they are generally performed against women for refusing an arranged marriage, being the victim of a sexual assault, seeking a divorce, or being accused of adultery. In some places, a bride deemed not to be a virgin on her wedding night, judged by the absence of blood, may face extreme violence including death. Acid attacks throw acid at a victim, usually the face, causing long-term blindness and permanent scarring. They are commonly a form of revenge against a woman for rejecting a marriage proposal or a sexual advance. In 2002, Widney Brown, advocacy director for Human Rights Watch, drew a connection between honor killings and the crimes of passion long treated with leniency in Latin America, noting that in both, women are killed by male family members and the crimes are seen as excusable or understandable.

• 6. Why They Offend

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  Research shows the key issue for perpetrators of abuse is their conscious and deliberate decision to offend in pursuit of self-gratification. Men who perpetrate violence display specific traits. They are narcissistic, they willfully lack empathy, and they choose to treat their needs as more important than others'. Perpetrators then manipulate the victim into believing the abuse stems from her own inadequacy rather than from their own desire for power and control. Lenore E. Walker presented a model called the cycle of abuse, made of four phases. Tension builds until a violent incident occurs, after which the abuser may turn kind and loving, followed by a period of calm in which the abused person hopes things will change, before the tension begins to build again. Psychological theories point to personality traits such as sudden bursts of anger, poor impulse control, and low self-esteem. Some research suggests that about 80 percent of both court-referred and self-referred men in domestic violence studies showed diagnosable psychopathology, typically personality disorders, compared with an estimated 15 to 20 percent in the general population. As violence becomes more severe and chronic, the likelihood of psychopathology in these men approaches 100 percent. These theories are disputed. Gelles argues that other researchers find only 10 percent or fewer fit such a profile, and that social factors matter more than personality or mental illness. Catharine MacKinnon advances non-subordination theory, which treats domestic violence as a subset of the broader problem of violence against women because victims are overwhelmingly female.

• 7. Trapped

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  Victims may be held inside a violent home through isolation, traumatic bonding to the abuser, cultural acceptance, lack of financial resources, fear, and shame, or the wish to protect children. Resource theory, suggested by William Goode in 1971, explains part of this. Women most dependent on a spouse for economic well-being, such as homemakers and women who are unemployed or have a disability, fear the financial burden of leaving and have fewer options for changing their partner's behavior. The danger does not end at the door. Professor Martha Mahoney of the University of Miami School of Law describes separation assault, where a batterer further attacks a victim who is attempting or has attempted to leave. According to Rashida Manjoo, a UN special rapporteur on violence against women, a woman's access to property in many countries hinges on her relationship to a man, so separation or a husband's death risks the loss of her home, land, and goods. Failure to guarantee equal property rights can force women to choose between violence at home and destitution in the street. Awareness compounds the trap. A study among first-generation South Asians in the UK found little knowledge of what counted as criminal under English law, and certainly no awareness that there could be rape within a marriage. In Australia, among abused immigrant women who did not report, 16.7 percent did not know domestic violence was illegal, and 18.8 percent did not know they could get protection.

• 8. What Society Permits

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  In a survey, 62.8 percent of women in Afghanistan said a husband is justified in beating his wife if she wears inappropriate clothes. Attitudes like this show how culture can sanction harm that the law elsewhere forbids. In Yemen, marriage regulations state that a wife must obey her husband and must not leave home without his permission. A 2012 report by UNICEF found that 57 percent of Indian boys and 53 percent of girls between 15 and 19 think wife-beating is justified. In Jordan's capital, Amman, a more liberal city than the rest of the country, 33.4 percent of teenagers approved of honor killings, and researchers expected even higher support in rural areas. Victim blaming reaches into the West as well. A 2010 Eurobarometer poll found that 52 percent of respondents agreed that the provocative behaviour of women was a cause of violence against them, with agreement above 70 percent in countries including Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, and Malta. Acceptance can fall over time. In Nigeria, support for domestic violence among women dropped from 62.4 percent in 2003 to 45.7 percent in 2008 and 37.1 percent in 2013. Education tracks closely with these views. In Mali, 60 percent of women with no education believed husbands have the right to use corrective violence, against fewer than 40 percent of women with secondary or higher education. The 1993 UN Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women named battering, dowry-related violence, marital rape, and female genital mutilation among the harms it set out to end, a list that still maps the work that remains.