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The practices and arrangements within a family can create grounds for violence. Although we agree that family processes are important, we think that these explanations downplay the structure of families (nuclear, extended) and thereby the ways in which gender relations are organized. In this paper, domestic violence is explored as an intra-family dynamic that extends beyond the intimate partner relationship and which seeps into court rulings of cases of such violence.

Using archival data from 164 Supreme Court case decisions on domestic violence in India for the period 1995–2011, we examine both the patterns of conviction and the complexities of gender relations within the family by systematically coding the Court’s rulings.

Analysis of court rulings show that mothers-in-law were convicted in 14% cases and the husband was convicted in 41% cases. We call attention to the collective nature of the domestic violence crime in India where mothers-in-law were seldom convicted alone (3% of cases) but were more likely to be convicted along with other members of the family. Two dominant themes we discuss are the gendered nature of familial relations beyond the intimate partner relationship and the pervasiveness of such gendered relationships from the natal home to the marital family making victims of domestic violence isolated and “homeless.”

Future research may benefit from using data in addition to the judgments to consider caste and class differences in the rulings. An intersectionality perspective may add to the understanding of the interpretation of the laws by the courts.

Insights from this paper have important policy implications. As discussed in the paper, the unintended support for violence from the natal family is an indication of their powerlessness and therefore further victimization through the law will not help. It is critical that natal families re-frame their powerlessness which is often derived from their status as families with daughters. Considering that most women in India turn to their natal families first for support when they face violence in their marriages, policy must enable such families to act and utilize the law.

By examining court rulings on cases of domestic violence in India we focus on the power exerted by some women particularly within extended families which is central to understanding gender relations within institutions. These relations are legitimized by the courts in the ways they interpret the law and rule on cases.

Family violence is a universal problem which is beginning to grow to a significant scale in Syria. Although it has existed for a long time, the actual characteristics of this scourge in our country are not known. The main aim of this study was to evaluate the family violence in Syrian society.

This work consisted of an epidemiological approach to domestic violence in Syria during the year 2010. A questionnaire had been developed which is used for the study of the socio-demographic profile of families and the study of violence in the family. This study has been conducted on a survey of 365 women.

The analysis of the results reveals the following characteristics: 16% of the women in the sample were victims of physical violence. The youth is a risk factor for these women, the age range most affected by violence (45%) is that of women aged between 20 and 40 years. Violence affects all social, economic, and cultural classes; anger is an aggravating factor of domestic violence; in fact, 27.3% of spouses who assaulted their wives were in an angry state.

The violence in the family is a very sensitive issue and very common, but the exact prevalence of violence in the family is not known. Therefore, the violence in the family is underdiagnosed. An urgent response plan is needed to reduce the spread of this scourge and its consequences.

Family is considered to be the corner stone of every society; it enhances its functionality and sustainability. However, the problem of spousal abuse has destroyed and disorganized many families in Nigeria, thereby hampering the stability of the basic institution. This study takes a look at spousal abuse as it affects the family stability as perceived in Lafia, Nasarawa State, Nigeria. Three research questions and a hypothesis guided the study. Descriptive research design was used, the population of the study consisted of 200 respondents. The study combines both qualitative and quantitative methods, which involves the use of questionnaire and focus group discussion (FGD) to collect data. The study selects 200 respondents and two FGD sessions of 10 participants each (married men and women). Data generated was analyzed using descriptive statistics of mean and standard deviation while the hypothesis was tested using linear regression. The results of the study revealed that wife/husband battering, insults/name calling, spousal rape/sexual deprivation, economic deprivation, and food deprivation constitutes spousal abuse in Lafia, Nasarawa State; destruction of platform necessary for good and healthy upbringing of the children among others are how the problems of spousal abuse affect family stability; there is a significant relationship between what constitutes spousal abuse and causes of spousal abuse in Lafia, Nasarawa State. It was recommended that more sensitization and education to end spousal abuse should be vigorously pursued; government and non-government organizations should create avenues where women are empowered and psychological centers for rehabilitation should be established.

The present study sought to determine whether or not there is an association between contextual effects of violent socialization on violent youth behavior across different nations.

The data in this study derive from the International Dating Violence Study, a dataset of over 17,000 college students collected in 32 different nations. Variables consist of various scales from the Personal Relationship Profile that focuses on experiences and behaviors occurring prior to age 15 years, as well as national indicators of violence. Multilevel modeling analysis was used to analyze the data.

The results indicate two important findings. First, violent socialization significantly varies across different national contexts and this contextual effect accounts for a significant proportion of variation in youth violence. Second, violent socialization, both within individual families and as a contextual effect within different nations, is significantly associated with increases in violent youth behavior across the nations.

The International Dating Violence Study is a cross-sectional convenience sample of college students, which is not representative of specific nations nor college students. Further, the present study classifies nations as a “community” rather than explore microlevel communities within a nation. Future research should focus on examining variation of area specific norms for subsets of communities within nations with representative samples of a general population.

The present study appears to be one of the first published studies offering empirical evidence for international research on the theoretical argument of the contextual effects of violence within a nation, and begins to increase knowledge among criminologists of such contextual factors being associated with youth violent behavior across different nations.

Prior researchers have documented significant effects of family violence on adult children’s own risk for intimate partner violence (IPV). Yet, few studies have examined whether exposure to family violence while growing up as well as emerging adults’ reports of their current peers’ behaviors and attitudes influenced self-reports of intimate partner violence perpetration. The current study based on interviews with a large, heterogeneous sample of men and women assessed the degree to which current peers’ attitudes and behaviors contributed to risk of intimate partner violence perpetration, net of family violence.

Using data from the Toledo Adolescent Relationships Study (TARS) (n = 928), we examined associations between family violence indicators, peers’ behaviors and attitudes, and self-reports of intimate violence perpetration among adults ages 22–29. We used ordinary least squares regression and controlled for other known correlates of IPV.

For men and women, we found a significant relationship between witnessing parental violence during adolescence and IPV perpetration in emerging adulthood, and a positive relationship between current peers’ IPV experiences and attitudes and respondents’ perpetration. We also found that for respondents who reported higher, compared with lower, peer involvement in partner violence, the effects of parental violence were stronger.

We provided a more comprehensive assessment of peers’ IPV to this body of research, which tends to focus on family violence. Studies have examined peers’ attitudes and behavior during adolescence, but we extended this work by examining both peer and familial influences into emerging adulthood.

Wife battering has important impacts on the health of battered women, both in the short and long term. This form of gendered violence has been a significant problem in Vietnam. Recent economic, social, and cultural changes occurring in Vietnam, with a transformation toward a socialist-oriented market economy through the state's doi moi political program, have influenced multiple aspects of wife battering. These include perspectives of wife battering, battered women's access to health care, conceptualizations of the household, and the emergence of new international health programs for battered women. Women's health problems derived from wife battering must be understood as processes that are informed by cultural, political, and economic change, on both a societal level and in the lives of individual women experiencing this form of gendered violence.

Domestic violence in Hong Kong is understudied in various ways: (a) there is no study about the relationships between restorative justice and domestic violence, (b) women’s resilience in the context of domestic violence is seldom mentioned and (c) practitioners’ perspective is often not voiced. This chapter is an explorative study aiming at finding out the following: (a) the relationships between restorative justice and domestic violence in the context of Hong Kong, (b) the understanding and practical implications of women’s resilience from a cultural perspective and (c) the challenges of social work deliverance to victims of domestic violence in Hong Kong. The research of this chapter has been conducted by in-depth interviews with five social work practitioners who deal with victims of domestic violence daily. Three specific cases of domestic violence have been selected and systematically analysed, and the temporal results are: (a) it is challenging to exercise ‘restorative justice’ in cases of domestic violence; (b) Chinese women have a very different understanding of the ‘western’ concept of ‘women’s resilience’; (c) any social work relating to ‘women’s resilience’ is challenging to apply to Hong Kong and arguably any Asian contexts, and (d) restorative justice is not a widespread practice when it comes to domestic violence in Hong Kong.

Research on the intergenerational transmission of violence has been limited by reliance on variable-oriented methodology that does not capture heterogeneity that exists within experiences of violent interpersonal conduct. The current study therefore examines the utility of a person-oriented statistical method in understanding patterns of maltreatment and intimate partner violence.

Guided by person-oriented theory, the current study utilizes latent class analysis, a person-oriented method used with cross-sectional data, to examine the heterogeneity within this transmission process in a sample of emerging adults (N = 150). This study also examined whether the classes identified differed on reported emotional reactivity and childhood family environment.

Three classes emerged from the latent class analysis, labeled full transmission, psychological transmission, and no transmission. Those comprising the full transmission subgroup reported the lowest levels of childhood family cohesion, accord, and closeness. The full transmission subgroup also reported significantly more emotional reactivity than the psychological transmission and no transmission subgroups.

To understand fully the etiology of intimate partner violence for maltreated offspring, a multidimensional view of violence is needed. The current study represents a step in this direction by demonstrating the utility of a person-oriented approach in understanding the IGT of violence.

The Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence was adopted by the Council of Europe and opened for signature in Istanbul in 2011 (the Istanbul Convention). The Istanbul Convention offers a treaty-level protection against domestic violence to all people, including LGBTQs, that is, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer persons. Intimate partner violence (IPV) occurs in same-sex relationships as well as different-sex relationships. In addition, LGBTQ persons face the risk of violence in homophobic and transphobic family environments. The Istanbul Convention has faced significant backlash, a process driven by the global anti-feminist movement that also calls for the protection of traditional family values. In the Convention, “gender” is described as “the socially constructed roles, behaviours, activities and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for women and men” (Article 3(c)). The opponents of the Convention suggest that gender roles are not “given” by the society but inherent in different natures of women and men. The dissatisfaction of many States, such as Bulgaria, Armenia, Ukraine, and so on, is related to the perceived excessiveness of rights given to LGBTQ persons in the Istanbul Convention. This research paper sets aside the issue of political campaigning against the Convention in Eastern Europe, which has already been well reported. Instead, it aims to reveal how the protection against domestic violence under the Convention raises normative, conceptual, and substantive challenges in States entrenching the ideology of traditional family values in law.

In Sri Lanka women make up the majority of the country's population. However, there is a concern that many women are subjected to any form of violence at home which is known as family violence, or in Sri Lanka which is identified as domestic violence. As such domestic violence is one of the topics that have gained attention in Sri Lanka under the major topic of gender-based violence (GBV). Sri Lanka also imposed prolonged lockdowns, travel/mobility restrictions, social distancing, and other health measures/restrictions to control the speedy spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. As a consequence, the life of women was unfavorably impacted. A increase in the number of domestic violence cases against women during public emergencies – here referred to COVID-19 – is one of such negative impacts. Therefore, this study intends to examine the adequacy of the existing laws of prevention of domestic violence in Sri Lanka and investigate the appropriateness of the available judicial mechanism including its preparedness in achieving the proper protection support for the women victims of domestic violence during public emergencies. To reach that goal this doctrinal research study heavily engages in a descriptive and detailed analysis of legal rules found in primary sources such as domestic statutes, international treaties, statistics, government circulars and regulations and case law, etc., in respect of the issue of domestic violence against women during public emergencies with specific reference to Sri Lanka. Secondary resources such as print and electronic text material are also utilized in the completion of this study.