VIOLENCE WITHIN ROMANTIC RELATIONSHIPS AND FAMILIES
Domestic violence affects every American. It harms our communities, weakens the foundation of our nation, and hurts those we love most. It is an affront to our basic decency and humanity, and it must end…we acknowledge the progress made in reducing these shameful crimes…and recognize that more work remains until every individual is able to live free from fear. (President Barack Obama, 2014)
A young woman is punched in an elevator by her fiancé, a well-known football player, and crumples to the floor. The league suspends him for two games, but she does not press charges and marries him. When a video taken by the elevator’s surveillance camera circulates on the Internet, the disturbing footage provokes public outrage. A debate breaks out over whether cultural changes about domestic violence are needed so that major league sports teams will take greater responsibility for disciplining their professional athletes, or whether to honor the presumption of
innocence and not take action until criminal charges are resolved by the legal system—which has a poor track record of handling this kind of interpersonal conflict between intimates. (Crouse, 2014)
This chapter focuses upon another aspect of family violence—not the abuse of children by parents, but physical attacks by one adult against another. Besides child abuse, the various forms of violence within a family (in the broadest sense of the term) include inti- mate partner abuse, woman battering and wife beat- ing, husband beating, attacks by teenagers against their parents, elder abuse, and fights among relatives in a household. Family members injured by all these forms of nonstranger interpersonal violence all face special problems because—as in cases of child abuse and neglect—they live in close proximity, if not under the same roof, as their assailants. They usually interact on a routine basis and are dependent upon each other, so they require special solutions that are crea- tive, fine-tuned, and effective. When the police are called upon to quell violence within households, the officers generally refer to these incidents as domestic disturbances.
Intimate partner violence (IPV) is the newer and more inclusive name since it refers not only to physical assaults by husbands against wives but also attacks by wives against husbands, fights between persons who are separated or divorced, and assaults within romantic relationships, such as between domestic partners as well as girlfriends and boyfriends IPV is a broader term than spouse abuse because it also embraces the use of force by a person with whom the victim is involved in (or has had) a sexual relationship, and therefore includes any and all assaults by a current live-in lover, a domestic partner, an ex-spouse, or a boyfriend, ex-boyfriend, girl- friend, or former girlfriend, whether heterosexual or homosexual.