Domestic Violence

The issue of domestic violence - always of concern to the victims, some researchers, and some social and women's shelter workers - became an issue of national concern during the O.J. Simpson trial. Just as the Clarence Thomas hearings raised the issue of sexual harassment in places where before it had been ignored, the pictures of a battered and bruised Nicole Brown - pictures that she had made so that if Simpson ever killed her his past violence to her would be known -- gave an unforgettable face to the problem of domestic violence. That case also highlighted some of the complex problems that scholars studying the issue of domestic violence and social workers trying to end the beatings face in their work.

This paper examines the recent research done on the subject of domestic violence in general before focusing specifically on the ways in which immigrant women are especially at risk. The subject of domestic violence is one that extends across disciplines; it is one of the topics that seems as likely to end up on the front pages of the newspaper as on the pages of a scholarly journal. This review of writing about and thinking on domestic violence reflects that range of arenas in which the issue is examined and debated.

We begin a review of the literature on domestic violence with a definition of the term. Although different writers use the term differently (and certainly it is used in different ways within popular usage) for the purposes of

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well be worse for men (Downs, 1996, p. 149). And it is men who feel out of control in their lives, and especially men who feel both out of control and emasculated, which may well be nearly the same condition for many of them, who are most likely to be abusive. This may well be linked to their psychological position as witnesses to abuse when they were younger. As children watching abuse, they were not in control of the situation; they could not, for example, save their mother from being beaten by their father. However, instead of confronting these residual feelings of being out of control and being frightened by this lack of power, many men turn to violence because of the immediate sense of power that it gives them (McGee, 2000, p. 127). Other situations and sets of cultural circumstances that reduce the sense of control men have over their lives are all likely to increase the chance that men will become physically abusive. Among these conditions are being a member of a racial minority. In American societies racial minorities tend to have less power than do whites, and a man who in his work life has to confront his reduced power as the member of a minority group may compensate at home by striking out violently (Barnes, 1998, p

Category: Psychology - D