Now, as I look back, I think Jim has pushed me or slapped me a couple of times. I don't recall that he ever really hurt me. I think maybe I have had a bruise or two, but never something as bad as a black eye. You see, Jim doesn't really have a bad temper. He's not really gentle, but not rough either. But sometimes, we get to fighting and he might push me, grab me, or even slap me. Once I think he punched me. But he's not a violent man (Gelles & Strauss, 1988, 52).
The experiences of "Lois," described by Gelles and Strauss (1988, p. 52) as a 35-year-old mother of three, are not atypical. Just as Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart claimed that, although he could not define pornography, "I know it when I see it," at all levels, from victim and perpetrator to police, prosecutors, and judges, accurately defining the concept of severe violence or abuse is elusive.
One thing is clear, however. As researchers first began serious inquiry into the topic of family violence--child abuse and wife abuse in particular--in the early 1970s, it became at once apparent that there had been precious little done before then: "At first we were frustrated. So little had been written on child abuse and wife abuse that the entire literature could be read at one sitting. Worse, much of what we read was flawed, biased, and unsound" (Gelles & Strauss, 1988, p. 11). It was almost serendipitous that, in 1971, "15 percent of the women interviewed in divorce actions spontaneously mentioned that marital violence was an important contributing factor," because, for example, there had been no reference to such violence in the Journal of Marriage and the Family between 1939 and 1969 (Binder & Meeker, 1992, p. 9).
Indeed, the plight of battered women was so obscured that what most commonly acknowledge to be the first shelter for battered women in the nation--a five-bedroom house near St. Paul, Minnesota--was not opened until October 1974; ...