Domestic Violence and Religion

My intention was to explore that perception by reviewing some of the literature. That proved inconclusive, since the literature is ambiguous about the role of religion in relationship to domestic violence. It can both support domestic violence and condemn it.

I followed up the literature review with a small-scale study exploring the incidence of domestic violence in two African-American congregations, one Pentecostal and one Black Muslim. I used Straus' (1996) revised Conflict Tactics Scale. My expectation was that I would find fewer incidents of domestic violence in the Black Muslim group, since one of its tenets was the protection of women and children.

There are many controversies in the domestic violence literature, including the degree to which women are offenders, the numbers of abused women, and the differing types of abuse that men and women are subjected to. There is also question in the literature about the role religion, generally Christianity, has played in the development of relationships characterized by domestic violence.

For example, in their study, Giesbrecht and Sevcik (2000) noted that abused women from conservative evangelical subcultures were

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not support violence in the family, and they were instrumental in getting a Domestic Violence Act passed and enforced in Malaysia. It appears, then, that the answer regarding religion and domestic violence may depend on many factors, including national origin, culture, sect, individual interpretation, gender interpretation, and subculture within the religion. Thistlewaite (1996) noted much the same in her study of religion and family life. She has written a great deal about domestic violence and its connections with patriarchal religion, but she noted specifically in this theoretical piece that there are numerous obstacles to developing any broad-based and comprehensive theory of practice on the family since there are so many other dynamics to be considered. Among these, she mentioned race, economic status, ethnicity, sexual preference, educational level, and other dynamics of privilege and disprivilege in this society. For example, male entitlement theory holds that that privileging of men supports them in the practice of domestic violence within the family. This sense of entitlement is often undergirded by religion, including Christianity, but it is not solely Christianity that contributes to it. Hunter (1992) emphasi
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Approximate Word count = 2617
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)

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