Domestic Violence
Prevalence and Cost of Domestic Violence
Domestic violence has devastating consequences on fall family members as well as the community at large.
• 16 percent of marital relationships experience domestic violence
• 8.7 million couples experience violence within the marriage, every year.
Violence usually begin early in the relationship and repeated aggression leads to unhealthy, unhappy relationships and then to divorce. However, aggression can lead to battering server physical injury homicide or suicide.
The effects of children witnessing violence often leads to them assaulting their siblings.
Although it has been estimated that violence among men and women in relationships occur almost equally; violence against women is considered more dire due to the fact that:
1. Women suffer more severe injuries and suffer more psychologically and emotionally.
2. Women usually resort to violence as a means of self-protection or self-defense, whereas men tend to use violence as a way of controlling women.
3. Societies part in encouraging women to remain in these unhealthy, damaging relationships at all cost (providing an inefficient response to the problem of domestic violence).
Domestic violence is often hidden from the therapist (only 6% of women indicated on their intake form that they were subjected to domestic violence, though 53% indicated that their husband had assaulted them (on a standardized assessment instrument). 12 % of families from a sample of 262 reported domestic violence within the relationship ye it was occurring in 40% of the families. The means that family therapist must be competent to treat families where domestic violence is occurring.
All family therapists should assess for the possibility of domestic violence because of the high rate of undetected occurrences.
Domestic violence ranges from the more severe kinds of kicking biting, punching, threatening with a gun or murder to the less severe kind of...