A Sociologist's Perspective on Domestic Violence
From Center for Law and Social Policy:
The standard definition of domestic violence in the battered women's movement has been what I call "intimate terrorism," the kind of violence in which men control "their women" using a variety of coercive control tactics, including physical and sexual violence.
Virtually every women's shelter and feminist domestic violence program around the country uses the Power and Control Wheel (see diagram) to describe and define domestic violence as a pattern of violent coercive control in which the coercive partner makes use of violence in combination with variety of other tactics such as psychological or economic abuse to take virtually complete control over his partner.
One group argues that women are as likely to be violent as are men in intimate relationships, the other that domestic violence is perpetrated almost entirely by men.
Intimate terrorism is the kind of intimate partner violence that involves a batterer who terrorizes and takes complete control of his partner through the use of violence in combination with other control tactics such as threats and intimidation, economic control, psychological abuse, isolation, and the assertion of male privilege.
Because in many cases the participants do not have to reveal anything about their own relationships, such programs are less likely to put clients at risk of increased violence.
However, many programs have been screening for violence, accepting only couples that have no serious problem with violence.
In general, they find that there are very few if any couples that have to be screened out, and some programs are now dropping the screening altogether.
Most marriage education programs do address conflict management issues and many of them discuss violence in connection with conflict.
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