Domestic violence, also known as domestic abuse, spousal abuse, child abuse or intimate partner violence (IPV), can be broadly defined as a pattern of abusive behaviors by one or both partners in an such as marriage, dating, family, friends or cohabitation. Police and welfare workers know the scene all too well: the battered child, wife, husband, parent, or even grandparent. About 75,000 people are arrested each year for “offenses against family and children” (Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics, 2005: Table 4.6). The Sociologists Suzanne Steinmetz and Murray Straus (1974; Straus 1992) stress that it would be hard to find an institution in the United States in which violence is more of an everyday occurrence than in the family. The first attested use of the expression "domestic violence" in a modern context, meaning "spouse abuse, violence in the home" was in 1977. Violence between spouses has long been considered a serious problem. The United States has a lengthy history of legal precedent condemning spousal abuse. In 1879, law scholar Nicholas St. John Green wrote, "The cases in the American courts are uniform against the right of the husband to use any [physical] chastisement, moderate or otherwise, toward the wife, for any purpose." Green also cites the 1641 Body of Liberties of the Massachusetts Bay colonists -— one of the first legal documents in North American history —- as an early de jure condemnation of violence by either spouse.
One example of the abuse of women that I am writing about it is a movie that was based on a true story. This movie is called Provoked and it is loosely based on the true story of Kiranjit Ahluwalia who killed her abusive husband. Kiranjit Ahluwalia (Aishwarya Rai), a battered Punjabi homemaker and mother of two, living in Southall, UK with her 2 children and abusive, alcoholic husband, Deepak Ahluwalia (Naveen Andrews). She was unable to bear the brutality and repeated rapes at the hands of her spouse, and sets fire to his feet while he is sleeping, unintentionally killing him. Charged with murder, her case comes to the notice of a group of South Asian social workers running an under funded organization called the Southall Black Sisters. Kiranjit is sentenced to life imprisonment with possibility of parole in 12 years. She befriends her cellmate, a Caucasian woman named Veronica Scott (Miranda Richardson), who teaches her English. Veronica is also friends with several girls in the prison and stands up for Kiranjit against the local prison bully. Veronica enlists her brother, Edward Foster QC (Robbie Coltrane), a highly respected Queen's Counsel, to aide in Kiranjit's appeal. Edward, in turn, realizes Kiranjit's importance to his sister and the importance of her case. His sister's request has additional meaning given that Veronica would not let him help her with her own appeal due to their on off relationship since childhood. Before Kiranjit's appeal hearing the Southall Black Sisters bring her plight to the attention of the media by organizing rallies to gather public support for her freedom. She is ultimately freed by the judicial system in a landmark case called "R v Ahluwalia", redefining provocation in cases of battered women in the UK. (She was reconvicted from murder to manslaughter; but released with time served). Kiranjit is reunited with her children and subsequently given an award by Cherie Blair, for her crusade against domestic violence. (The award is not shown on the film although it is accredited at the end). Another example is when I was young; I went to a family friend’s wedding. We were on the bride’s side and her name was Prathima. I didn’t know her that well as I was closer to her younger sister Pranithi. The wedding was beautiful. They met when they were in college and fell in love. They got married and a few years later after two sons they got divorced. The reason that they got divorced was because her husband turned out to be an abusive husband. After they got divorced, her ex-husband remarried and it seems that he is still an abusive husband. As divorced couples with children share their time with the children, one weekend that the kids spent with their dad they saw him being abusive to their stepmother just like he used to be abusive towards their own mother.
When I was in my senior year of high school, there were many things going on in the world that I never thought would in the future impact my life or family. For example, I have watched the news for years and read newspapers about all the different crimes in the world. When I watch the news, I would usually get upset about all the rapes and murders that were on the news. I would always pray for the victim’s and their families. It would be sad to watch the friends of the victim’s talk about the crime and what happened to people that they knew. I never thought that someone that I loved would lose someone that they cared about in a crime. But it happened and everyone was devastated. On February 10th, 2006, I woke up on what seemed to be a normal day. Little did I know that later that day my beloved best friend would get the shock of her life? That last night, her beloved father was stabbed to death at the hotel where he worked the night shift. After my mom picked us up from school, she told my sister and me that our best friend Ramya’s dad died last night. We asked how he died, and she told us that he was stabbed to death. On the normally short ride home, it seemed like the car wasn’t going fast enough and that we had hours to drive because all three of us were sobbing uncontrollably. The worst part was when we found out that Devi Auntie’s mom didn’t know that her son-in-law was killed because she was going through dialysis and it seemed that the kids were going to find out at 6:00. My sister and I staged a protest that until our parents promised us that we would go see Ramya we would not eat dinner. We finally went and were shocked to see that no one was in the room with Ramya. She told us her reaction (that she knew something was wrong) when she saw her uncle’s car in the driveway. That uncle was her mom’s younger brother and he lived with his wife in New Jersey. She told us that her ten-year-old brother would not believe that their dad was killed but then he had a full-blown tantrum. When our other friends arrived, we talked, cried, and just wished that our beloved Harry Potter series was real, so that we could find her dad’s killer and have a Dementor kiss him. My whole family went to the funeral the next Wednesday and then also went to the Tenth Day Ceremony the next Sunday.
The last time I went to India was Christmas 2008 and when I was there tragedy struck my neighborhood in Woodstock. Victoria Heil was the younger sister of one the girls that I graduated high school with and we grew up in the same neighborhood since second grade. Victoria Elizabeth Heil, 18, beloved daughter, sister, aunt, and best friend to so many, passed away on Sunday, December 28, 2008. Victoria Heil died when her Jeep Wrangler left I-575 at Town Lake Parkway and overturned. She wasn’t wearing her seatbelt and lost her life. She was also texting on her cell phone when the accident happened. She was graduating high school that summer
When I started taking the four Criminal Justice classes that I took at Chattahoochee Technical College, I was interested to learn about criminal justice since social work has to do with it. Last summer, my Aunt Prema’s house was burglarized in Chicago and the burglars stole a lot of gold jewelry. Thankfully, no one was hurt but it was very close. Before the burglary, my uncle was home and then he went out for awhile. He came back home and saw that the house was a mess. He called the police and they came. The police detectives found the culprits by going to pawnshops and looking if any of my aunt’s stolen jewelry was there. It seems that the past few years, the thieves are getting very smart and burglarizing Indian homes because they know that Indians have a lot of gold, jewelry, or gold coins in their homes. That made me scared because I usually was home alone during the day last year and you never know what will happen.
Conventional crimes of violence include murder, forcible rape, robbery, and assault. Murder often occurs between an offender and a victim who were previously acquainted. Forcible rape and assault also usually occur between a victim and an offender who know one another. Robbery, the use of force or threat of force to steal property, typically involves strangers. Today, urban patrol groups operate in the context of a functioning, but often ineffective, criminal justice system. Citizen involvement in crime prevention is usually not a direct result of the fear of victimization but is instead related to the characteristics of community residents and the presence of organizations broadly concerned with neighborhood improvement. Social control theory has several shortcomings. It does not identify the social-structural sources of motivations to violate the law. Social control theory has also failed to spell out the way that attachments to different institutions interact with one another to prevent or cause crime and delinquency.
Violence between spouses has long been considered a serious problem. The United States has a lengthy history of legal precedent condemning spousal abuse. In 1879, law scholar Nicholas St. John Green wrote, "The cases in the American courts are uniform against the right of the husband to use any [physical] chastisement, moderate or otherwise, toward the wife, for any purpose." Green also cites the 1641 Body of Liberties of the Massachusetts Bay colonists -— one of the first legal documents in North American history —- as an early de jure condemnation of violence by either spouse.
Works Cited Page
Conklin, J.E., (2007). Criminology (Tenth Edition), New Jersey: Pearson Education.
Green, N. S., (1879). Criminal Law Reports: Being Reports of Cases Determined in the Federal and State Courts of the United States, and in the Courts of England, Ireland, Canada, etc. with notes. Hurd and Houghton.
Henslin, J.M. (2008). Social Problems: A down-to-earth approach (8th ed.). New York: Pearson Allyn and Bacon.
Manohar, S. M. (Producer), & Mundhra, J. (Director). (2007). Provoked [Motion picture]. United Kingdom: Private Moments.
Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, annual.
Steinmetz, S. K., and Straus, M.A., (eds.). Violence in the Family. New York: Dodd Mead, 1974.
Straus, M.A., (1992). “Explaining Family Violence.” Marriage and Family in a Changing Society, 4th ed., James M. Henslin, ed. New York: Free Press, 344–356.
