[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on Homeless women and Domestic Violence
According to the myth of the family as a church of serenity and compatibility, domestic violence is a veritable lack of harmony, a contradiction in terms. Violence shatters the peaceful image of the home, the safety that kinship provides. None the less, the insidious nature of domestic violence has been documented across nations and cultures worldwide. It is a universal phenomenon.
Domestic violence is violence that occurs within the private sphere, generally between individuals who are related through intimacy, blood or law. Despite the apparent neutrality of the term, domestic violence is nearly always a gender specific crime, perpetrated by men against women. When the reverse occurs and women strike out against their male partners, such incidents barely influence statistics of the gender specific nature of domestic violence. In any case, such incidents most often occur when women attempt to physically defend themselves against their abusive partners. According to the United States Justice Department, women are 11 times more likely to be victims of domestic violence than men are.
Domestic violence is often, albeit problematically, labeled "family violence", so that the actual structure of the family, whether defined as nuclear, joint or single sex, becomes an important subject of investigation. Discussions on family violence have failed to include the broad range of women's experiences with violence perpetrated against them by their intimates when that violence falls outside the narrow confines of the traditional family. Therefore, it is important that in any definition of family violence there exists an accompanying conceptualization of the family. This, however, rarely occurs and negates the reality of those women whose experiences do not fall into traditional categories of family.
In addressing violence in the family, State tolerated violence intended to control women in their so-called private lives has thus far not been accounted for. The rhetoric of public versus private and the consequent primacy afforded to the public realm has fundamentally affected perceptions of women's rights......
