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Essay on Arrest Policies for Domestic Violence
Domestic violence is one of the commonest crimes. It is present throughout society, usually hidden, but there nonetheless. In any house, on any average street, avenue or road, women regularly experience abuse and violence. Most frequently, it happens behind firmly closed doors. It is worth standing on such an average street — your street perhaps — and trying to imagine the reality of it behind those closed doors. You may not be aware that it is happening, but it is.
It is one of the most explosive issues facing the criminal justice system today is how to react to and control it. Until recently, primary attention was placed upon the control of violence committed by strangers. Such acts were properly seen not only as inflicting serious harm, if not fatalities, on their victims but also as challenging the essence of a public order committed to nonviolent resolution of disputes (Langan & Innes, p 124).
Within the last fifteen years, attention has also focused on what is statistically the greater problem, violence within family structures. One 1986 statistical estimate by the U.S. Bureau of Justice was that over 50 percent of the violent attacks upon women and 33 percent of the attacks upon men were committed by family members or acquaintances. Because of the widespread nature of abuse, concerns that first arose over abused children enlarged to encompass other family members, as awareness grew of previously unreported incidents of brutal attacks upon intimates, even elderly relatives.
Headlines detailing vicious and sometimes fatal injuries inflicted on family members became the impetus for a spreading network of shelters designed to assist the victims of "wife abuse" or "wife battering." Advocates for these women came in time to realize that the police and courts extended, often deliberately, only the scantest attention to the needs of such victims......
