When one uses the word ‘crime’, it’s hard to 
avoid thinking in terms of a stranger mugging 
someone in a dark alleyway, a serial killer, or a 
burglar breaking into someone’s house.
But a great of deal crime takes place between 
people who know each other, including within 
relationships that are normally mean to be intimate 
and nurturing, like family relationships. 
For example, Australian women are more likely to 
experience physical and sexual violence in their 
own home than outside it. 
In 2014, one woman was killed in Australia by her 
current or former partner almost every week. 
Let’s take a look, then, at what domestic or family 
violence is, how it can be defined, and what’s 
known about it.
It’s worth taking a close look at domestic violence 
when you’re thinking about crime, because it’s a 
good example of how a social problem gets 
constructed over time, and how various actors 
contribute to that construction process. 
Domestic violence has only become deviant, then 
a crime, and then a crime that actually gets 
punished, over time, and because of the actions 
and interventions of particular social actors. 
The criminality of domestic violence isn't natural, 
it’s not inherent to the act and the behaviour, it’s 
socially constructed.
How it’s thought about and responded to varies 
across cultures and over time.
Joseph Gusfield once argued that : “Human 
problems do not spring up, full-blown and 
announced into the consciousness of 
bystanders. 
Even to recognize a situation as painful requires 
a system for categorizing and defining events.”
Until the 1970s, violence within family life simply 
wasn’t recognized, reported on, studied or 
analysed. 
This was the result of a long history of regarding 
it as men’s ‘right’ to ‘discipline’ their wives, as well 
as the construction of the family as the ‘private 
sphere’. 
Since Roman times, men have essentially been 
presumed to have the right to inflict violence on 
their wives and children, who were regarded as 
their property.
It was only when male violence became an 
economic threat, because the labour of women 
and children was lost when they were killed, that 
laws emerged to confine violence to non-fatal 
outcomes.
When it was recognized, which was when the 
injuries inflicted were extremely serious, including 
death, it was regarded in psychological terms as 
the product of mental illness.
There was no system, then, for defining violence 
within the family, and it has only gradually 
evolved.
It began with ‘wife- abuse’ and ‘the battered 
woman’ in the 1970s and 1980s, and then 
‘domestic violence’ and ‘family violence’ from the 
1990s onwards.
Increased attention was paid to family violence 
for a number of reasons:
First, violence became a broader social concern, 
with the war in Vietnam, increased homicide 
rates, assassinations, and civil unrest.
Second, second wave feminist activists drew 
public attention to the problem, and put their 
critique of the ‘normal family’ into practice in the 
women’s refuge movement, making it possible for 
women to leave their violent husbands.
Third, in broader cultural terms, there was a 
changed understanding of the boundary between 
private life and the public sphere. 
One of the women’s movement’s slogans was 
‘the personal is political’, and in general there was 
a greater willingness to talk about personal issue 
in public, which some have called the rise of a 
‘confessional’ culture. 
TV shows like Oprah Winfrey and Dr Phil would 
be only the most recent examples of this kind of 
willingness to put private life on public display.
Fourth, there was also a general decline of the 
consensus model of society, with a raised 
awareness of the conflicts running through all 
social life, including the family.
Fifth, researchers began to figure out how to do 
the research, beginning with agreeing on the 
definitions of the problems being examined. 
A sense of what sort of data was required, the 
methods for gathering it, and then actually 
gathering this data, were among the initial 
obstacles to a society-wide appreciation of the 
extent of family violence.
One important initial problem in thinking about 
domestic violence is that there’s no shared 
agreement about what violence actually is. 
Some argue that violence is the use of physical 
force against another person which causes pain 
or injury. 
Others argue that violence also includes things 
like threats, verbal abuse, intimidation, ridiculing or 
humiliating someone. 
This has implications for how research on 
violence is done and how much violence 
researchers are likely to find in their studies. 
If researchers use a narrow definition of violence 
to mean the use of physical force against another 
person, then they will almost certainly find less 
evidence of violence in their study than a 
researcher who also includes shouting, 
swearing, slamming doors, or verbal put-downs 
of another person as violence. 
Different studies of violence may not be 
comparable if people understand violence in 
divergent ways and collect data on very different 
things. 
When you’re considering studies of domestic 
violence, then, you need to pay close attention to 
how violence more broadly is defined, and 
especially whether a narrow or broad definition 
is being used.
The term ‘domestic violence’ has often been used 
to refer to violence between spouses or de facto 
partners. 
But even here there are disagreements among 
researchers about what counts as ‘domestic’, 
and what counts as ‘violence.’ 
Some researchers only include married partners, 
current partners or men’s violence towards 
women. 
Others include de facto partners, former 
partners, dating partners or women’s violence 
towards men. 
Incidents of violence, including domestic or family 
violence are greatly under-reported in Australia. 
The Australian Bureau of Statistics found that 
roughly two-thirds of women didn’t contact police 
after their most recent incident of being assaulted 
by a male. 
This means that you can’t rely simply on police 
reports or court records to know what the level 
of violence is. 
A more accurate picture can be drawn with the 
help of surveys. 
The Australian Bureau of Statistics recently 
examined people’s experience of violence by 
current or former spouses and de facto partners 
but not girlfriends, boyfriends or dates. 
This ABS survey found that just under 17 per 
cent of women and just over 5 per cent of men 
had experienced physical or sexual violence by a 
partner since the age of 15. 
Although it’s true, then, that men are also 
subjected to domestic violence, women 
experience it at around three times the rate of 
men. 
Rates of domestic violence are also higher among 
some groups of women than others, affected by 
factors such as age, being Indigenous, living in 
rural and remote areas, having a disability, and 
cultural background.
Indigenous women, for example, are two and a 
half times more likely to experience physical 
violence than non-Indigenous women. 
While the term ‘domestic violence’ historically 
referred to heterosexual relationships, it has now 
been extended to gay, lesbian and transgender 
relationships. 
Research on domestic violence among gay men 
and lesbians in Australia indicates that about one 
in three gay men and lesbians have been victims 
of domestic violence by a partner or former 
partner.
Domestic violence, then, can be found in all 
intimate relationships, clearly including, but also 
going beyond violence inflicted by men on their 
female partners.
