Domestic Violence Notes

Definition:Acts of violence or abuse against a person living in one's household,especially a member of one's immediate family.

Forms of Abuse: Domestic violence can take many forms, including physical aggression or assault , or threats thereof; sexual abuse; controlling or domineering;intimidation; stalking; passive/covert abuse (e.g., neglect); and economic deprivation.It can also mean endangerment, criminal coercion, kidnapping, unlawful imprisonment, trespassing, and harassment.

Physical
- Physical abuse is abuse involving contact intended to cause pain, injury, or other physical suffering or bodily harm. It includes hitting, slapping, punching, choking, pushing, throwing objects, burning and other types of contact that result in physical injury to the victim. The victim may be abused by several perpetrators: for instance the victim may be held down by a person so that someone else can assault the victim.

-Acid attacks, also seen in domestic violence, occur when acid is thrown in anger or vengeance at the victims, usually at their faces, burning them, and damaging skin tissue, often exposing and sometimes dissolving the bones. This can result in long-term blindness and permanent scarring of the face and body.

-Both women and men have been killed as the result of domestic violence. IPV homicide, however, makes up a greater proportion of all female homicides than it does male homicides. For instance, in the United Kingdom, 37 percent of murdered women were killed by an intimate partner and for men, 6 percent were killed by an intimate partner. From 40 to 70 percent of the women murdered in Canada, Australia, South Africa, Israel and the United States were killed by an intimate partner.

-The World Health Organization (WHO) states that globally, about 38% of murders of women are committed by an intimate partner

Sexual
Is defined by World Health Organization as any sexual act, attempt to obtain a sexual act, unwanted sexual comments or advances, or acts to Traffic, or otherwise directed, against a person’s sexuality using coercion, by any person regardless of their relationship to the victim. It also includes obligatory inspections for virginity and female genital mutilation.
Aside from initiation of the sexual act through physical force, sexual abuse occurs if a person is unable to understand the nature or condition of the act, unable to decline participation, or unable to communicate unwillingness to engage in the sexual act.

-The WHO includes "‘customary’ forms of sexual violence, such as forced marriage or cohabitation and wife inheritance" within its definition of sexual violence, as well as forced pregnancy. Wife inheritance, or levirate marriage, is a type of marriage in which the brother of a deceased man is obliged to marry his brother's widow, and the widow is obliged to marry her deceased husband's brother. -Sexual violence also occurs between spouses or