DOMESTIC VIOLENCE CASE

Domestic Violence Case

Domestic Violence Case

As a social worker, by analyzing Joanna case, it is the case of domestic violence; domestic violence is one of the most insidious types of violence. It is a violent act that takes place between a man and woman, husband and wife. This type of behavior turns love into terror. Woman battery is a universal phenomenon, happening on all levels of society and in all cultures.

History seems to point to the fact that spouse abuse and rape (indeed, all forms of abuse) has existed from before recorded history. Brownmiller (1986) suggests that perhaps the female of our species traded monogamous relationships for safety of protection. We received the protection we needed as women and children from predatory males from our mates, and this gave our mates exclusive rights to us as property.

From there it seems society moved towards what is called the earliest form of permanent, protective, conjugal relationship. The relationship of mating turned into marriage. This was institutionalized from what is seen as a practice where the male forcibly abducts and rapes the female. Having done this he has staked his claim to her body via violence. This was acceptable behavior until the fifteenth century in England and is still practiced today in the rainforests of the Philippines by the people called Tuesdays. In ancient times the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi and Mosaic Laws allowed capture by force of women from outside the tribe. Under the Hammurabi Code women had no independent status. Hebrew laws stated if a wife were raped, the "offending" wife and her attacker were to be stoned to death. In ancient Greece women were the property of men. The Athenian female, though a citizen, could not make debts, contracts, or bring actions of law. At all times she had to have a male guardian, usually her father, brother, husband or son. In the middle ages, men were exhorted from the pulpit to beat their wives, and their wives to kiss the rod that beat them. This was the deliberate teaching of domestic violence. In 18th Century Europe, assault was not considered rape if a woman conceived. In the United States in the days of slavery men could use his slaves as desired. Slave women were considered "breeders" and treated as such. In the 1830's and 40's in the United States temperance groups sprang up because the "drunken spouse could (and did), spend the family money as he chose. He sold off his and his wives property, apprenticed their children, and assaulted wife and child alike. In 1869, John Mill wrote the Subjugation of Women, decrying the fact that thousands of husbands routinely "indulge in the utmost habitual excesses of the bodily violence towards the unhappy wife." In 1878, Frances Power Cobbe wrote of a place in Liverpool known as the "kicking district" because so many residences kicked their wives faces with hobnailed boots. Our Fairy tales and myths are full of abuses and ...