Domestic violence

Domestic violence, by barest definition, is violence within a home. Beyond this, the term has a range of definitions, some more and some less formal, which are frequently used with little awareness that a range of definitions exists.

Purpose

Whilst purposelessness might be a better heading for this section, a causalist view is that the purpose of domestic violence is not primarily to hurt or harm the victim. Rather, it is to gain or maintain power and control over the victim.

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Note that power in a relationship is often a matter of perception. A person may perceive themselves to be put-upon when a less involved observer would disagree.

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An alternative view is that abuse arises more from an attempt to 'export' feelings of powerlessness to the victim. The purpose of an attempt to 'gain or maintain power and control over the victim' is to develop and enforce a permanent channel for such attempted 'export' to the other. Since feelings are personal, and cannot be resolved via others as proxies, this 'export' is inherently impossible to achieve, hence such behaviours are inherently addictive, leading to cycles of abuse. Mutual cycles develop when each party attempts to 'pass the buck' back and forth, usually through varying mechanisms of abuse. Since preferences for abuse-mechanisms are somewhat gendered, with females strongly favouring non-physical forms of abuse, selective 'snapshots' of such interactions may create an illusion of a gendered pattern of violence. Models such as the Duluth framework which attempt to resolve abuse by disempowering the alleged 'perpetrator' actually exacerbate the problems and all but guarantee failure. Resolution is only achieved when all parties acknowledge their responsibilities, and identify and respect mutual purpose. http://www.nuancejournal.com.au/documents/one/graves-duluth.pdf

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