Violence and Sexual Abuse in Family Life

Abstract

‘Violence in the family’ encompasses a range of phenomena: physical assaults of varying degrees of severity on children, sexual partners and older people, rape and other forms of sexual coercion of women and the sexual abuse of children. It has been a source of social concern and reform in Britain, the USA and other Western societies for over a century. However, in the past ‘familial violence’ tended to be perceived either as a ‘lower-class phenomenon’ or as the action of disturbed or drunken men, and public concern was intermittent and fleeting.