Family Violence

Abstract

Abstract Over the last three decades, family and intimate violence has been transformed from an issue obscured by selective inattention to a problem that receives increasing professional, public, and policy attention. The explosive growth in our knowledge and understanding of the various aspects of family violence has produced a wealth of empirical data, as well as deep and intensive controversies about those data and their meaning. The topic of this chapter is family violence, but there really is no unified field of study or practice that falls neatly under that term. Family violence is only rarely viewed as a holistic problem.