Domestic Assault Beyond the Current Legal Definitions, Essay Example

I certainly believe that collectively, our society should address domestic assault beyond the current legal definitions. Strategies such as education and prevention can help to empower victims by providing them with the necessary resources to overcome their problems. This empowerment and education model offers significant advantages over the ‘criminal justice’ model: as Buzawa, Buzawa, and Stark (2012) explained, the ‘criminal justice’ approach often treats perpetrators as offenders against the state, rather than their particular victims, and stereotypes offenders and victims in ways that obscure nuance and difference (pp. 10-14). Taking this broader view means recognizing that domestic assault is multivariate and many-faceted: different circumstances and behaviors characterize different situations. Different offenders may perpetrate different kinds of assault for varying reasons, while different victims may require different resources to support them, and may have different wishes concerning the situation.

Moreover, there is a very good case that legal definitions of domestic assault should be broadened to include more than violent acts (Buzawa et al., 2012, p. 14). For one thing, it can indeed be difficult to distinguish between “abusive assaults that merit police intervention” and fights between couples that may turn physical and even violent, but do not necessarily warrant police intervention (p. 14). And, too, the tropes associated with popular conceptions of victims and narratives of victimhood may incline some people against the use of the label ‘victim’, due to personal aversion to these conceptions. Because abusive situations vary, different approaches may be called for, and definitions need to reflect this. Finally, the law might also benefit from including certain kinds of emotional and psychological stresses, caused by harassment, intimidation and manipulation. These are certainly abusive, and may warrant the status of assaults, depending on the circumstances.

References

Buzawa, E. Buzawa, C. and Stark, E. (2012). Responding to Domestic Violence: The Integration of Criminal Justice & Human Services (4th Edition). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

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