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And, unfortunately, the intimate context all too often leads those outside the relationship to take domestic violence less seriously than other types of violence. In domestic violence, perpetrators have on-going access to their victims, know their daily routines and vulnerabilities, and can continue after violent episodes to exercise considerable physical and emotional control over their daily lives. In addition, these perpetrators have knowledge of their victims (e.g., prior medical conditions, allegiance to their children) which they use to target their assaults (e.g., withholding medications, grabbing victims from behind, threatening to harm the children), increasing the victims’ trauma and fear. Victims of domestic violence not only deal with the particularities of a specific trauma (e.g., head injury) and the fear of future assaults by a known assailant, but must also deal with the complexities of an intimate relationship with that assailant. Many perpetrators believe that they are entitled to use tactics of control with their partners and too often find social supports for those beliefs. It is the “family” nature of these relationships that sometimes gives the perpetrator social, if not legal, permission
UNDERSTANDING DOMESTIC VIOLENCE
Health care providers may want to become familiar with the legal definition of domestic violence in their jurisdiction and note the similarities and differences in the ways domestic violence is defined. 2 For the purposes of this manual, masculine pronouns are generally used when referring to perpetrators of domestic violence, while feminine pronouns are generally used to reference victims. This is not meant to detract from those cases where the victim is male or the perpetrator is female. This pronoun usage reflects the fact that the majority of domestic violence victims are female. The U.S. Department of Justice estimates that 95% of reported assaults on spouses or ex-spouses are committed by men against women (Douglas, 1991). There are no prevalence figures for domestic violence in gay and lesbian relationships, but experts (Lobel, 1986; Renzetti, 1992; Letellier, 1994) indicate that domestic violence is a significant problem in same-sex relationships as well. Consequently, some of the examples in the manual are specific to gay, lesbian or heterosexual relationships, while others apply to all three.
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