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Domestic Violence Against Spouses

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Domestic Violence has been a reoccurring thing for centuries all over the world. Child abuse and spousal abuse was largely overlooked and ignored by the justice system, mental health professional, and social science researchers until the later part of the 20th century. For the most part, police saw domestic violence against spouses as a “private matter” that should be dealt with between the spouses. Charges against the abuser would only occur if there were serious injury or death. During the early 1900’s many victims did not report the abuse because they were after they would be victimized further (Bala, 2008).
In the 1960’s and 1970’s the awareness of domestic violence began to rise and there were more supports and resources put into place. There was also an enactment of mandatory child abuse reporting laws in many jurisdictions requiring pediatricians to report abuse if they found unexplained bone fractures, bruising or other possible physical abuse attribute on children. (Bala, 2008). The 1970’s were the beginning of the battered women’s movement. During this time activist sued the police departments for failure to protect. …show more content…

However, this number is not accurate due to the fact that many of these cases were seen as murders, aggravated assault, or forcible rapes rather than domestic violence. (Etter, & Birzer, 2007). Due to the huge amount of domestic violence cases the police have been trying to bring down the number of domestic violence victims. In 2000 police departments all over the United States created a program to train police officers on domestic violence (Huisman, Martinez, & Wilson, 2005). Even though police have been trained and still have domestic violence trainings a lot of people are still victims of domestic violence. In 2007 alone there were reports of 554,000 female victims and 69,000 male victims of violent crime by a partner (Franklin,

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