Domestic Violence in A Male and Female Relationship

Introduction

Most women experience some form of sexual violence as part of their daily reality. Even if this does not take the extreme form of rape, beatings and murder, there is the ever-present threat of assault implicit in the sexual comments and gestures in the streets and at work. The media, advertising and the wide-spread circulation of sexist literature and pornography create a climate that encourages sexual violence and harassment by objectifying women. This paper discusses domestic violence in a male and female relationship.

Discussion

Violence against women can take many forms, physical and sexual, financial, verbal and psychological/emotional. Physical violence includes not only actual assaults but also the threat of violence which limits women's actions and behavior. Sexual abuse can include humiliating or degrading comments or jokes, unwanted touching or fondling, through to demands for sex, rape and causing injury during sex. Financial abuse can involve male breadwinners not giving their female partners enough money for food, health and housing or the threat of financial insecurity which is used to keep women trapped in violent situations.

Women who have been full time carers and out of the work force for a long period of time may face unemployment or employment with low pay, it is uncommon for women to maintain their material standard of living after leaving a marriage or de facto relationship (Bedford p 52). Verbal abuse includes put-downs, derogatory comments, persistent claims that a woman is incompetent, unattractive, inferior etc. Verbal abuse also consists of actual threats of assault. Psychological/emotional abuse often comes from prolonged verbal abuse which destroys women's self-esteem but can also include the prolonged threat of violence and social isolation (Macnamara 50-52).

Violence against women is not just carried out by individual males against individual women. The State not only condones violations against the rights of women it perpetuates them. In the past it did this directly by legalizing wife-beating and by placing the responsibility for rape onto the victim. Indirectly the state aids in the powerlessness of women by not providing adequate, affordable child-care, allocating insufficient welfare payments to single mothers, and by under-valuing work which is traditionally female. In addition,

When we are prohibited from exercising our abortion rights by the terrorist tactics of so-called "right-to-lifers" who bomb abortion clinics and the criminal actions of the government as it withdraws federal subsidies for abortion, we experience violence aimed at our reproductive choices and our sexuality (Brisbane 7-2).

When the government cuts funding to child-care centers, rape crisis centers, refuges, women's health services and limits women's right to safe, affordable abortion they are complicit in societies violence against women. Through such measures governments limit the options available to women in violent domestic situations and violate women's control over their bodies and lives. These particular manifestations of violence against women are situated on a larger continuum of socially inflicted violence, which includes concerted, systematic violations of women's economic and political rights (Waugh & Bonner 282-295).

When we look at wider forms of violence against ...