ABSTRACT
Pro-feminists who eschew psychological explanations of domestic violence (Mullender and Hague 2005) and advocates for the contributions made by the discipline (D.G. Dutton and Corvo 2006) all emphasise the pervasive nature of domestic violence. Further, all sides of the debate consider violence and abuse to be aberrant rather than typical (Verhulst 2000). However until relatively recently there had been a division between those who examined the transmission of violence across generations (paying attention to `cycles of violence'1) (J.P. Smith and Williams 1992; Dankoski et al. 2006) and those (Ehrensaft et al. 2003) who focused on how to care for child witnesses to violence through protection of both the children and their mothers (Humphreys 1999; Humphreys et al. 2001, 2006). Research to explore the transmission of violence across generations has been mostly focused on the impact of living with family violence during childhood on the (potential) perpetrators (Smith and Williams 1992; Chapple 2003; Stover 2005; Dankoski et al. 2006; Davhana-Maselesele 2007; Dryden et al. 2009).
