ABSTRACT
In the world of 2006, political violence sometimes seems to overshadow interpersonal violence. The war in Iraq, and its recurrent car bombs and body counts; security risks and drills; violent riots at the World Trade Organization; and political roil all seem to dominate our consciousness. Family violence is hostile aggression between people who are intimately involved with each other. By traditional definition, this has meant those who are married or related to one another, but in current practice the term refers to all those who are intimately involved, including, for example, couples who are cohabiting or dating. The secrecy that surrounds most cases of family violence makes them particularly difficult to detect, which means that most of the statistics cited here probably do not include domestic violence and are thus likely to be underestimates. When domestic violence has been detected, most societies have been reluctant to take action against it.
