ABSTRACT
This chapter explores whether the law provide solutions to the problems of violence against women when it constitutes part of that problem. It investigates this problem using English law and practice, appropriately since the private ills of battered women were recognized as a public problem in England before they were recognized elsewhere. The debate about violence against women needs to be removed from deliberations about strategies for social, including legal, intervention and placed firmly within the arena of sexual politics. Violence against women must not be viewed as an abstract, unproblematic concept. Law defines the character and creates the institutions and social relationships within which the family operates. The legal system is constantly recreating a particular ideological view of relationships between the sexes, best expressed as an ideology of patriarchalism. A study of the relationship between the law and the family today gives us insight into the modern forms of patriarchy.
