ABSTRACT
Violence against women began to attract attention as a serious social problem in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Since then, a multitude of phenomena including emotional, sexual and physical assault, stalking and sexual harassment have been studied in fields such as anthropology, criminology, epidemiology, psychology, and sociology (Crowell and Burgess, 1996). Nowadays, those interested in the epidemiology and aetiology of violence against women are confronted with the problem that the sheer size of the field is daunting. For example, the database "Violence & Abuse Abstracts: Current Literature in Interpersonal Violence" summarizes more than 1300 articles and chapters in the professional literature each year (de Keseredy and Schwartz, 2001, p. 23). Some very useful reviews on specific topics have recently been published (e.g. reviews on risk factors for sexual, physical, and psychological male-to-female abuse by Black et aL, 2001; Schumacher et al., 2001a,b) and comprehensive resources have been compiled such as the Sourcebook on Violence Against Women (Renzetti et a/., 2001).
