ABSTRACT
Histories of family life and gender-power relations have revealed that physical and mental cruelty to women and children are typically taken for granted as part of `normal' family relations (Gordon 1988). Domestic violence and abuse, by de®nition, take place away from the public gaze and so are easy to ignore, diminish and/or deny (Jecker 1993; Heise et al. 1994; Zink, Jacobson, Regan and Pabst 2004). Therefore, even in sophisticated democratic societies, recognition that violent behaviour in the private sphere `counts' along with publicly committed violence is a relatively new concept.
