Domestic violence also account for about fifteen percent of total crimes committed in the United States. Reports from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and National Institute of Health indicate that each year, 5, 300, 000 non-fatal violent victimization committed by intimated partners against women are recorded.
Female murder victims are likely to occur compared to male murder victims to have been murdered by intimate partners (Congress 528). According to Congress, half of female murder victims and four percent of male murder highlighted in the Disease Control, Prevention, and National Institute of Health reports met their death in the hands of intimate partners. With respect to government statistics, approximately 987, 400 rapes take place in United State where 89% of the rapes are perpetrated against female victims. Since 2001, cases of rapes have augmented by four percent (Congress 528).
Domestic violence more than any other criminal act, entails a wide range of relationships and behaviors. Unfortunately, criminal codes are in general rather blunt instruments, describing violence as individual actions, specifically threat of physical harm or physical assault aimed at causing physical harm (Buwaza 4). In reality, most researchers precisely conceptualize domestic violence as a range of conducts, some clearly criminal in temperament, others more manipulative intended to exercise coercive control entailing sexual, physical, verbal and psychological conducts utilized to control another person. This approach focuses on the blueprint of abusive and violent conducts within the relationship as opposed to individual actions of perpetrators. Only in recent time, have criminal codes evolved to the point through which they have begun to acknowledge innumerable abuse forms, but also prohibiting harassment or stalking (Buwaza 4). . Even though such statutes solely centered on physical abuse, they are not as widely utilized and they hold foremost inconsistencies. Additionally, as a crime, stalking is difficult to prove.
Very little is recognized regarding the employment of these laws as a productive element of preventing abuse in its totality instead of individual actions of physical abuse evident in typical domestic violence laws. According to Buzawa, an author, examination of 2000 police reports in a ten-year period for all assaults indicated that eighteen to twenty percent of all victims were viewed as offenders (Buwaza 5). The victim-offender dichotomy confines people from viewing domestic assault as a form of interaction that in some situations may be maladaptive rejoinder to conflict in families. Victims and offenders usually experience the effect of such labeling, and in order to get services, victims must accept their publicly framed condition as victim and the anticipations that go along with this label.
Moreover, when there is an intricacy in identifying which party is the victim, police experiences the choice of either taking no action given that there is no lawfully recognizable victim or inconsistently, of arresting both parties (Buwaza 4). Moreover, there has been great concern over increasing rates of dual arrests in some jurisdiction through which both parties to an occurrence get arrested instead of the customary practice where police only identifies just one victim and one offender. While the dual arrest may be valid, research indicate that police officers employ dual arrests as a response towards presumptive or mandatory arrest policies thereby failing to differentiate self-defense on the victims' part. Domestic violence criminal codes also hold incomprehensible gaps in coverage. The links involved under these criminal codes differ from state to state and sometimes only include married individuals only or in some situations include past and current intimate partners, children, any relative, siblings, and people living in the same residence or any family member (Buwaza 4).
Proposed Solutions
Solution 1: Legal Responses and Interventions
Serious domestic violence is lop-sided; women's aggression against men differs considerably in terms of the consequences and context. The context of women's violence is often self-defense and the upshots for men are less severe (Buwaza 4). Females' aggression towards their male intimate partners does not take place with similar ferocity or frequency as men's violence towards female intimate partners. From this prospect, responses to domestic violence must be developed which must include legal responses. Policies aimed at tackling men's violence against women and strategies to support female victims must be developed (Burton 6).
To allow criminal justice system to operate efficiently, implicit need for the identification of a crime with a defined offender and victim in the context of an acknowledged applicable criminal law is paramount. Given the severity of the sanctions of criminal, it must be based purely on objective criteria for the determination of domestic violence. Nevertheless, an individual's condition may be intricate to identify and may as well not be constant in the several incidents that may take place during a given couple's...
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