How the law slowly stopped treating violence at home as a private matter
Until 1973 the phrase domestic violence mostly meant unrest inside a country, as opposed to attacks from abroad. That year the British MP Jack Ashley used it in Parliament to mean violence in the home. The shift in wording tracked a much longer, uneven change in how courts treated what happened behind closed doors.
Domestic violence is violence within a household, such as between spouses or people living together, and the broader term domestic abuse covers non-physical harm too. It is often used interchangeably with intimate partner violence, which can occur between current or former partners and in both opposite-sex and same-sex couples. Older labels like wife battering faded as definitions widened to include unmarried partners, female perpetrators and psychological or economic abuse. The World Health Organization estimates that about one in three women experiences it at some point.
According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, in the early 1800s most legal systems implicitly accepted a husband's right to beat his wife. English common law from the sixteenth century treated it as a breach of the peace, an offence against the community, and a wife could ask a local justice for a peace bond, though procedures were informal and unrecorded. Some American colonists went further: the Massachusetts Bay Body of Liberties of 1641 declared married women free from bodily correction by their husbands, and New Hampshire and Rhode Island banned wife-beating outright.
After the American Revolution, women increasingly had to seek divorce for cruelty or sue for assault, which raised the burden of proof. First-wave feminist campaigning in the nineteenth century changed opinion and law. Tennessee explicitly outlawed wife beating in 1850, courts in Massachusetts and Alabama rejected any such right in 1871, and Britain's Matrimonial Causes Act of 1878 let women seek legal separation.
Even so, most legal systems addressed the problem seriously only from the 1990s. A 1993 United Nations manual urged countries to treat it as a crime, stating that a right to private family life includes no right to abuse relatives. Europe's Istanbul Convention became the first legally binding European instrument on the subject, and India passed its Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act in 2005 after years of campaigning by women's organisations.
Source: Domestic violence
