Understanding Victims Of Interpersonal Violence

Understanding Victims of Interpersonal Violence: A Guide for Investigators and Prosecutors provides accessible information for criminal justice personnel "in the trenches" with victims of violence to aid in understanding and explaining their behavior. This guide sheds light on interpersonal violence victims’ decisions and actions by providing context and naming factors that commonly impact victim responses. These include internal factors such as culture, religion, shame, and personality, as well as external factors like access to services, support systems, and resources. These factors inhibit or facilitate responses like disclosure, resistance, and participation (or lack thereof) in the prosecution of the offenders. This book also explores the influence of the perpetrator, as well as more deeply examining victim responses that typically offer challenges to investigators and prosecutors; for example, continued contact with the offender, lack of resistance, and issues in disclosure. Finally, the guide provides concrete tools to assist investigators in interviewing and for prosecutors to use during the prosecutorial process. This book is designed for investigators, prosecutors, advocates, criminal justice practitioners, and students of these subjects.

Drawing on cases, Stark identifies the problems with our current approach to domestic violence, outlines the components of coercive control, and then uses this alternate framework to analyse the cases of battered women charged with criminal offenses directed at their abusers.

There is an increasing appreciation of the interconnections among all forms of violence. These interconnections have critical implications for conducting research that can produce valid conclusions about the causes and consequences of abuse, maltreatment, and trauma. The accumulated data on co-occurrence also provide strong evidence that prevention and intervention should be organized around the full context of individuals’ experiences, not narrowly defined subtypes of violence. Managing the flood of new research and practice innovations is a challenge, however. New means of communication and integration are needed to meet this challenge, and the Web of Violence is intended to contribute to this process by serving as a concise overview of the conceptual and empirical work that form a basis for understanding the interconnections across forms of violence throughout the lifespan. It also offers ideas and directions for prevention, intervention, and public policy. A number of initiatives are emerging to integrate the findings on co-occurrence into research and action. The American Psychological Association established a new journal, Psychology of Violence, which is a forum for research on all types of violence. Sherry Hamby is the founding editor and John Grych is associate editor and co-editor of a special issue on the co-occurrence of violence in 2012. Dr. Hamby also is a co-investigator of the National Survey of Children’s Exposure to Violence (NatSCEV), which has drawn attention to polyvictimization. Polyvictimization is a focus of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Defending Childhood Initiative and has recently been featured in calls for grant proposals by the Office of Victims of Crime and National Institutes for Justice.

Violence against women is one factor in the growing wave of alarm about violence in American society. High-profile cases such as the O.J. Simpson trial call attention to the thousands of lesser-known but no less tragic situations in which women's lives are shattered by beatings or sexual assault. The search for solutions has highlighted not only what we know about violence against women but also what we do not know. How can we achieve the best understanding of this problem and its complex ramifications? What research efforts will yield the greatest benefit? What are the questions that must be answered? Understanding Violence Against Women presents a comprehensive overview of current knowledge and identifies four areas with the greatest potential return from a research investment by increasing the understanding of and responding to domestic violence and rape: What interventions are designed to do, whom they are reaching, and how to reach the many victims who do not seek help. Factors that put people at risk of violence and that precipitate violence, including characteristics of offenders. The scope of domestic violence and sexual assault in America and its conequences to individuals, families, and society, including costs. How to structure the study of violence against women to yield more useful knowledge. Despite the news coverage and talk shows, the real fundamental nature of violence against women remains unexplored and often misunderstood. Understanding Violence Against Women provides direction for increasing knowledge that can help ameliorate this national problem.

Since the 1970s the issue of intimate partner violence (IPV) has been explained through the patriarchal desire of men to control and dominate women, but this gendered perspective limits both our understanding of IPV and its treatment. Intimate Partner Violence: New Perspectives in Research and Practice is the first book of its kind to present a detailed and rigorous critique of current domestic violence research and practice within the same volume. In this challenging new text, with contributions from the UK, the US, and Canada, the subject is assessed from a more holistic position. It provides a critical analysis of the issue of domestic violence including issues that are often not part of the mainstream discussion. Each of the chapters tackles a different area of research or practice, from a critical review of contemporary topics in domestic violence research, including a critical review of men’s use of violence in relationships, a consideration of male victims, IPV within the LGBTQ+ community, perceptions of perpetrators and victims, and IPV within adolescent populations. The second half of the book examines challenges and opportunities for professionals working in the field and includes an analysis of an evidence informed perpetrator programme, the challenges faced working with male victims, and a discussion of the impact of domestic violence on children. Culminating with a series of evidence-based recommendations to bridge the divide between academic and practitioner stakeholders and to inform future working practices, this is an essential resource for students and practitioners alike.

Interpersonal violence has been the focus of research within the social sciences for some considerable time. Yet inquiries about the causes of interpersonal violence and the effects on the victims have dominated the field of research and clinical practice. Central to the contributions in this volume is the idea that interpersonal violence is a social action embedded in responses from various actors. These include actions, words and behaviour from friends and family, ordinary citizens, social workers and criminal justice professionals. These responses, as the contributors to this volume all show, make a difference in terms of how violence is understood, resisted and come to terms with in its immediate aftermath and over the longer term. Bringing together an international network of scholars and practitioners from a range of disciplines and fields of practice, this book maps and expands research on interpersonal violence. In doing so, it opens an important new terrain on which social responses to violence can be fully interrogated in terms of their intentions, meanings and outcomes.

What impels human beings to harm others -- family members or strangers? And how can these impulses and actions be prevented or controlled? Heightened public awareness of, and concern about, what is widely perceived as a recent explosion of violence -- on a spectrum from domestic abuse to street crime -- has motivated behavioral and social scientists to cast new light on old questions. Many hypotheses have been offered. This volume sorts, structures, and evaluates them.The author draws on contemporary research and theory in varied fields--sociology, clinical psychology, psychiatry, social work, neuropsychology, behavioral genetics, child development, and education--to present a uniquely balanced, integrated, and readable summary of what we currently know about the causes and effects of violence. Throughout, she emphasizes the necessity of distinguishing among different types of violent behavior and of realizing that nature and nurture interact in human development. Controversial issues such as physical punishment and violent television programming receive special attention making this volume an important resource for all those concerned with violent offenders and their victims -- and for their students and trainees.In this third edition of Understanding Violence, author Elizabeth Kandel Englander draws on contemporary research and theory in varied fields to present a uniquely balanced, integrated, and readable summary of what we currently know about the causes and effects of violence, particularly its effect on children. The goal of this textbook is to give a critical review of the most relevant and important areas of research on street and family violence, examining why it is that people become violent. Between 1994 and 2004 the United States benefited from a dramatic decline in rates of violent crime. However, as the economy has weakened in recent years and tougher times have returned, the crime rate has shown signs of a modest

This book presents new conceptual and theoretical approaches to violence studies. As the first research anthology to examine violating interpersonal, institutional and ideological practices as both gendered and affective processes, it raises novel questions and offers insights for understanding and resolving social and cultural problems related to violence and its prevention. The book offers multidisciplinary perspectives on various forms and intersections of different types of violence. The research ranges from the early modern era to the present day in Europe, US, Africa and Australia, representing disciplines such as gender studies, history, literature, linguistics, media and cultural studies, psychology, social psychology, social work, social policy, sociology and environmental humanities. With its integrative approach, the book proposes new ideas and tools for academics and practitioners to improve their theoretical and practical understandings of these phenomena as a source of multidimensional inequality in a globalized world.