Three men who assaulted their wives participated in semi-structured, in-depth interviews in an attempt to understand the experience that accompanied each man's "assaultive" decision. The study assumes that spouse abuse can be best understood from an ecological point of view which, it has been argued, warrants a hermeneutical approach to research (Young & Collin, 1988). The study focuses on the description and understanding of specific life experiences of the participants through the application and development of interpretive categories or themes. Three themes that are common to all the participants are identified and discussed. It was found that: all the participants experienced misunderstanding between themselves and their partner before the assaultive situation; all the participants experienced a sense of emotional distress prior to and at moments during the assault; all the participants experienced a sense of justification in the abuse which they were displaying. The results of this research highlight the centrality of empathic understanding in the study and treatment of domestic violence. / Education, Faculty of / Educational and Counselling Psychology, and Special Education (ECPS), Department of / Graduate

Violence was a central feature of Anglo-Irish relations in the latter half of the sixteenth century. Besides the devastation brought about by organized warfare there were many incidents of violence of an extraordinary nature—violence employed in times of truce.as well as war, exercised against, non-combatants of all ages, and often carried out with extreme cruelty. Such destruction evoked extensive response from many English gentry serving as officials and administrators in Ireland. Their private and official accounts of the Irish people and the Irish problem serve as the basis of my study. This thesis will be an analysis of how these Elizabethan gentry attempted to justify their violence, to legitimate it in the face of external opposition, and to rationalize it within their own minds. I will attempt to discover why Elizabethans found it necessary to justify their actions in the intricate manner in which they did, and what this may tell us about the intellectual development of the English gentry throughout the sixteenth century. An examination of the attitudes and policies of sixteenth-century Englishmen towards Ireland reveals that a great change took place over a relatively short period of time. Accounts and policies dating from the reign of Henry VIII were both lenient and sympathetic towards the Irish whereas those from the reign of Elizabeth were, by and large, brutal. This change was to occur mainly during the period of the Protectorate in England at a time when military force and religious persecution became the primary tools by which Ireland could be brought to 'civility'. The works dating from the reign of Elizabeth were, in large part, a response to.the extraordinary violence which began at the mid-century and to the psychological tensions that such destruction created. For this reason, I have relied, to a limited extent, upon modern psychological theories to help explain some aspects of the Elizabethan justifications. Finally, I am stating, as propositions, two conclusions. First, I propose that in the latter half of the sixteenth century the English and the Irish thought out and formulated ideas on two distinct intellectual planes and, as a consequence, were unable to fully comprehend the motives and aspirations of each other. This, I suggest, negated the possibility of a lasting peace in the sixteenth century and seriously hampered future attempts at reconciliation. Secondly, I submit that in their attempts to analyse and describe Ireland and to justify the violence perpetrated in that land, Englishmen were forced to re-examine their own society and to re-evaluate their role within it. It is possible, therefore, that their experience in Ireland was one of the numerous factors which helped many Englishmen break with the intellectual bonds of the past and to think in new and distinctive ways. / Arts, Faculty of / History, Department of / Graduate

Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree Educational Psychology at the University of Zululand, 2006. / This study explored the experiences of five children who witnessed domestic violence and the resultant psychological distress experiences by these children. The study was conducted within a phenomenological framework and used in-depth interviews with the children and caregivers. The data gleaned from the interviews with the children was substantiated by projective drawing tasks. Analysis of the interviews and drawings showed that children who witnessed domestic violence experienced significant psychological distress. The significant findings of the study were as follows: • Child witnesses exhibited behavioural, affective and cognitive responses to the traumatic event. • Themes of guilt, shame and role confusion emerged from the interview data as a result of having witnessed the abusive episodes • Fear was a result of having witnessed the abusive episodes, and was pervasive in all relationships - with significant others, peers and the researcher. • Social support from peers and family members acted as a buffer by providing an escape to dealing with witnessing the trauma. • There was a significant difference in the coping styles in relation to developmental status - the older children exhibited a multitude of coping styles as compared to the younger children. • Gender pattern differences emerged — boys were more likely to exhibit externalising behaviour in response to witnessing the abusive episodes, whilst the girls exhibited more internalising behaviour patterns. The results of this study were discussed within the ecological-transactional framework. Further research in the area of domestic violence is recommended.

Thesis (Ed.D.)--Boston University / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / The modem problem of domestic violence has a historical reach into antiquity and is a part of every known culture. Domestic violence relates to the origins of aggression in men including areas as diverse as violence, gender roles, relationships, and even cultural and religious ritual. The radical feminist movement ofthe 1950's pushed child physical and sexual abuse, and later domestic violence, out from the shadows of being regarded as a family's "dirty laundry" into the spotlight of public opinion. With public awareness came outrage at the plight of the women and their children who suffered at the hands of the batterer and an exponential increase in efforts by researchers to understand and describe the problem, by legislators, police and courts to create laws, arrest procedures to and contain the batterer and finally by clinicians to devise programs and methods to treat the man once he had been arrested, separated from his family and sent to a batterers' program in lieu of jail. In spite of the recognition of the importance of the problem, progress in working to change batterers has been hampered by a fundamental split between two factions as to the cause of the problem. One side claims that all men raised in a patriarchy are "batterers" to some degree due to masculine privilege. The others claim that there is an essential difference between men who batter and those that do not. This study addresses that question. This study was conducted in two phases. In phase I, the author administered an MMPI-2 protocol to thirty men who had been arrested for domestic violence and sent to batterers' intervention classes. In phase II, ten of these were selected for videotaped interviews, structured with questions based on Loevinger' s ego development work. Themes that emerged from the data suggested that these men, as a group, had difficulties in their ability to identify and communicate their feeling states, to effectively understand and manage relational conflict, and further that as a group these men showed evidence of internally experienced shame which they did not experience consciously. The author found support for the Shame A voidance Model of domestic violence, which asserts that batterers have several conditions which comprise the "essential difference" sought by the field. It states that cognitive, emotional and gender deficits, when combined with the presence of unacknowledged shame, will result in a man who will batter or abusively control his intimate partner in order to avoid experiencing his own shame during the course of natural relational conflicts. This is held to be counter to the feminist faction that holds that he batters to maintain masculine privileges over his partner. / 2031-01-01

Globally, the WHO (2014: 10) estimates that one in three women experiences sexual and physical violence at the hands of their intimate partner over their lifetime. According to a Violence Against Women (VAW) Baseline study (2013: 11) in Zimbabwe- two in every three (68%) women who were interviewed reported having experienced some type of gendered violence during their lifetime. Although legislation on the prevention of domestic violence has become, globally, part of many countries' legal frameworks, Zimbabwe instantiated its Domestic Violence Act only in 2007. This came as a result of decades of feminist advocacy at state, legal, and NGO levels which theorized the rights of survivors of domestic violence, usually women as essential to Zimbabwean citizenship. These rights included criminalization of domestic violence and full access to legal processes. As in many other contexts, the weak implementation of this legislation has been widely researched, suggesting that Zimbabwean domestic abuse survivors remain vulnerable (Burton, 2008). Alongside the need for more research lies the question at the heart of this dissertation. Feminist theory has established that the vulnerability of domestic abuse survivors comprises both the legal and the social. Theorists of social justice focus on questions of recognition and redistribution (Fraser, 2008), empowerment (Kabeer, 2016) and the notion of capabilities as intrinsic to fair and equitable social systems and processes (Nussbaum, 2011). This study asks whether and how the provision of shelter space to the survivors (for which provision is made in the Domestic Violence Act) can be theorized as a form of social justice, despite the weakness of the system of courts. In carrying out the study, I worked with one particular shelter, Musasa, in Gweru, Zimbabwe, and explored the experiences of those who had worked with the shelter in multiple ways. This built what I called an “exploded view” of the representations of living and working at a specific place. The concept of “exploded view” comes from architecture and connotes a perspective able to understand different parts of a system or process separately to revise the whole. Data gathering was through in-depth interviews and involved listening to the voices of those who imagined and created the shelter and also those running it. At the centre of the study were twenty women who experienced the shelter as a space in which they lived and their voices were critical in theorising sheltering. Data were analysed using both thematic and content analysis and aimed to tease out the multiple threads of meaning through which people associated with the shelter in different ways made sense of its location and importance for tackling domestic violence in Zimbabwe. While the study is aware of its limitations as a case study, the dissertation's theorization of shelter work as social justice contributes to a feminist theorization of redress for survivors of domestic abuse in Zimbabwe.

Thesis (M.A.) - Simon Fraser University, 2006. / Theses (School of Criminology) / Simon Fraser University. Also issued in digital format and available on the World Wide Web.

Thesis (M.S.S.W) -- University of Texas at Arlington, 2008.

This study covers literature and empirical studies where twenty (20) learners from violent homes in Itsoseng and Bodibe areas and eight (8)teachers of Tau-Rapulana, Tswelelopele, Opa-Diatla and Mmuagabo were selected and interviewed. The study was undertaken to investigate the impact of domestic violence on primary and high school learners. The findings of the study revealed that: > Violence cuts across all families of different social backgrounds and economic statuses > Family members are mostly the perpetrators of domestic violence. > Learners from violent families are not readily accepted by both teachers and other learners alike. > Community members and neighbours are not doing enough to address the problem of domestic violence. The study therefore suggests that: > Prevention approaches, treatment and other mechanisms be put in place to deal with the problem of domestic violence. > Schools should introduce a curriculum which teaches non-violent conflict resolution skills. > Teachers should be trained to be able to recognize abused children and to help them.>The government should increase the number of shelters to house learners from violent homes. > Peer-mediated approaches should be utilized to help affected learners socialize effectively with their peers. / Thesis (M.A. (LLC)) North-West University, Mafikeng Campus, 2004

Thesis (M.P.H.)--Georgia State University, 2007. / Title from file title page. Ike Okosun, committee chair; Volkan Topalli, Rita Noonan, committee members. Electronic text (53 p. : col. ill.) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed Mar. 25, 2008. Includes bibliographical references (p. 48-52).

Thesis(M.S.)--Auburn University, 2006. / Abstract. Vita. Includes bibliographic references.