The Battered Woman

I've been doing some research into domestic violence because it's the topic I've chosen for my criminological theory paper this year and my dissertation next year. For this year's paper, I needed to find a working definition of what a "battered woman" is, and the one I've chosen stunned me. So that maybe it will help someone, somewhere, I decided to post what I've found here.

Legal definitions of wife or partner abuse, in most cases, focus only on assaultive acts that lead to visible injury. Mental health professionals often use the word abuse to include a number of assaultive and nonassaultive, but injurious, acts perpetrated by adults toward other adults or by adults toward children ... The term violence most often refers to all forms of physical aggression, while the term abuse refers to those physical and non-physical acts that cause physical and emotional injury.

Although much as been written in the field of interpersonal violence, particularly in the last decade, relatively few definitions of the term battering exist. Existing definitions differ in terms of the variety, frequency, and severity of assaultive behavior. Some definitions focus solely on the physical assaultive act ... Walker (1979), on the other hand, defines a battered woman as one "who is repeatedly subjected to any forceful physical or psychological behavior by a man in order to coerce her to do something he wants her to do without any concern for her rights" (p. xv).

Ganley (1981b) outlines four forms of battering: (1) physical, (2) sexual, (3) destruction of property and pets, and (4) psychological. Physical battering, the most obvious form, includes all assaults directed by the perpetrator against the victim's body. It includes a range of behavior from less severe acts, such as spitting, pinching, and slapping, to more severe assaults, including choking, punching, and stabbing. Sexual violence involves physical attacks on the victim's breasts or genitals, coerced sexual activity accompanied by threats of violence, or sexual assault or rape. Violence against objects or pets constitutes violence towards the person emotionally and also serves to remind the victim of the potential for violence against her. Psychological battering is carried out with emotional or psychological weapons and includes such behaviors as threats of violence, suicide threats, controlling sleeping and eating, threats to take or harm children, and forcing degrading behavior.

Richard A. Stordeur and Richard Stille (1989) Ending Men's Violence Against Their Partners: One Road to Peace. London: Sage Publications, p. 19-20.