CHAPTER – III THEORIES ON DOMESTIC VIOLENCE Violence against women is wide-spread in society, but it is not universal. There are small scale societies like the Wape of Papua New Guinea and Garos and Khasis of North-Eastern India where domestic violence is at its minimum level or virtually absent. Anthropologists have researched and found out the fact that social relations can be organised to minimise domestic violence. Human beings are social animals and so always stay on relations. Relationship continues on the basis of expected roles & responsibilities at personal or societal level. These expected roles and responsibilities of individual vary from community to community, society to society and situation to situation. It is when intimate …show more content…
Individuals are violent because of some internal aberration in brain, abnormality, or defective characteristic. These characteristics include inadequate self-control, sadism, psychopathic personality types, and undifferentiated types of mental illness. Personality disorder due to early childhood experiences of trauma facilitates individual to show violent behaviour. Individuals engaged in domestic violence; do show symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, anti-social personality disorder, passive-aggression, paranoia, obsessive-compulsive disorder and intermittent explosive disorder. Thus, through medication and psychiatric treatment the mental illness can be treated and the behaviour of the perpetrators of domestic violence can be corrected. (Kemp, Silverman, Steele, Droegemueller & Silver: The battered Child Syndrome, 1962/Snell, Rosenwald and Robey: The Wifebeater’s Wife, …show more content…
Dobash and Dobash in their study found that battered women do not live their lives in a state of ‘learned helplessness’ rather they keep on in a process of “staying, leaving and returning”. These battered women take active and conscious decision as per circumstances; to escape the violence and to show annoyance they leave their homes for short periods but after negotiations/reconciliations come back to re-establish the relationship on a non-violent