Family and Domestic Violence
Motivation: I can’t say for sure when it has started. I think it started when I wasn’t even born. The earliest memory that imbedded in my mind is Birthday party of my mother’s friend which attended all our family. The near next memory: my mom and me were running out from my dad through all town trying to hide ourselves in some rear entrance. I was 4 years old. All years after that the relationships between my mom and dad was demonstration off all kinds of violence. It have been lasted until my mother died last year suffering from serious illness as a result of violence for all these years. Now while proceeding my personal project I try to find out such problems in other families and to form some kind of a generalized character for the family relationships problem.
Proposal: The one of most major problem of Russia and ex-USSR countries is an increase of violence in its various forms, one of which domestic violence, includes physical abuse, psychological abuse, economic and financial abuse and sexual abuse. Added to that is the national epidemic of alcoholism unleashed a veritable maelstrom of family violence. No one knows the actual number of women in Russia who are living with extreme abuse. In the late 1990s, the Internal Affairs Ministry estimated that some 36,000 women are beaten every day by their husbands or partners. According to statistics, domestic violence occurs in every fourth Russian family. In 70% incidents, victims of domestic violence are women and children.
Every forty minutes, one of Russian women killed by their husband or partner. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that the Government does not disaggregate crime data according to gender—with the exception of homicides—nor does it have a separate category for domestic violence. The Russian Federation has no specific legislation that addresses domestic violence. The attitude of the agencies of law and order to this problem that violence not as a crime but as “a private matter between the spouses”. The state doesn’t start prosecuting until the woman is already dead. Historically wife-beating in peasant Russia was the most prevalent form of domestic violence, although other members of the household could abuse their son’s bride, and the children produced by any marriage were often punished physically. Culturally, wife-beating was seen as natural, healthy, and necessary. Peasants even exchanged adages about the advantages of beating their wives, which described how physical abuse would make a woman work harder, speak less, and tolerate more from her husband.
In modern time the law enforcement officials often view domestic violence as a private matter that should be sorted out from within the family. And reflecting public attitudes, they often blame the victims for provoking the attack. If police do file charges, it will often depend on the extent of injuries, while less serious signs of abuse or death threats go largely ignored. While system responses are primarily targeted toward adult victims of abuse, increased attention must to be focused on the children who witness domestic violence.
