Introduction

The beginnings of change: a hidden issue becomes visible

Violence against women, and domestic violence in particular, became a public issue in Britain during the last quarter of the 19th century. Influenced by the feminist movement of the time, legal changes gave women the right to protection against the severest forms of assault by their husbands, including the right to apply for legal separation and to keep their own earnings, if separated (Cobbe, 1978; Dobash and Dobash, 1980; Mulvey Roberts and Mizuta, 1994). (It was not until later that married women living with their husbands gained full property rights.) The subject then lapsed from the political agenda until 100 years or so later, and only became a public issue again in the last 30 years of the 20th century.

Despite some changes in opinion reflected in 20th-century case law, attitudes to violent and coercive behaviour by men towards their wives and partners in the second half of the 20th century were still heavily influenced by beliefs about the rights of men in the family and the privacy of the household similar to those in the late 18th century (Dobash and Dobash, 1980, 1992; Pahl, 1985; Hague and Malos, 1993, 1998). The persistence of traditional attitudes towards gender hierarchy in the family, and the newer psychological approaches which located ‘personal’ problems in an individual or family matrix, combined to minimise and obscure violence against women in general, including domestic violence, as a social phenomenon (Dobash and Dobash, 1980, 1992; Hague and Malos, 1993, 1998).

In addition, there was a belief that the postwar welfare state had eradicated poverty, and therefore significantly reduced what were thought to be the major social causes of violent and ‘deviant’ behaviour. Instances of social problems, including violence in society and in the family (including child abuse and domestic violence), were subsumed under the heading of ‘deviance’ by sociologists and criminologists and were normally viewed by social welfare agencies as a consequence of pathological individual psychology or of ‘family dysfunction’ (Parton, 1985; Hague and Malos, 1993, 1998).

In Britain, the beginnings of a break with such attitudes came in the 1970s through a combination of processes, the most important of which was the advent of the Women's Liberation Movement. Some key factors here were the growing realisation that equality between the sexes was an ideal which had not been realised, either in the ‘public’ realm of the labour market, the law and politics, or in the ‘private’ sphere of family life and personal relationships.