Public Responses to Intimate Violence: a Glance at the Past

UnHope20 · 2021-03-30T00:11:54+00:00

Lack of attention to non-lethal intimate violence may have been “the normal state of affairs” throughout most of American history.

Prior to the 1980s, only the colonial era (especially 1640 to 1680) and the late Victorian era (especially 1870 to 1890) witnessed sustained efforts to curb wife-beating and “unnatural severity” toward children.

However, scholars have overstated the level of public apathy toward men’s homicidal aggression against women.

Leading criminal law casebooks, numerous law review articles,and books by influential American legal scholars and historians repeat the erroneous claim that, in the past, the legal doctrines of self-defense and provocation endorsed men’s brutality, whereas women were severely punished for perpetrating intimate violence.

In fact, the converse was true. Data culled from dusty criminal case files in New York and Colorado demonstrate that, in both the eastern and western United States, men accused of killing their intimates often received stern punishment, while women charged with similar crimes were treated with leniency.

Moreover, the capital punishment of men who murdered their lovers, spouses, or other family members constituted a higher percentage of total executions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries than today.

Thus, despite widespread scholarly agreement that public responses to intimate violence were inadequate, newly discovered historical data indicates that feminist criminal-law researchers, such as myself, must reexamine the underpinnings of our theories.

Title	Public Responses to Intimate Violence: a Glance at the Past
Author	UnHope20
Upvotes	2
Comments	1
Date	March 30, 2021 12:06 AM UTC (5 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/Male_Studies
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/Male_Studies/comments/mg38iz/public_responses_to_intimate_violence_a_glance_at/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/Male_Studies/public-responses-to-intimate-violence-a-glance-at.1216414 https://theredarchive.com/post/1216414

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