Violence Against Women In The 1970's

Violence against women (VAW) is an issue that, for many years, was widely unrecognized. However, the rise of the feminist movement in the 1970’s brought this issue back to the forefront of public policy. While the first wave of feminism focused on topics such as women’s suffrage and the right to vote, this second wave expanded to topics concerning sexuality, legal inequalities, and reproductive rights. Women were openly discussing their life experiences and bringing attention to these barriers (Mallicoat, 2015).One of the most important roles this feminist movement played was establishing violence against women as a social problem that concerned not only public health but also the criminal justice system. Having an accurate measure of VAW is
An issue such as VAW is somewhat vague and can be perceived in different ways. In order to establish a way to measure violence against women, there must first be a definition of what violence against women is. There are two main approaches to defining violence against women: criminal justice approaches and the public health approach.
The criminal justice perspective provides a narrow definition, defining violence against women as a division of crimes against women and female children by an offender. However, a definition such as this fails to include acts that are harmful to women but not illegal such as emotional abuse and neglect. This criminal justice approach is also hindered by the fact that criminal codes vary greatly across countries and among various jurisdictions within a country.
A public health approach, on the other hand, appears to offer a broader definition than the criminal justice perspective due to the fact that it includes those non-violent acts such as emotional abuse and neglect that would otherwise not be included. However, this approach can also be seen as narrow because public health professionals, while focusing on sexual violence by all offenders, view physical and emotional violence only by intimate partners (Tjaden,
There are several steps that must be taken during the process of identifying a VAW case. Failure to identify any one of these steps would result in a case identification or recording failure. After a VAW incident occurs, the victim must identify the event and label it. There are several instances in which a victim may not be able to identify the even. For example, if the victim was sexually assaulted after being drugged. The victim also may not label it as a VAW accident. This is common in intimate partner relationships. Next, the event must be coded in to memory. If none of the above occur, it is highly unlikely that the event will be recorded. Unless the victim is included in a survey, there is no possibility of this victimization ever being recorded. The next step in the process requires the interviewer, health care provider, or victim service provider to ask questions about the victims experience in order to trigger the victim’s memory of the event. If this does not occur, the incident will not be identified or recorded. The victim must also be willing to disclose the incidence to the interviewer or provider. Again, if the incident will remain unrecorded. Finally, the interviewer or service provider must decide whether or not the incident reported to him/her constitutes an act of VAW. For