Domestic Violence Affects Everyone - Essay Example

For a long time in America, domestic violence was considered a matter between the husband and wife, mother and father, or romantic couple.  That has changed, and with this change, the courts are looking at ways to apply sentencing guidelines that serve the people involved and the public at large in the best and safest ways.  One of the aspects of sentencing is whether or not a man (or woman) should be sentenced to time in jail.  That is a disruption of the family life, including employment, and putting the man away from the family, when in fact keeping the family intact and rehabilitating the offender with therapy and education might be a better solution.

            How violators in domestic violence cases were categorized and perceived long determined how they were treated.  The treatment, in most cases, and before recent laws that force the justice system to deal with perpetrators legally; was to make excuses for the perpetrator, to blame it on finances, or some other personal emotional response to an outside precipitator ( Bullock, 2007, p. 34).  While some called this making excuses and placing blame, there is perhaps some degree of usefulness to these “excuses.”  That is that it may be more useful to rehabilitate the perpetrator than to incarcerate the perpetrator.  If these outside issues, precipitating factors, or even if the source of the perpetrator’s dysfunction and abuse is one of learned behavior from his or her family upbringing; then it makes sense that rehabilitation and therapeutic services would be an even greater deterrent to domestic violence than would be incarceration.

            To get the courts to support rehabilitation over incarceration, the question as to whether or not the domestic abuser can be rehabilitated must be answered.  Rehabilitation is being tried in other countries (Summers, Randal W., and Hoffman, Alan M., 2002.)  Government funding in countries like Spain and the UK has been set aside to increase public awareness and educate people as to the facts of domestic violence, including the fact that domestic violence is not unique to an ethnic or income group (Summers and Hoffman, p. 150). 

            Experts agree, for the most part, that rehabilitation does not succeed with hardened criminals (Summers and Hoffman, p. 150).  “Hardened criminal,” however, suggests that there is other criminal activity associated with the individual’s behavior that involves other crimes in addition to domestic violence.  If that is the case, then this is useful information.  Not all perpetrators of domestic violence, then, would fall into the category of hardened criminals, and there might be positive outcomes in the treatment of spousal abuse, child abuse, and elder abuse.  If there can be a successful treatment of domestic violence, it would interrupt the patterns of abuse that are often found repeated between the same victim and the same perpetrator, which suggests that two people continue to come together to “work it out.” 

            If society, the courts and the social service agencies could recognize that there is a benefit to the family unit to eradicate domestic violence, but to keep the family unit intact, and to keep the family life-lines of income and other functions that support the family structure from being interrupted, then there exists the possibility that we might curtail domestic violence and keep families together.  To this end, rehabilitation should be an option considered over incarceration when the perpetrator is not a “hardened criminal.”