Is it Possible to Prevent Intimate Partner Violence Knowing Its Causes?
Despite the fact that people created an eternal concept of romantic love centuries ago, many of them still doubt whether romantic love includes suffering. Boys and girls all over the world are raised on fairytales and myths which promote romantic love as the ultimate source of happiness but not without suffering. That is why by the age of sixteen or earlier most young individuals start looking for someone to fall in love. Love is often accompanied by illusions of pure trust, long life commitment, and exceptional understanding between two people. However, many myths common for Western European civilization promote that love is not possible without suffering as well. Psyche and Amour, Romeo and Juliet, Anna Karenina and Vronsky were suffering when they fell in love. Such high praise of suffering in romantic relationships can be bewildering but it can partially explain why people stay in relationship with a violent partner. Other reasons are not that simple to explain. The problem is that intimate partner violence, both emotional and physical, has become exceptionally common, and it proves that people lack awareness and understanding on the essence of intimate relationships and causes that provoke problems in them. For instance poverty, unemployment and alcoholism are strongly associated with intimate partner violence (Boirgois, 1996). The goal of this research is to understand what factors influence people in their choice to create and stay in relationships with a violent partner and if awareness about these factors can prevent other people from avoiding violence in relationships. It is clear that intimate partner violence appears in social context and some social problems cannot be fixed but awareness about individual factors can have some impact on prevention. Therefore, gender equality promoted in the society can prevent and reduce intimate person violence for those women who understand the real value of this factor today.
Intimate partner violence has to be studied carefully as it is one of negative social trends that threaten the stability in society on individual level. Nevertheless, such phenomenon as social violence cannot be studied outside the context of society because society gives birth to such trends and reinforces them indirectly. Department of Justice Statistics claims that 1 million of women and 150.000 of men suffer from intimate partner violence. It is possible to predict that the real numbers are seriously higher as the majority of victims find it difficult or impossible to address to police or social support center (Stith, 2012).
Most researchers who explored this topic made accent on the factors and rarely discussed possible ways of prevention of intimate partner violence. The debates over the factors that create, reinforce or stimulate domestic violence do not cease to stop. For instance, poverty was described extensively as one of the greatest factors provoking intimate partner violence. The causal effect of these two phenomena is the following: living in poverty is highly stressful because partners must take constantly think about paying bills …
