Násilie - biele miesto na mape súèasnej rodiny
The violence - unknown territory on the map of present-day family

Summary/Abstract: The paper is an attempt to analyse and define the social problem of the violence in family. The quantitative increase of this phenomenon is characterized as a logical part of the present total violence increase in Slovak society, which is influenced by the lost social security, strong economic pressure, changes in value orientation, etc. The basic category used here in the classification of violence is age. The author distinguishes: 1. the violence in the family committed on the children (syndrome CAN - Child Abuse and Neglect) and, 2. the violence in the family against adult members, where the most widespread form is so-called "domestic violence" against women (woman abuse, marital abuse). This category is the main topic of this paper. The roots of the emotional, physical, sexual or economic woman abuse in the family, are uncovered in the original family and in the defect socialization of an abuser and a victim and the defect structure of the present family. The author offers the following explanations of the occurrence of this phenomenon: 1. Myth of the inequality of man and woman and traditional subordinate position of the woman in the patriarchal family. 2. Economic pressure - sociologists refer to relationship between unemployment, low economic standard of the family and the increase of the violence in family. The myth of social determination (employment, level of education, social status, cultural and socioeconomic level) is undermined by some authors who stress the psychological characteristics of abusers. The commonsense conviction that this deviance is caused by drug abuse or by the mental disability of abusers is misleading. 3. Inter-generational transmission of violence. The adult abuser was often abused as a child. The abused woman could be either victim or the witness of violent relation between her parents. The so-called "role model of violence" can be transferred from generation to generation. 4. The social isolation and low level of social control influences the occurrence of the violence in the family. Why do women, as a victim of domestic violence, persist in the pathological relations? It is due to the identification with the role of woman, who must suffer, often it is simply fear, the feeling of shame, the economic or emotional dependence, the unsatisfactory institutional help, and so on. The author concludes that in order to eliminate such a social problem is necessary to create an effective intervention network consisting of the interested experts of various fields (including lawyers, psychologists, sociologists, teachers, social workers, policemen, journalists, social researchers).

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