(Nie)bezpieczeństwo w rodzinie
(In)security in the family

Summary/Abstract: Besides the fact that it seems obvious that the majority of the families involve people who love each other, still the researchers agree that the family is the place in which acts of violence unprecedented in other environments take place. They also claim that crimes within the family are some of the most common crimes committed. The UNICEF report concerning the death of children caused by domestic violence or drastic neglect shows Poland to be in the middle of the ranking of 28 developed countries. The report of the WHO shows that over 1/3 of women in the world are victims of violence and majority of them are attacked or harmed by their husbands or partners. This article is an attempt to show the complexity of the domestic violence problem. The author presents in it the forms of violence against children as well as adult family members. Special attention was paid to the very often ignored kind of victimization, namely the children being witnesses of violence between their parents or between other children in the family. The article shows the scale of the domestic violence problem in the light of the empirical research done in Poland and confronted with foreign research results. Special attention was also paid to the situation of a child experiencing violence from his/her relatives. The scale of consequences of the harmful behavior of the parentsis wide and their effects are long-lasting. The child’s aggressive environment provides models of behavior and ways of the instrumental usage of aggression. The victims of domestic violence very often became tormentors reaching for the kinds of behavior that caused them pain and humiliation.

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